Agile Complexification Inverter

What is your plan for being a better developer next year?  What's the technique that will repay your efforts many fold?  Testing - automated test to be specific.  There are all types of automated testing.  The agile mind set thinks of testing first, not in a reactive manner, but as a preventative and design effort. "For three years, The Container Store has been using application performance management (APM) technology from AppDynamics to locate bugs in the website, target them immediately and fix them. Sometimes there's a slowdown in a particular region. Other times it's from a certain database and often from a single line of code. Just this year, the Container Store upped its contract with AppDynamics, buying more software so the company can test new features before deploying them and minimize the number of live fixes necessary. "We said we want to be more proactive instead of reactive," said A.J. Azzarello, a quality assurance engineer at The Con...

What happened in the mid 1980s?  Previously women were in the hi-tech industries at the same rates as any other industry - but then it all changed.  Women fled the compute sciences field.  Is this the rise of the computer geek era? Was it the geeks that ran the women away?  Or was it the lack of women that attracted the geeks?  Was there cause and effect or just an interesting correlation? Planet Money has an interesting investigation and some answers - give it a listen. When Women Stopped Coding  :: Planet Money - NPR Look at the red line in 1984.  What happened in 1984? A trend may change, all it takes is a desire to change.  Here is a great story of one such change in education cirruclum and the effective outcome it has had in women in STEM education. Colleges Have Increased Women Computer Science Majors: What Can Google Learn? heard on NPR's All Things Considered See Also: Why women in tech came to a 'Halt' ...

Leadership is well defined - that's not the problem - the problem is it has many, many various definitions. Leadership definitions change throughout time. Your grandfather's definition of leadership may vary quite drastically from your's - ask him if you have the opportunity. A modern classic definition: Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. -- Peter Northouse Series Outline: A brief history of Leadership    A working definition of leadership    Is leadership a process    May leadership emerge from a group    Is leadership more than a form of coercion and power Various Leadership Approaches    Situational, Skills, Style, Trait Leadership Theories    Contingency Theory    Path-Goal Theory    Leader-Member Exchange Theory    Transformational Leadership Model     Servant Leadership Model   ...

Do a Google search on "servant leadership" and you will get plenty of hits (2.5 million for me just then). So if you don't know what it is cruise on over to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership and check out the 21st century " Cliff's Notes " on the topic. Disclaimer: as this blog is a from of note keeping for me - an extension of my cognitive model of the universe of knowledge - this article and the series of article may be in great flux until complete (or good enough to quit editing). Greenleaf's enlightenment of Servant Leadership stems from his reading of   Hermann Hesse's short novel, Journey to the East . "Hesse's story is an account of a mythical journey by a group of people on a spiritual quest where the recognition of the true leader of the group takes place as a result of his acts of service and self-sacrifice for the benefit of the whole group. As Spears tells it, upon reading this story, it seemed suddenly clear t...

What are the considerations when the business wants to reduce the cost of the IT department and they want to outsource some or all of the costly software development group?  Here is a model to help you think through this decision and some additional resources. Introduction What decisions must be made to implement an IT Outsourcing program?  Are these decisions similar to the decisions that leaders must make for an Agile program?  How do they differ, how are they similar?  What are the expected outcomes, and the possible outcomes?  Which decisions have high stakes with no-return points along the transition map?  Which decisions are safe-to-fail and possible to repeat and iterate toward success? Comparing and contrasting basic road maps for the implementation of major process change is fraught with generalizations that may easily be questioned.  The intent of this paper is to objectively represent the set of high level decisions and expe...

Apple and IBM joining forces - oh really?  Will George Orwell be rolling over in his grave - will his 1984 become truth in 2014? Well, one must follow the news to make sense of that gibberish... and the 1984 reference.... it goes back to the famous Superbowl Apple commercial introducing the Mac . An IBM/Apple partnership to tunnel into the enterprise walled garden for devices is a great idea.  As a consumer it works for me.  I don't know of any enterprises that can pass the Starbucks Test (test for the ubiquity of access for the digital native). In 2005 (years before the iPhone) Apple joined forces with Motorola to launch the ROKR, a cell phone and iTunes connected music player. It took the world a few years to recognize that the Wright brothers had flown the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC (first flight in Dec. 1903 to 1908 public demonstrations). -- The Wright Brothers by  David McCullough   "Jointly developed with Motorola and made available ...

Is your "Agile Project Manager" driving the team to increase their velocity?  Has the Agile Death March begun? Fred Brooks warned us of these dangers nearly 25 years ago in The Mythical Man-Month . One antidote to the PM schedule crunching technique of throwing warm bodies at the problem is to remove the impediments that are known (or just under the surface) within the structure and environment that holds the team back from performing at more efficient delivery rates.  So many times the line workers (developers and testers) are well aware of these issues, and feel as if they have raised them many times and gotten little attention (mostly negative attention) from managers.  A classic game (Innovation Game) to expose these impediments is Speed Boa t. I just saw this image of the anvil holding the balloon down and thought it would make a great visual metaphor for the Speed Boat game .  See the article by Alan Dayley  Velocity is Like a Helium Balloon  ...

Many companies have initiatives to become innovative.  There are some companies that don't appear to need a leadership sponsor to get competitive innovation - wonder why.  Perhaps they have some fundamental aspect to their organization that allows them to be creative.  What would be those aspects? Why It Feels Like We're Falling Behind It can take years to notice a life-changing invention.  - Motley Fool It took the world a few years to recognize that the Wright brothers had flown the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC (first flight in Dec. 1903 to 1908 public demonstrations). Here's my research on the topic of creativity. The musical group OK-Go! describes their process to achieve creativity - and the math behind the wonder and surprise they are reliably able to deliver. An awesome lesson in discovery - planning to play - to achieve innovation. Predicting Creativity in the Wild -- a research paper on the use of sociometric monitoring of teams by Sociom...

I'm working with a large networking (telecommunication) company on a mission critical new initiative to replace existing B2B account services functions that are siloed and separate with a new sexy UI where all the services are aggregated in one portal.  The development has been underway for over one year.  It is touted as an "agile" program.  Yet an interesting impediment has never been resolved.  That is the internal WiFi/Lan systems appear to be overloaded with the strain of development, over utilized with the number of people that are squeezed into the floor plan (I call the sardine can).  This system fails quite frequently, it is a well know impediment to sprints being completed, stories integrated into the build, builds tested, access to the QA server, etc.  Yet this impediment remains after months and continued growth of the program. I wonder if the problem is that management feels that they can't do anything about infrastructure at one of the large...

"The 21st Century is when it all changes.  You've got to be ready."  -- Capt'n Jack Harkness What does a 21st Century company look like?  Here's some principles, some templates, some examples.  I believe the 21st century will see a movement toward companies being good social citizens (not money focused) these movements are already starting and we are only 14 years into this century.  Movements such as Conscious Capitalism, Sustainability, Triple Bottom Line, Lean/Agile, etc. I intend to work for one of these new breed of companies before the decade is done. A look at the No Manager movement at Treehouse  a learning company focused on learning... No Managers: Why We Removed Bosses at Treehouse How to set priorities, create budgets and do project management in a #NoManager company How salaries, career progression and reviews work in a #NoManager company How to communicate in a #NoManager company Kotter's 21st C Org Model Here's ...