I’m often surprised how enthusiastic non-technical people are for technology, and how circumspect technical people are. A while back I was speaking to someone from a corporate IT function who was asked to purchase an online workflow tool for the company’s marketing team. It was to help them track assets for marketing material as it … Continue reading
I used to think it important to take a build-to-last approach to their core software. Now I’m more pragmatic. If you only have finite resources then build-to-survive may be the best option. The change in thinking has come about through working with a few startups, and there the dynamics can be very different to what … Continue reading
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
