The Mindset

When I started reading Steve Yegge’s latest article I was optimistic. The title sounded promising. The quote from Wikipedia was great. And the arguments against the Agilism religion were well articulated. The first couple of pages were really a great read.
Then, as I began to read Steve’s description of “the Google experience”, my enthusiasm started […]

Originally, I wanted to wish my US readers a happy 4th of July. Then, I came across this post, and I thought to myself: is this yet another Agile hijacking?
My prediction is that in ten years from now either no one will use the word “Agile” in the context of software development, or everything in […]

In a recent post, my friend Tom Harris writes about the process of learning at work. As you might know, this is one of my favorite topics.
Tom describes something similar to a decision tree to help you come up with a plan regarding how you want to treat the process of learning and the process […]

Welcome back to the “Only Part of the Story” show. In today’s episode, we are going to revisit one of the most common Agile statements, which seems to make a lot of sense. But as you can guess, it’s only part of the story.
We will do that with the help of this blog post […]

It’s not my habit to regularly quote other authors just for the sake of quoting, but this is not the first time I’m quoting J. Timothy King (and probably not the last).
This great text is from his article Moving Chairs and Why It’s Cool. I found it to be so accurate, thought-provoking and well-written, […]

In a recent article Eric Sink claims to have found the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of our industry: why do we all sell products with bugs? And the answer is: The alternative is to fix them and risk introducing worse bugs.
OK then. We can now go on with our lives knowing we […]

I read a lot of articles and blog postings about software development, management and quality. My “favorite” articles are characterized by their ability to present some idea or concept with a sound voice, while blurring other important aspects of the subject. Most of them are not doing that on purpose. But the innocent reader might still get a wrong […]

Michael Webb wrote a great article about the barriers to effective listening. No matter what your job is, if it involves communicating with people (customers, employees, managers, etc.) you must read this article!
One issue needs to be emphasized, though: listener and speaker are not separate roles.
When you act as a speaker, you should also be […]

I’ve just came across this article warning us from automatically trusting the vast amount of information available to us (mainly from Internet sources).
My first reaction was: OK, this makes sense. What else is new?
My second reaction was: How can I trust the article I am currently reading to be legitimate? For all I […]