Blog

November 22, 2015

Greg Thomas

The True Cost of Failure?

What will happen when you fall on your butt on the ice in front of everyone in attendance? You’ll pick yourself up and start skating again. If that latest code fix breaks the build and blocks everyone else from check-ins? You’ll unwind your check-out, figure out what you did wrong and later build something that won’t block everyone when this happens to someone else? What will you do if that proposal that you spent all of last week’s days and nights putting effort into does not win the bid? Figure out what you did wrong, reach out to the client and

November 19, 2015

Greg Thomas

Watch your Drift

In a Virtual Machine Cluster, you are constantly turning servers on and off and sometimes those server images are remain off for a prolonged period of time.  When you bring them up you start to notice that they have drifted from the initial configuration and haven’t been “around” for all the changes that have taken place around them. Sometimes this happens in your professional life as well, you leave a project partway through only to come back and realize that things have drifted from their original goals.  Where you thought the direction the project was headed in, was not actually where it is

November 15, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Problem with Objectives

Objectives are a tricky thing… whether you’re receiving them or managing them… they aren’t an easy problem set… any day of the year.  I’ve been on both sides of the equation and see the arguments for one both sides and have been involved in a number of different programs over the years.  The one I always think back to was where people could be rewarded a few extra percentage points for “going above and beyond”.  The thing is, when those people went above and beyond, it was above and above and above and beyond and beyond and beyond, translation – they

November 12, 2015

Greg Thomas

You are Only as Good as Your Last Release

Ouch – did that hurt? Did it strike a nerve and make you twinge at what you are currently working on? Maybe feel a pang of failure in your stomach? Good. You can’t rest on laurels that you achieved, months and years ago, you can only focus on the next ones.  If you were to leave your job today, most would remember you for what you were working on at that point in time and not all the incredibly amazing super awesome things you have done. The last thing you ever… ever… want to hear a customer say is “Version

November 9, 2015

Greg Thomas

How to Make Great Software Estimates

Well, I decided to take everything that I’d done in my recent series on Software Estimation and throw into a Slide deck with some added thoughts to it. So here it is – everything you ever wanted to know about Good Software Code Estimation in one handy deck. https://www.slideshare.net/GregThomas3/how-to-make-great-software-estimates