Leadership Language Lessons from Star Trek

Posted by & filed under Leadership, Star Trek, XP.

Growing up, an influential television character for me was Jean Luc Picard from Star Trek the Next Generation. Picard was a portrayal of a different sort of leader to most. Picard didn’t order people about. He didn’t assume he knew best.  He wasn’t seeking glory. In his words: “we work to better ourselves, and the… Read more »

We got lucky

Posted by & filed under ContinuousDelivery, XP.

“We got lucky”—it’s one of those phrases I listen out for during post incident or near-miss reviews. It’s an invitation to dig deeper; to understand what led to our luck. Was it pure happenstance? …or have we been doing things that increased or decreased our luck?    There’s a saying of apparently disputed origin: “Luck is… Read more »

Meetings, ugh! Let’s change our language

Posted by & filed under XP.

“How was your day?” “Ugh, I spent all day in meetings, didn’t get any work done!”  How often have you heard this exchange? It makes me sad because someone’s day has not been joyful; work can be fun.  I love a whinge as much as the next Brit; maybe if we said what we mean… Read more »

Latency Numbers Every Team Should Know

Posted by & filed under ContinuousDelivery, XP.

Meandering path towards value

Here’s some important feedback loops for a team, with feasible delays. I’d consider these delays tolerable by a team doing their best work (in contexts I’ve worked in). Some teams can do better, lots do worse.

Humility

Posted by & filed under XP.

Extreme Programming describes five values: communication, feedback, simplicity, courage, and respect. I think that humility might be more important than all of these.  Humility enables compassion. Compassion both provides motivation for and maximises the return on technical practices. Humility pairs well with courage, helps us keep things simple, and makes feedback valuable. Humility enables Compassion … Read more »

A little rant about talent

Posted by & filed under XP.

It’s become less common to hear people referred to as “resources” in recent times. There’s more trendy “official vocab guidelines”, but what’s really changed? There’s still phrases in common use that sound good but betray the same mindset. I often hear people striving to “hire and retain the best talent“ as if that is a… Read more »

The benefits of making code worse

Posted by & filed under XP.

A recent twitter discussion reminded me of an interesting XTC discussion last year. The discussion topic was refactoring code to make it worse. We discussed why this happens, and what we can do about it. I found the most interesting discussion arose from the question “when might this be a good thing?”—when is it beneficial… Read more »

Reasons to hire inexperienced engineers

Posted by & filed under XP.

There are many reasons to consider hiring inexperienced software engineers into your team, beyond the commonly discussed factors of cost and social responsibility. Hire to maximise team effectiveness; not to maximise team size. Adding more people increases the communication and synchronisation overhead in the team. Growing a team has rapidly diminishing returns. However, adding the… Read more »

Do you CI?

Posted by & filed under ContinuousDelivery, XP.

When I ask ask people about their approach to continuous integration, I often hear a response like “yes of course, we have CI, we use…”. When I ask people about doing continuous integration I often hear “that wouldn’t work for us…” It seems the practice of continuous integration is still quite extreme. It’s hard, takes… Read more »

Learning from Pain

Posted by & filed under ContinuousDelivery, Java, XP.

Pain is something we generally try to avoid; pain is unpleasant, but it also serves an important purpose. Acute pain can be feedback that we need to avoid doing something harmful to our body, or protect something while it heals. Pain helps us remember the cause of injuries and adapt our behaviour to avoid a… Read more »