The Mindset

One of the things I hated as a teenager was being told I should grow up already. Whenever I was told that, my immediate reaction was “You don’t understand anything. YOU grow up!”. Undoubtedly a typical reaction for a teenager. Not to say an immature reaction, which is what got me that far in the […]

Here’s a pop-quiz: what do [take a long breath] Agile, Peer Reviews, JUnit, Pair Programming, SCRUM, velocity charts, burn-down charts, Bugzilla, Subversion, lint, ClearCase®, RequisitePro®, ClearQuest®, RUP, UML, MDA, TDD, BDD, XP, ISO, CMM, and (my personal all-time favorite) Refactoring have in common?
OK now, let’s see. If you found it easy to come up with […]

A couple of weeks ago I heard a developmental psychologist say that children learn by emotional experience. When you’re trying to explain to a child that something is forbidden, for example, he may understand your words, but unless you can somehow reach him at an emotional level, chances are he will repeat the same behavior […]

A few years ago, I tried to introduce a systematic code and design review process to the organization I worked for. For months, I repeatedly received the same answer: “We know this is a good idea, but our developers won’t like the idea of their code being read by their colleagues. And anyway, we really […]

Once upon a time, whenever people talked about quality they talked about process. They talked about documented, repeatable process. They talked about unified process. And they talked a lot about metrics. Quality management was a synonym for being obedient, and quality was all about discipline.
But something has changed. More and more people realize now that […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about The Semi Myth Of YAGNI. The message of that post was that there are cases where trying to anticipate the future evolution of the product is the best approach. In those cases, doing the simplest thing possible today without analyzing where the product is going is also […]

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 […]

I’ve received a lot of great feedbacks on my post It Doesn’t Matter What You Call It. I get the sense that many professionals “out there” are really fed up with the endless online (and offline) debates about “the best software development methodology”.
Reality proves over and over again that there isn’t such thing. The best thing you can […]

I was working on my book yesterday. I read one of the chapters I had written and I wasn’t happy with it. It wasn’t the grammar, nor was it the phrasing. It just didn’t feel right. Something in its flow was awkward, although I couldn’t just put my finger on it.
So I started working […]

Another insight about organizational underwater currents:
The variation in how different people within the same organization perceive a certain issue is by itself an interesting finding.
You can learn a lot about the organizational culture by comparing the way different people live a certain aspect of the organization and react to it. Sometimes this variance is derived from […]