Articles for category: Drive

February 19, 2023

Greg Thomas

Building Software Processes

Here is how you build a software delivery process; What bugs you about your current system (this is whiteboarding time)? What do you want to get out of the delivery (metrics, delivering faster, more on time, a more relaxed team)? Who is involved in the delivery (either stakeholder or the roles within the process)? What things do you care about in the process (what matters to people – trust, empowerment, control, etc)? That’s it, it doesn’t matter what system, process, workflow, or automation you use, everything will spring out of those 4 questions.  The key to building any software process

February 18, 2023

Greg Thomas

What goes into Logs?

What happened? (Debug/Verbose, Info, Warning, Error, Critical) When it happened. (Dates but don’t forget timezone offsets) Why did it happen? (who did what and where) What you should do next. (is there a KB?  Does this happen often) Those are the four components of any great log file, if you have those in your file the people that have to go troubleshoot will thank you kindly. The fifth component of any great log file is ensuring people know where to go and find the information, disseminate it, and do something with it.

February 15, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Clicking Moment

The clicking moment is an easy one – it’s when it all comes together and everyone goes “oh look it worked”! They don’t see the hours, days, weeks, months, and maybe even years of work that went into getting it to that point – all they see is when it clicks. That’s okay, you know what went into making that happen, the drive and initiative for it to happen. You know what it takes to make things click and that’s what matters to be able to lead yourself and others there.

February 14, 2023

Greg Thomas

Coding is the easy Part

Meeting with people. Negotiating requirements back and forth. Deciding which languages and frameworks to use and why. Investigating customer problems you’ve never seen before. Working with Sales on features that aren’t there. Figuring out new UI/UX schemas. Organizing your work. All of the above is much harder to do than writing the code that comes from these interactions.  Don’t underestimate the value of sitting down with someone to understand their point of view and their needs before you start dropping code.

February 10, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Big List

Everyone knows about the Big List. The Top 10 Most Requested Features by Customers. The Top 5 Biggest Pain Points in our Software. The 7 Bugs that keep recurring. The 9 Test Cases that always Fail. The 4 Requirements that must be part of every story. Pick your list, but it’s a list, it might be big because of how many things are on it or big because of how important they are.  Whatever the reason, it’s a big list, an important list. The hard part is getting everyone aligned to the list so we are all moving in the