Seven Strategies for Helping People Get What They Want
It’s human nature to want to help others but we may not always know how. We offer solutions to problems with the best of intentions but sometimes the solutions we offer are taken as if we are telling others what to do. What we really need to do is help people find their own solutions, …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Empowering Developers
Developers are the engine of software development, the people who write the code. Empowering developers to improve and supporting them to do the right things is an important part of building great software. Here are seven strategies for empowering developers. 1. Avoid sacrificing quality Unrealistic deadlines can lead to cutting corners that shouldn’t be cut. …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for ScrumMasters
The ScrumMaster serves a unique role on an Agile team–part leader, part servant. ScrumMasters are responsible for the overall health of their team and for making sure everyone has what they need to do their work. This is not a technical role but it is helpful to understand the technical issues the team will face …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Product Owners
Often we find at the core of a great product is a great Product Owner (PO). The Product Owner holds the vision for the product and prioritizes the work to be done. They steer the team to create the product. If the product they define is not ultimately what the customer wants then no matter …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Getting Support from Management
Agile software development requires management support. If the rest of an organization is fundamentally entrenched in a waterfall process then it will be difficult to for software development to become agile. In such situations, we must identify external dependencies and give the non-agile parts of the organization time to get us whatever we need so …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Team Agreements
One of the most valuable documents teams can create is a Team Agreement. Team Agreements for software development can range from very detailed specifications of coding standards and practices to a general statement of moral and ethical conduct, or anywhere in between. Team agreements help set the context for team member expectations and provide a …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Remote Teams
It used to be thought that if only we could write a good specification that accurately described what was to be built, we could take advantage of the cheap labor overseas to cut costs and get software built faster. Unfortunately, reality often shatters such naive hopes. However, outsourcing overseas can help for many tasks and …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Working with an Onsite Customer
One important characteristic of agile development over non-agile processes, such as waterfall, is the presence of an onsite customer. Unlike the Project Manager or ScrumMaster, whose job it is to keep the team healthy, the Product Owner or onsite customer representative’s job is to be a proxy for the real customer and ensure development is …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Successful Agile Development
Agile is not a silver bullet but it does have the potential of improving software development when done correctly. Unfortunately, teams newly adopting agile practices often don’t know how to get the most out of applying agile practices until it is too late. Here are seven strategies for getting more from agile software development. 1. …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Customer Collaboration
My wife is a video producer. Her job is not very different from our jobs as software developers. Both jobs demand lots of creative problem-solving where we face different challenges every day, and both jobs often involve close collaboration with our customer or a subject matter expert. My wife, Staci, is great at creating videos …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Team Swarming
I don’t see a lot of talk about team swarming (sometimes referred to as mobbing) yet it can be one of the most powerful problem-solving techniques for breaking through really difficult challenges. A swarm is where you get the whole team together to focus on solving a single problem. You can also focus on multiple …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Pair Programming
Of all the agile developer practices I teach, pair programming gets the most resistance from management. Managers often ask me how putting two developers on the same task can possible be more efficient than having them work independently on different tasks…but it most definitely is. Well, you may not find a huge increase in the …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Doing Emergent Design
Emergent design is an advanced technique, drawing on several agile practices. When done correctly, it can be a highly efficient way of building quality software but it is not a beginner technique, it requires a deep understanding in many areas. Here are seven strategies to help you master emergent design: 1. Understand object-oriented design Just …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Agile Infrastructure
The first step in achieving agility and technical excellence is to set up an infrastructure to support it. The infrastructure we will discuss here, an automated build server, is one of the most important aspects of agility because we can only consider a story as “done” when it is fully integrated into the build. Here …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies to Foster Hyper-Performing Teams
Hyper-performing teams do exist. I know teams that are an order of magnitude more productive than average teams. Achieving hyper-performance is possible if everyone on the team has the skills and a burning passion to do their best. Here are seven tips that can help your team become high performing, if not hyper-performing: 1. Know …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Improving Your Scrum Process
Scrum is a minimal framework for providing feedback so we can constantly improve our development process yet many teams use Scrum prescriptively without using the feedback that Scrum makes available for ongoing improvement. Here are seven strategies for using Scrum to improve your development process. 1. Use retrospectives Scrum offers many subtle feedback loops to …
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