The Mindset

A friend of mine sent me this article and asked me for my opinion.
The basic premise of the article is simple: if you want to know exactly how a certain tool, technology, or process, improve the productivity of your staff, you cannot just measure how much time it saves. If a certain tool saves […]

A car is a wonderful tool. It can get you from one place to another quite effortlessly (well, assuming the two places are within reasonable distance). For most of us, cars are cost-effective and convenient. They serve their purpose amazingly well, at least until some higher form of transportation emerges.
There’s a lot to consider when […]

Well, it has been three days since my Hiring Great Developers? post. During this time an interesting discussion took place both on this blog as well as on others. I usually try to respond to most of the comments posted here, but this time I’ve decided to step back and let the discussion roll. Now […]

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 […]

When I was a child, one of my favorite TV shows was The Time Tunnel. The concept of being able to go back in time and try to fix the things that went wrong fascinated me. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone from the future could come back and fix whatever it is we did wrong?
Maybe […]

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 […]

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”                                 George Bernard Shaw
Here’s a fictional scenario. It takes place in a project postmortem session. The product manager looks in his papers or dashboards and says something like “We had too many defects in this project”. The developers […]

Dear CEO,
This post is for you (but the rest of you readers are welcome to read on as well).
Today, I have a special offer for you. An offer that will make your life so much easier that you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
Your competitors might already have one, but they probably […]

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 […]