Someone sent me this error last week. “Could not Process” They asked me if I knew what it was or what it related to. All I could think about was how unhappy that Developer must have been at that point to have written that error with no subsequent log or follow-up information to help the next person to move forward. How bad was their day that this was all they could give?
Processes are meant to be tweaked. To overhaul them, to have the suggestion that they need to be overhauled by one person on their team means one of two things; They don’t understand the process (and thereby think it needs to change) They understand the process (and thereby know it needs to change) You only overhaul once, after that, it’s tweaking on tweaks to keep improving it and making it better. If you’re overhauling your…
Everything. Testing is everything. If you aren’t testing then you aren’t shipping. Consider that the next time you are trying to squeeze your QA team down from four months to three months to two weeks in the hope that “everything works”. Hint: It won’t, but that’s why we test.
Grunt work never has and never will go away. It will always be there, no matter your role, it will exist, in different forms to be sure. Embrace it, learn from it, figure out how to automate it, and do something with it. From grunt work comes our great ideas for what we might work on next.
I’m a big fan of doing demos on the fly. Fire up the compiler, and show people what you’ve done. They are meant to be exciting, exhilarating and the best forum in the world to get feedback on how you are doing. Whether you plan it or not, you should always show up ready to go. If you aren’t ready to go, push it off, an hour, a day (no more than a day) but…