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A bad time to estimate
The other day a friend and I were discussing a project which had notably overrun its original expected delivery date. “The problem is,” he said to me, “You estimate a project at the point you understand it the least.” This is a great phrase, and good to remember, even though it’s not strictly true. If … Continue reading
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The other day a developer in my team asked, “So what’s your plan for…” and then described a particular organisational and technical challenge that several of us had been discussing on and off for a while. It was something that I was pushing forward, but I didn’t have all the answers yet. Of course, I … Continue reading
Previously I’ve advocated the use of probability distribution curves to describe uncertainty more clearly. It helps us get away from the binary success/fail of traditional risk listing, and instead allows a much wider understanding of the likelihood of different gradations of outcome. For example, not just whether we’ll make our predicted profit, but different degrees … Continue reading
When people talk about “managing risk” they often list individual “risks” and then choose an action to deal with each one. However, this approach is often too simple, and misses subtleties. That’s probably because what people call a risk is often an event which is much too narrowly defined, and hence the solution (the action) … Continue reading
Welcome
Hi. I'm Nik Silver. I've been leading software teams for years. My specialism is helping organisations work effectively with their technical teams, to deliver business value frequently and consistently. Take a look at my experience.
If you want to talk about turning talented people into brilliant teams then get in touch. I'm nik@niksilver.com on e-mail, and I'm @pigsaw on Twitter.
Recently spotted
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- The crooked timber of humanity | 1843"The world’s first national data network was constructed in France during the 1790s. It was a mechanical telegraph system, consisting of chains of towers, each of which had a system of movable wooden arms on top."
- Slack’s Stewart Butterfield on coping with rapid growth | Financial Times"Trust is like “gravity”, he says, “it falls off very quickly”."
- Why automated continuous integration is a must for microservices success"Microservice architectures put a tremendous amount of pressure on the testing infrastructure. You need to have a good CI strategy and automated testing harness to make sure that you can test all the edge cases and all the different integration points between the services."
- MicroservicePrerequisites"...with microservices there are serious consequences for operations[...]. Consequently if you don't have certain baseline competencies, you shouldn't consider using the microservice style."
