Author Archives: Tom Howlett
These moments are precious
The moments when excitement builds throughout the whole team at the delight of discovery and creativity are precious. These moments feel like play rather than work and they breed openness and courage. So what conditions must exist for these moments to happen? Here’s some ideas A shared competence – The feeling that the team has […]
Assumption: Fear causes us to build the wrong thing
The classic tale of a year-long project finally being delivered only to discover it doesn’t meet the needs of the customer sounds ridiculous in the days of short iterations and customer collaboration but I’m guessing we are still a long way from delivering what’s really needed effectively. So what’s stopping us? Is it the fear […]
Assumption: Continous Delivery of Software reduces its cost by 5 times
For me the most fundamental principle in Agile Development is to reduce feedback time in everything you do. This helps us do the right thing more often and waste less time doing the wrong thing. It’s not just the feedback time that matters, it’s the quality of that feedback and when it comes to building the […]
Assumptions were made for testing
Here’s another extract from my book-in-progress “The Programmers Guide To People”, the first few chapters should be available at the end of May on LeanPub. You can sign up to be notified when it is here The Oxford Dictionary defines an assumption as: “a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, […]
The best tools to calculate WIP limits are your eyes and ears
We have a team of 7 developers. We normally work in pairs and we generally have 3 stories on the go at any one time. The 7th dev, picks up any bugs or chores that come through, happily there aren’t always any. Yesterday as the 7th dev I tried picking up a 4th story myself. […]
Openness
The purpose of a Silo is to protect the contents from being disturbed or damaged from external foreign bodies. Creating a Silo is reasonable if you are the farmer protecting your grain from insects but surely they are not necessary in an organisation where we should be supporting each other? Unfortunately working culture can be […]
Rings
We underestimate how difficult it can be to express our ideas clearly through writing and how easy it is to misinterpret those ideas when reading them. For a small Easter project I’ve been experimenting with an alternative way of expressing my ideas, and after 3 late nights hacking away at javascript I’ve come up with Rings. Rings […]
We can’t go on living this way
For years I’ve assumed that when Agile principles succeeded at a team level they would naturally spread to other teams in the organisation until eventually the whole organisation would embrace openness and failing fast. I’ve naively been surprised when this doesn’t happen. I’ve probably been a bit slow, or perhaps my bias for optimism has lead […]
Kanban Questioning
Moving beyond the Visualise part of the Kanban Method and beginning the process of collaboratively improving the system with policies that enable you to work more effectively can be challenging. When you begin with your existing value stream you also begin with existing assumptions. Challenging deep-rooted assumptions about the way we work may be met […]
Jim and Jo go pairing
Jim has 15 years experience Jo has 2, they are pair programming but neither are very happy. Jim is frustrated with having to explain himself, he is impatient to get the job done. It degenerates into Jim dictating code to Jo. Jo is disheartened and wonders if how he will ever learn to “keep up”. Whilst Jim […]
