A lot of people are thinking about their winter sports plans, as we move through autumn. At the same time, a lot of people are getting into the swing of projects that kicked off in September. The second group have a set of constraints. Just for clarity, I am an architect, and a bit of a snowboarding thug, so we’ll concentrate on how this thinking can enable delivery teams, and their customers to get the best out of projects.
Amigoing
One of the cooler things I saw teams do this year is the idea of a “Three Amigos,” session. Basically, before an individual takes on a new task from the board, they ask a couple of peers to do a quick sense check on the task. It’s a great idea because its so easy to be too close to a solution, and miss some architectural intent, or business value by simply getting on with it.
This is a Smoke Test
In the last year, I’ve heard the phrase “Smoke Testing,” used by many teams that I’ve worked with. It is used to cover a nebulous…
The Chesterfield Principle
Many organisations have an eclectic mix of software in use with teams, running across the organisation’s various capability groups. These software products range in size, from full stack…
Agile Governance… what we really mean
When I talk about Agile governance, I always get the same reaction, which goes something like this… ‘Are you being serious?’ Most people I talk to think I’m a) joking or b) introducing some antipattern to Agile and effective ways of working.
Par for the agile course
It seemed to me that there was an emerging trend, of people using a new agile vocabulary to describe some rather old fashioned ways of delivering projects. For the most part, commercial factors, or a powerful status quo, meant that transformation was never going to be easy. For some situations though, transforming the business was being made harder by the assertion that using, “Framework X,” would be the key to success, or that the team would be using “Methodology Y”.
Technical Investment Vehicle
In situations where a huge amount of debt accumulates, for example the very Student Loan Company that I was paying back, it is not uncommon for the people holding the debt to try to sell it on. To make this work you need investors to want to buy the debt. This trick is one that translates easily into technical debt situations.
