March 2011
1 post
The Opportunity Costs of Technical Debt
I had the pleasure of catching up with Jim Highsmith recently and we had an interesting discussion on the topic of technical debt. We were talking about the non obvious consequences to high technical debt loads. One particular insight that rang true from my own experience was the effect of high technical debt loads on the psychology and mind set of an organization and in particular, the tendency...
February 2011
2 posts
Beyond Development: The Next Ten Years of Agile
I had the honor and great privilege to be one of the 33 attendees at the 10 Years Agile gathering at Snowbird, Utah. The gathering’s goal was to celebrate our accomplishments in the Agile Community, reflect on what has transpired since the Manifesto’s signing, and dialog on what remains undone. Agile has, over the last 10 years, grown to be the dominant development methodology. It...
Release Planning is Evil
I’ve wrestled with some hairy large scale agile problems. I’ve found that the coordination, temporal synchronization, and management overhead represented dramatic waste. While many argue that this is part of the nature of scaling up, I have a hypothesis. I believe that a shift from a team oriented organizational structure to a community oriented organizational paradigm will result...
January 2011
5 posts
Agile Development Needs Game Mechanics
Development teams are becoming more virtual, transient, and distributed. The lack of colocation makes it challenging to experience much of the cohesion benefits that come from positive reinforcement in intrateam interactions. The increasing instability in team membership makes it difficult to establish and maintain a team culture, shared identity, and the expectations for individual practices...
The Socialization of Product Development: Social...
A fascinating trend that I have noticed accelerating of late is the socialization of the development process. One of the more innovative corners of this trend is the introduction of social objects into the development world. A social object is a domain object in a business process which has been surfaced to interested parties independent of the normal process workflow and wrapped in social...
Building a Backlog in a Lean Startup
Background and the Three Core Inputs
I’ve watched e lean startup movement gain momentum with great interest over the last few years. While I was no longer in a start up environment, I found that Steve Blank’s Customer Development Process worked well for any new venture (new product, new market, or other significant shift of expansion of a component of your business model). While...
Crowdsoucing: Man vs Machine
When I first heard the story of John Henry as a very young child, I found it puzzling. I couldn’t understand how anyone could honestly believe that somehow the human spirit could triumph over machinery at manual repetitive tasks. Later, I came to understand that this story was an allegory for society’s struggle to accept marginalization in value of human labor as a result of the...
Top Five Technologies for Weight Loss and Health
It is New Years Day. Time for New Years resolutions. Almost everyone puts weight loss, health, and fitness on there list. I thought I would make a quick top five list of my favorite technologies in the area. As you might guess, it is full of gadgets, social analytics, and human cloud components.
Dailyburn
First on my list is Daily Burn. While not perfect, Daily Burn represents the best...
December 2010
3 posts
The iPad is the Future of Knowledge Work
@careerisover made an interesting case for why the tablet (read: iPad) is the odd man odd for executive use. In the very short term, I think he is right. However, despite my fear of sounding like a me too fanboy, I wanted to lay out my case for why it is early, but the fight is already over between netbooks, laptops, and tablets (spoiler: tablets win in the end).
First, my credentials/bias. I...
RIP: The Iteration 19?? - 2010
Friends and Family, we are gathered together here today to morn the passing of an old friend. She lived a long full life and was a true hero. We will never forget the contribution that our friend, the Iteration, made to our lives.
Blasphemy
In casual conversation over the last 18 months, I’ve had many chats with practitioners, vendors, and agile/lean strategists about the work that I...
Agile/Lean Development is Ground Zero for the...
I had the opportunity to spend some time out at GigaOM’s new conference Net:Work last week. Net:Work is focused on the evolution of work driven by ubiquitous mobile, broadband, and cloud. The topic with the most buzz around the conference was the subject of “The Human Cloud”. Briefly, the human cloud is the banner term used to describe the way that cloud computing principles...