I recently came across a fresh way to help people work towards the higher level goals of a project. And while I’m not 100% sure of it, I wanted share it because it has some valuable insight. I was speaking to a group about making agile development work in practice in a corporate environment, and … Continue reading
I was confounded the other day by Andrew Ross Sorkin’s criticism of Facebook’s IPO figures, which he wrote up in the New York Times. On the face of it he looked naive and distinctly non-digital when he wrote: On the first page of Facebookâs prospectus for its sale of stock to the public, it pegs … 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
The other day I met a developer who went for a job interview and was asked to write a sorting algorithm. He was caught off-guard, didn’t do it very well, and failed the interview. But the company itself also failed, because it turns out they didn’t understand sorting algorithms either. Here’s the test question: You … Continue reading
Earlier this week I was involved in a discussion about staff compensation, and one of our number said, in response to someone who was struggling with the issue, “Does your team have targets? Get rid of ‘em.” I couldn’t have agreed more. One major problem with targets comes about when they are different from the … Continue reading
A few words about meaningful metrics. When implementing a change of working a while back in my development team my boss of the time said, “Well, okay, but I want you to show me that your changes are making a difference”. What’s the metric for better software? I knew all about the dangers of measuring … Continue reading
I was recently involved in a great example of software complexity, technical debt, and refactoring, and I want to pass on the experience. As part of a project some new requirements came in. I had been concerned that part of the system under development was a little complex, but not overly concerned, as it worked … Continue reading
When CEOs and other leaders — such as Cabinet Secretaries — say “we need to take more risks”, they don’t really mean it. Or at least, they don’t mean it in the way most of us interpret it. I was thinking about this after reading Mark Foden’s excellent response to Sir Gus O’Donnell’s recent Telegraph … Continue reading
Here are the answers to last week’s quiz of the year — along with a reminder of the questions. If you still want to do the quiz then jump over to the original now, and don’t look below. Here goes… Question 1: “Zeebox is now live” said PaidContent in October. “Appearing initially as a TV … Continue reading
If you’re like me then this is the time of year you love to gather your family together and look back fondly at 12 months of dodgy flotations, me-too launches, and fired CEOs. So here is a quiz of the tech world in 2011. It’s entirely partial, with all the questions coming from links I’ve … Continue reading
