• Almost a year ago I shared an advice to use test cases. Not because they are crucial during testing or dramatically improve the quality of the product (they are not), but because of value you get when you create test cases. A confession (and yes, you’d guess it anyway if you read the title): we […]

  • XP is a “software development through the eyes of an engineer” kind of methodology. It focuses heavily on engineering practices. On contrary, neither Scrum nor Kanban seems to care much about best software development practices. But wait, if you read about Kanban a bit you’ll quickly find an advice to focus on your engineering practices […]

  • I have a question for you. And yes this is one of this dumb black-or-white questions which don’t take into consideration the world is just gray. If you had to choose a vendor among the one which you trust more and the one which can be paid less what would be your choice? I pretty […]

  • A very interesting discussion followed one of my recent posts about people not willing to learn. There were a few different threads there but the one brought by David Moran is definitely worth its own post. David pointed it is manager’s responsibility to create learning opportunities and incentives for people to exploit them. At the […]

  • During my talk at AgileCE I mentioned three things as biggest Kanban boosters in our case: Co-location No-meeting culture A set of best engineering practices One of comments I heard about this part was: “Pawel, these things aren’t Kanban-related – they would work in any environment.” Well, I’ve never said they’re exclusive for Kanban. My […]

  • There was a time when we were writing user stories to describe requirements. I’d say they worked fairly well for us. But we don’t do this anymore. We were using user stories as a technique which allowed us to describe bigger chunks of functionality. There was one bigger sub-project or module and it had more […]

  • I attended a few meetings recently. They all were one thing in common: someone made some effort to create opportunity for others to learn. It doesn’t really matter if that’s downloading Mike Cohn’s video or preparing and delivering a presentation in person. It is the effort addressed to others. It’s like saying: “Hey, I found […]

  • The other day we were discussing different techniques aimed at improving code quality. Continuous integration, static code analysis, unit testing with or without applying test-driven development, code review – we’ve went through them all. At some point I sensed someone could feel that once they employ all this fine practices their code will be ready […]

  • So you’re a manager. You even think you’re pretty damn good manager. Fine for me. Do you remember Pointy-Haired Boss? Yes, that clueless manager from Dilbert cartoon. You have this guy sitting in your head. So do I, by the way. Is that supposed to be insult? Well, not exactly. I really think every manager […]

  • Jennifer Bedell wrote recently at PMStudent about testers goldplating projects. Definitely an interesting read. And pretty hot discussion under the post too. I’d say the post is written in defense of scope. Jennifer points that testers should test against the specification only because when they step out of the specs it becomes goldplating. In other […]

Hi, I’m Pawel and I’m your host.

Leadership in Technology is a blog dedicated to wide variety of topics related to running a technology business.

Among others you will find here: product management, agile and lean, leadership, organizational design and more.


Search


Subscribe


Recent comments