Every question has two responses. The knee-jerk, shoot from the hip, get off my back, I’m tired of this, you don’t know what you’re talking about, this is a waste of my time response. Or, the “take a step back”, read it again, don’t rush to respond, gather the information and this must mean something to you response. The latter doesn’t mean you are ignoring the potentially valid issue being raised, it simply means you…
Every application has some level of Technical Debt. Some of it exists in our tracking systems, but most of it exists in our minds, slack channels, or forgotten conversations we have with each other, later to be forgotten when we start on something else. One of the hardest jobs of being a Software Manager is being able to enunciate where your team’s debt is and push the work that needs to be done, to get…
It can become a habit that you always need to lead the team, you always need to be there, and you always need to be the one calling the play. Depending on where your team is at, this is completely acceptable, especially when they are new and have to learn everything around them. But as they grow (which will happen and MUST be one of your top goals), your leadership style will need to change…
A feature is a collection of requirements that need to be delivered as part of a product. The requirements that form a feature can generally be broken down into stories that form the scenarios which are used by the feature and/or they can simply be the use cases for which a feature can be handled – both are very similar. In short, I like to think of it in this way – it’s a big…
You are going to make good decisions, and you are going to make bad ones. You will not always get it right, no one has a hundred percent success rate. But you need to make a decision. Not making a decision, and spending more and more time arguing about the pros and cons is not helping your team, it’s confusing them. Make a call, admit when it’s wrong, don’t flaunt it when it’s right, and…