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Technical debt is like Tetris
This article uses a really neat analogy with Tetris for illustrating the impact of technical debt. Leaving gaps is akin to leaving technical debt in the code base and makes subsequent changes more difficult or slower to ship.
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Empowering problem solvers - not offering solutions
There is a natural reaction for people when faced with a problem to offer solutions. This can be especially true for managers.
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How to run a planning workshop
We have just completed a two week exercise with the whole development team to identify, design and estimate the next phase of work. It started as an organic process as we found the best way to do this and then developed into a repeatable process for the latter functionality.
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The battle of real versus artificial deadlines
This excellent article looks at the different types of deadlines and the impact they have. The key point for me, and not something I had seen previously defined, is the distinction between real and artificial deadlines:
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Places to name things
This one is just for future reference for me that I may find useful one day - a website full of resources that may be useful for naming things.
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Do we really need that meeting? - the forgotten costs
We had a meeting recently with 16 people on the video conference call. Due to poor planning and technical issues it took nearly half an hour to decide to postpone the meeting. That is eight man hours wasted - a whole day of work!
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The value of throwing code away
We had a discussion at work about “throw away” code. One of our developers was very against developing any code that would be thrown away afterwards. He referred to this as a waste. In my view sometimes the biggest gain can be in developing code that is meant to be thrown away. It can be used to try things and, more importantly, learn things that can shape the code that is kept. This article sums it up much more eloquently than I can.
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From 5 whys to why now?
I have used the “5 whys” approach multiple times to get to the root of some question. This article advocates adding a time dimension to the decision. Not only should we consider why we are doing something, we should also consider why we are doing something at a specific point in time. It also twists this around and suggests we should consider “What is the danger of not doing this right now?” - what would we lose or miss?
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How to identify real gurus and experts
This is an old post (March 2009) that someone retweeted but still holds true on how to work out if an expert is really an expert. It also is a guide how not to fall into common traps that so-called experts fall into.
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