I gave a talk at Devs in the ‘Ditch last week when I was in London. I posted the slides on slideshare: Overcoming Three Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile. The very nice people at 7digital made a video and posted it, too. If you can take the time, watch the entire video. Rob Bowyer gave a great talk about kanban and theory of constraints. My part about overcoming these three pitfalls starts at about 42 minutes in. There are many other pitfalls to transition. This talk had just three of...more »

Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development The purpose of development/IT is to deliver value quickly - not just for a team, but for the entire organization. If you reflect on this, it's not about going fast, it's about removing delays.  Delays are typically waiting for folks, getting feedback late, detecting errors late, or just going to work on something else that has come up.  Scrum, XP, and Kanban all, in their own way, focus on doing this -...more »

Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development While adding value to the customer is the ultimate goal, there is more than customer value. There are actually at least five different types of business value: knowing what will be of value to the customer knowing how to build this building this deploying this value so it is consumed by the customer being able to do any of the above faster All of these are of business value.  The last one is...more »

Over this past weekend I built a little tool for Play Framework app developers which auto-refreshes an app in Chrome when the source code or static assets change. Check out a video demonstration: For information on how to set it up, check out the project on GitHub: https://github.com/jamesward/play-auto-refresh Special thanks to Josh Suereth for helping me figure out the SBT magic.more »

One advantage of doing business in the Chicago area is getting to see lots of manufacturers.  The Midwest still builds stuff.As an Android developer who gets to talk with many of the local companies I've recently noticed a pattern in the Android space that I wanted to share.High end tools and machines often contain some kind of display that describes the status of the tool or provides a way to configure or operate the tool.  And by "tools and machines" I'm covering a huge variety of...more »

Hi everyone.  To pick the pace back up I'm going to write either shorter blogs or, as in today, I will take some previous work and mold it into this work.  I appreciate your patience and will get things going again. Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development I believe that one of the essential components of successful Agile adoption across teams is systems thinking. “Systems thinking” is the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems,...more »

The move towards Single Page Apps and RESTful services open the doors to a much better way of securing web applications. Traditional web applications use browser cookies to identify a user when a request is made to the server. This approach is fundamentally flawed and causes many applications to be vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. When used correctly, RESTful services can avoid this vulnerability altogether. Before we go into the solution, lets recap the...more »

My friend and colleague, Gil Broza, is interviewing me for his Individuals and Interactions virtual training event. My topic? “Focus Keeps You Going.” If you read my personal kanban series a couple of weeks ago, you saw how my focus kept me going. Even with a big interruption last week, due to a death in the family, I was able to maintain my focus, because I knew exactly what I had to do, to finish my work, to get ready for my trip today. Gil has other great people in his event:...more »

Just recently I made the switch from AT&T wireless to T-Mobile using my own iPhone 4s. Beyond some administrativa, all I had to do was purchase a T-Mobile SIM card and I was ready to go. Somewhere back around 1999 or 2000, I switched to Voicestream Wireless (switching away from Airtouch Wireless). Sometime after that, T-Mobile acquired Voicestream and I stuck with this service until 2008 when I switched to AT&T so that I could get an iPhone. I always had great customer service from T-Mobile...more »

  Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   I really appreciate the 2-3 new people who commented on the day 0 blog and joined our group. It got me to write today's entry on the flight home from the Scrum Gathering - something I almost certainly wouldn't have done otherwise.  So keep reading and getting friends to join - it helps.   I've been wanting to do a technical one again and thought I'd do one based on Shalloway's Law and Principle....more »

Just recently I made the switch from AT&T wireless to T-Mobile using my own iPhone 4s. Beyond some administrativa, all I had to do was purchase a T-Mobile SIM card and I was ready to go. Somewhere back around 1999 or 2000, I switched to Voicestream Wireless (switching away from Airtouch Wireless). Sometime after that, T-Mobile acquired Voicestream and I stuck with this service until 2008 when I switched to AT&T so that I could get an iPhone. I always had great customer service from T-Mobile...more »

It seems to me that authentication in general needs to change. The requirement to remember a password for every online service you use has proven to be a daunting task not only for users but also for businesses that must store the credentials to authenticate those users. Considering the dramatic increase in data security breaches in recent years, it's no wonder that the competition amongst password management software continues to increase. Personally, I use a password manager that supports...more »

I’m often asked about what teams doing Domain-Driven Design (DDD) should do in the way of documentation.The question What types of Written Design Documents are used in DDD projects?) came up on Stack Overflow and I started to write a response, but realized it was getting way too long to post there. So here it is. When it comes to documentation, we need to begin with the end in mind. We need to understand why we are writing it in the first place: What purpose is each document...more »

We’re cohosting a hackathon with FoundationDB on Friday. For those of you not in the know, FoundationDB is a pretty exciting addition to the NoSQL space. It brings flexible, arbitrary transactionality (including atomic cross-row joins in a distributed system) to NoSQL. My colleague Doug Turnbull got very excited about the technology a few months ago [...]more »

Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   The Scrum Gathering starts in Las Vegas today where I am presenting a talk this afternoon.  Figured I should do a Scrum based lesson today.  I have been saying for years that the Chicken and Pigs story is counterproductive and is a symptom of an over-reaction to management.  I wrote a blog about this Is Chicken and Pigs Counter-Productive.  I decided to just point to the blog instead of re-writing it...more »

  Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   I've been hearing two disparate views of estimation, and it does feel "camp" oriented.  The Scrum camp doesn't question estimation but is looking for better ways.  It takes much more time than it feels it should.  The reason for this feeling is that it takes much more time that it should.  Planning poker is useful in some situations, but for the very reason it is effective in some, it is very...more »

Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   Relatively early in my consulting career, I realized that it’s not simply the low hanging fruit you go after, you have to attend how one thing sets up another.  As people learn, some lessons set up others.  I call this the “pick up sticks model for building curriculum.”  Some practices also change the environment within which people work in such a way as to greatly leverage your efforts – these are trim...more »

I am still making progress, although it’s more difficult to see my progress today. Why? Because I did not get as much to done. One of my readers asked a question about the Urgent queue  and the relative ranking of my ever-growing left hand column. How did I determine what to do, and what was the rank of each? The Urgent queue always trumps everything on the left hand side of the list. I was so frantic on Monday, I didn’t order anything when I put the list together. It almost didn’t...more »

I’m still chugging along, making great progress. I took some interruptions yesterday, as many people do. They are not reflected on my kanban. They are in my calendar, which I am not showing you :-) A potential client emailed, asked for a call. I said yes, and we arranged for a call that day. Could I have put it on my kanban? Yes. Did I bother? No. Does that make me a bad person? No. It’s my kanban, not yours. I don’t track metrics from my kanban. If I did, I would want that...more »

Are you considering joining me in my Coaching or Project Management workshops in London on May 16 or May 17, 2013? If so, please decide quickly. I have room for two more people in the coaching workshop. I have room for three more people  in the project management workshop. When those places are gone, they are gone. That’s it, no more. I will run a waiting list. If you are considering it because you are not sure, email me.   more »