Articles for category: Delivery

January 21, 2015

Greg Thomas

Thanks to the Process

I’ve worked on a lot of releases that have come down the wire.  Not always a great trend, but in what I do, it can happen.  However, the best part when it happens, is when you have a team with you, you’re all in it together, it’s late, you’re trying to close the last bug, run the last test, give it one more shot.  I’ve been in these situations as the jr developer, the tech lead, the manager and more and each time you know you’re going to make it through because you have a great team beside you.  And

January 13, 2015

Greg Thomas

Insulate the Failure

I know this is one of those topics out there that people might go – “oh great another blog about letting people fail and everyone being happy and unicorns and rainbows and let’s hold hands and save the world, etc, etc, etc…”.  And to some extent it might be, to some extend it might not. One of, if not the hardest part about managing/leading a team is giving your team the opportunity to fail because at some point, the little voice in the back of your end starts connecting the dots and going “Red Alert!  Red Alert!  We’re going to crash”.  And

January 7, 2015

Greg Thomas

Living Documents are a Cop Out

I hate this phrase – “It’s a living document, it will never be completed, it will live on and on, we will be in the ground and yet this document will continue to live on”.  Okay the last bit might have been exaggerated a bit, but you get the gist of where I’m going with this. Can someone show me a document that is dead? Probably not, because we don’t exactly label documents as dead because that would mean that someone took a significant amount of time to write something, we deemed it useless and than pushed it aside into

December 29, 2014

Greg Thomas

The Install is the Experience

Well, I got an XBOX One for XMAS and the first thing I was presented with when I went to turn it on was a screen asking me for updates.  Now this isn’t meant to be a blistering narrative against the hackers, XBOXLive or Microsoft – it’s a bummer it, it happened, everything is great now, I have all my updates and I can merrily play away.  However, when your first experience with a product is that you literally cannot do anything with it (no updates = no playing), you start to question it’s value, buyer’s remorse slowly starts to

December 23, 2014

Greg Thomas

Build the Team not the Process

No one has ever, ever shipped a piece of software and thanked the process.  Apologies to everyone that work with methodologies and ALM, but it’s true. Why? Because, processes don’t ship software, people do.  Do a mental back-check of the last few releases to see what really got them out the door?  Was it the check-in process, how bugs were logged or what happened at the last triage meeting?  Probably not.  No one ever ships a release and goes – “Thank the heavens we have this process because otherwise we would never have been able to go out the door”.  No, it always goes

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