The discussion of children learning to code seems to have picked up again. How valuable is it really? I’m very sympathetic to the idea but also have reservations. In the UK coding for children is touted as “the new Latin”, a phrase coined in the Livingstone-Hope review on skills for the video games and visual … Continue reading
Estimates for software projects only need to be sufficiently accurate to serve a purpose, but if that purpose isn’t clear then producing the estimate can be quite stressful. Over on the emergn Value, Flow, Quality blog Chris Berridge says If the estimate information you are producing isn’t vital for making a decision, then take a … Continue reading
In a discussion today about innovation many wise words were said, but one thing in particular stuck with me: that an organisation’s innovation is almost always limited to being a particular kind of innovation. On the one hand innovation is about change. On the other, you need a reliable — and therefore pretty fixed — … Continue reading
In all teams, large and small, in all organisations, there is a constant pressure to deliver features at the expense of writing code well. The tension is between “do it now” and “do it right”. When I speak to developers about this I remind them that they are a professional and that no-one (or at … Continue reading