Articles for category: Delivery

October 21, 2020

Greg Thomas

Sprint Retrospectives During the Release

You wouldn’t change your oil while on the highway. Or change the materials in a house half-built with a few days to go. Or start teaching a new lesson when the first one isn’t finished. Or turn on the dishwasher when only a few dishes are in it? Then why are you running a Sprint Retrospective while your team is working on delivering said work? They are in a different mindset, a different zone, a different area of delivery altogether. Wait until the sprint is over, give people time to collect their thoughts, then ask the questions that you want

October 4, 2020

Greg Thomas

Priority and Severity

Ask any developer how you sort bugs and they might reply P1/S1 or S1/P1. Priority – the impact to the owner’s of the software Severity – the technical impact to the software Both are critical factors in identifying how bugs are logged. Lately, I’ve taken to updating these definitions to apply to other areas of a project that I might be working on. Priority – impact to the owner Severity – impact to the system that we are working on When we talk about the system it could be the process, the software, the team, whatever, but the question remains

September 29, 2020

Greg Thomas

To vs CC

I get emails that I’m “cc:ed” on. We all do. I send emails where I “cc” people on. We all do. Did we ever do this before with our conversations? No. Do we cc people on our instant messages? No. The problem with ccing someone is that it is never clear what they are supposed to do with it? Do you want them to read everything therein? Do you want them to take an action based on what is in the email? Do you want them to read but just respond? CC is a super-convenient way to someone was included

September 13, 2020

Greg Thomas

Good Logging, Better Errors

The hidden underbelly of software development is translating what you write into something that someone understands. Someone that has no idea what you have written. And they can’t read your code. And even if they could read your code, they don’t want to because they don’t code. Enter logs and stacktraces which has given rise to one of my most favourite and longest-running memes ever. It is crystal clear, in all it’s glory. A developer cannot resolve a problem without knowing what happened – we need those logs. But what happens when the logs aren’t there? Or they are so

September 11, 2020

Greg Thomas

Conveying Ideas Remotely

When you have a new idea, the first thing you want to do is talk to someone and explain it to them. You are so overcome with excitement that people can see it on your face and they want to hear what has you all worked up. A new framework? A new language? A new idea? They don’t even have to know what the idea is, but they want to hear it. I remember having this feeling when I’ve had ideas presented to me. Someone comes in to your area in a rush, they collapse into their chair and they

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