Blog

October 23, 2020

Greg Thomas

Carve Out Time to Play

We are day in and day out in the office. Whether you are working somewhere remotely for your company or working from home, you are pulling in more bandwidth to the office then you ever thought possible. Everyone is worried about what is coming next and it’s seeping into our psyche (if it hasn’t already). If you are a consultant/contractor, you are taking on as many projects as you can right now in case of what might come next. Personal Development is going out the window because finding time is getting harder and harder. Find the time, 30 minutes, something,

October 22, 2020

Greg Thomas

Requirements are a Story

It doesn’t matter what methodology you are using. Your requirements are a story. They are a story that people want to read like a book. They want to read it so badly that they can never put it down. They want to be consumed by it. They want to never stop reading it. They want it to be the bestseller they never knew about. They want to be blown away by it. And they want to be so inspired by it that they go and build the best software you have ever seen. That is what your requirements need to

October 22, 2020

Greg Thomas

Why Agile Implementations Fail

Agile is hunky-dory implementation of software development. If it’s on your resume it suddenly means you have experience at “developing software quickly”. Even though you might have been doing this for years without Agile, not it means you are following a process to getting things done. However, Agile can still be slow, it’s not an immediate switch that all of a sudden people start going faster. Unless you are a brand-new team who are all eager to jump onto a methodology and throw everything else you know out the window, the onboarding to it is not as easy as you

October 21, 2020

Greg Thomas

Sprint Retrospectives During the Release

You wouldn’t change your oil while on the highway. Or change the materials in a house half-built with a few days to go. Or start teaching a new lesson when the first one isn’t finished. Or turn on the dishwasher when only a few dishes are in it? Then why are you running a Sprint Retrospective while your team is working on delivering said work? They are in a different mindset, a different zone, a different area of delivery altogether. Wait until the sprint is over, give people time to collect their thoughts, then ask the questions that you want

October 20, 2020

Greg Thomas

Rethink the Problem

Factors change. Results come in. Experiments succeed and fail. What you thought you knew was the problem, might not have been the problem at all. Don’t get frustrated or even worse, give up. Step back, rethink the problem, approach it from a different angle. Move forward.