Learning Is The First Step
This article lists some thoughts on optimal hiring, firing, and performance review policy. I do like what Netflix does: At any time a report can bring an offer letter to their manager and the manager is free to modify compensation. In their words: “To help us attract and retain stunning colleagues, we pay employees at … Read more
While I admit that logging tasks in Agile results in some overhead, there are many cases where this overhead is worth it. Decomposing user stories into tasks or subtasks in JIRA is a non-special case of task decomposition in general. Here’s an example paper showing that decomposition reduces estimation error. The magnitude is far from … Read more
I was quipping this morning and I might have uncovered something useful. Culture consultant Jamie Notter put out this article and I mentioned to a coworker: This article is decidedly better than his last, but again, his solution is ‘pay my consultancy’ instead of the obvious possible internal solutions like take a culture survey, do a culture SWOT, … Read more
I’ve often been asked to map points to hours as part of an estimation process. This kind of works and kind of doesn’t. I’ll give my rule of thumb at the end, but first I want to defend the use of story points qua story points. If the only purpose of story points is to … Read more
There is a minority practice in Agile Scrum sometimes called Repointing. This article describes the practice, compares it to the usual practice, and concludes by recommending that teams do not engage in Repointing. The usual Agile estimation procedure for an existing issue is as follows: Optionally create a tentative story estimate during release, multi-sprint, or … Read more
One of the major Austrian critiques of certain kinds of analysis focuses on uncertainty. You can make a forecast based on certain data, but something unexpected might come along and muck everything up. In the past I have described ways of overcoming this issue. These article contains 3 sections which do the following: Argues for … Read more
This article outlines some skills in overcoming uncertainty. It’s heavily biased toward software engineering. I also talk about environmental variables which help overcome uncertainty and risk in software development. Tldr: Skills include the ability to research, the ability to trial and error, and the practice of regularly learning, each of which have generic and project-specific … Read more