Building quality into your software

Building quality into a system means much more than only having a quality plan. Usually, the quality plan describes in details the degree to which our software suite possesses a desired collection of quality attributes. Your organization need to reach alignment around...

How to keep the team together when distributing a colocated team

The main difference between working in a co-located or distributed environment is how we communicate together. Experiences show that miscommunication is always a part of any failure and good communication is the basic for all successful teams. Main success factors...

How to run a good standup meeting remotely

Effective meetings do not happen by accident, they are well planned and have good focus. There has to be a clear goal, agenda, time frame and focus. The following is a guide based on experiences of working in distributed teams.  Goal for the standup: Share status of...

Communication – The art of listening

You have been talking for a while with a colleague. Do you believe she has listened to you? Or, maybe she has just heard you? Hearing is totally different thing than listening. In previous articles where I have discussed communication, we talked about how to...

How to maximize business value in software development?

Once upon a time there were some companies trying to build the perfect software. They called it the killer app. Unfortunately, they struggled producing any value and got killed themselves. Their CEOs and boards of directors asked WHY. After a lot of analysis and...

What is needed to produce a succesful software product?

History shows that we are still trying and failing when aiming to produce new software products, maintaining existing products or just running a project. In my articles, I am trying to share some of my experience (almost 3 decades) from the Software development...

The science of prioritization

What to do first; this is the question! There are only 24 hours a day. Time is money and you can not value things equally. Something brings you more value, other things are urgent while something else should be done sooner or later. How to set priorities and know that...

Introduction to the science of prioritization

What to do first; this is the question! There are only 24 hours a day. Time is money and you can not value things equally. Something brings you more value, other things are urgent while something else should be done sooner or later. How to set priorities and know that...

How to reduce waste by increasing your speed

When we estimate the time needed to get something done in a process we usually divide the number of things to do by the average rate of completion. We call the resulting number Cycle Time. With other words, Cycle Time is the average amount of time it takes to get a...