In the past, if you worked on a factory assembly line you did one job. You did it very well. You tried to do it as quickly as possible without making errors. Workcells on assembly lines changed this somewhat. Now you may do 2 or 3 things, but you generally aren't trying to do all of them in parallel. That simply wouldn't be efficient. I can just imagine the chaos that would result if the person installing the steering wheel of a car was also trying to install the front seat at the same time.  read more »

When a development team starts using an agile process one of the first questions asked is: "What is it important for us to know?" I believe there are many agile consultants in the world that take this simple question and start leading teams down the wrong path right from the start. Technical people (like the agile consultants I'm thinking of) tend to jump right to the technical things. They may say it is important to have a good understanding of the various new roles on the team. Or it is important to know how long your iterations will be.  read more »

In Part I of this 2 part series I put forth a standard argument about how programming is a science. In this part I want to explore an argument that says programming is an art. As I mentioned in Part I, this is a thought that I didn't even entertain until I was a good number of years into my career as a programmer. At this point, maybe the argument has some validity.  read more »

I have a both a Bachelor of Science, and Master of Science degrees in Computer Science. I used to think that was very appropriate because during those years I was very much in tune with the line of thought that said computer programming was a science. Now that I'm older (and hopefully wiser) I'm not so sure.

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Net Objectives is a partner of VersionOne and we use their product internally. In the past I have personally recommended VersionOne as a tool provider without hesitation. In my opinion, and in the opinion of our company as a whole, VersionOne was the best agile management tool available.

Now that we have that out of the way, let me say that VersionOne just upped the ante in the tool space with their new Taskboard view.  read more »

As the VP of Business Development and Marketing for Net Objectives, I get calls nearly every day from hard-working people that are having significant problems with their agile process. Many of them have just started a new project using an agile process, but there are others that have been agile for a while and are finally admitting that they are having issues. I am a good listener, so I always ask them to explain to me what they see as the problems they are having.  read more »

There is a common problem I find among development teams that end up failing when they switch to using scrum or other agile processes. Not all teams do this, but I find that many simply don’t understand the underlying concepts behind developing code quickly and iteratively.  read more »