If you’re looking for a way to slow down your team. Have them switch between delivery work and anything else. Have them come to meetings they don’t need to be at. Have them switch between different technology platforms for communications. Give them unclear guidance on what to do. Leave “things” up to them but don’t outline your expectations. It sounds like things we shouldn’t be doing, but we do them all the time, even though…
This is a hard question to ask. At the most simplistic level, we want to say – “I can code for 6 hours a day, every day for the next 2 weeks” – and hope that happens. For some, it might be possible, for many it isn’t. There are meetings, customer issues, planning sessions, product discussions, design chats, etc, etc – what your velocity is can change by the day, perhaps by the week. The…
Can you make your code better? Can you stop it from being so unwieldy? Can you code for the one problem that is in front of you or do you need to look at all the problems around you before you can decide? Controlling your code, what you write, and not letting it spiral out of control is one of the most difficult tasks developers have to perform. Our innate desire is to solve all…
What’s the difference? Ready means it’s ready for someone to look at and see what it looks like. Done means no one needs to look at it. One involves testing, the other states that testing has been completed. If your team doesn’t know the difference, it could be your biggest problem in knowing what is complete.
Chasing stats is a good short-term victory. It means changing what you do and what you care about to get some quick wins. It means redirecting people and resources to achieve those quick points that put a win in the column. The problem is, if you keep chasing stats in the short-term, your long-term strategy starts to fall apart, it starts to fail and break simply because you don’t have one. You’ve been too busy…