Blog

January 7, 2015

Greg Thomas

Living Documents are a Cop Out

I hate this phrase – “It’s a living document, it will never be completed, it will live on and on, we will be in the ground and yet this document will continue to live on”.  Okay the last bit might have been exaggerated a bit, but you get the gist of where I’m going with this. Can someone show me a document that is dead? Probably not, because we don’t exactly label documents as dead because that would mean that someone took a significant amount of time to write something, we deemed it useless and than pushed it aside into

December 29, 2014

Greg Thomas

The Install is the Experience

Well, I got an XBOX One for XMAS and the first thing I was presented with when I went to turn it on was a screen asking me for updates.  Now this isn’t meant to be a blistering narrative against the hackers, XBOXLive or Microsoft – it’s a bummer it, it happened, everything is great now, I have all my updates and I can merrily play away.  However, when your first experience with a product is that you literally cannot do anything with it (no updates = no playing), you start to question it’s value, buyer’s remorse slowly starts to

December 23, 2014

Greg Thomas

Build the Team not the Process

No one has ever, ever shipped a piece of software and thanked the process.  Apologies to everyone that work with methodologies and ALM, but it’s true. Why? Because, processes don’t ship software, people do.  Do a mental back-check of the last few releases to see what really got them out the door?  Was it the check-in process, how bugs were logged or what happened at the last triage meeting?  Probably not.  No one ever ships a release and goes – “Thank the heavens we have this process because otherwise we would never have been able to go out the door”.  No, it always goes

December 16, 2014

Greg Thomas

Respect thy Calendar

I live in Microsoft Outlook, not something that I originally had as a boyhood dream between being All-Star Cleveland Indians Catcher and Doctor, but hey such is life and I roll through a ton of email on a daily basis so it works.  With work and kids et al, I use my calendar for everything (primarily because it makes sure that I am where I need to be, when I need to be).  Over the years, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend where appointments become stacked on appointments which are already stacked on appointments.  There must be something that can be done…

December 10, 2014

Greg Thomas

Overtake them on the Hill

Many years ago (too many in fact), I undertook the task of running a half-marathon (21km) and training for it in 7 short weeks.  At the time I had a friend who had run many marathons, New York and Boston to name a few, and she outlined a complete training regimen for me to get me in shape.  I still remember my time of 1:58:05 (primarily because I wanted to be under 2 hours). To this day, I always remember the one piece of advice which I applied to that race and now apply to so many other things in life –