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What’s the most powerful step in a software development process? It’s not uncommon for analysts to label steps in a process. The critical path, bottlenecks, waste, and non-essential steps come to mind. So I would say that common wisdom agrees that all steps in a process do not hold equal weighting of importance. Maybe there isn’t a single most powerful step in the software development process you follow or maybe it depends on the context of the situation.
For what it’s worth, a few weeks ago it occurred to me that the act of estimating was perhaps the most powerful step. Estimating is completed at the ground level, by …Continue reading >>
Two ads. Two shows. One Brand. While traveling home this week I was skimming a Delta Sky Magazine and noticed two full page ads from Cirque du Soleil. My first thought was that the ads were repetitive. They had different pictures but they were advertising entertainment from the same brand. With just one page separating the two I thought maybe it was an A/B test for the advertisement.
On closer examination I saw that the two ads followed a template that was constructed to show seven different Cirque du Soleil experiences. The banner strip in the middle of the page had a raised block for the specific show. Each show …Continue reading >>
This is about IT and Business alignment. I’m fortunate enough to have worked in two different functional areas of a business: IT and Marketing. I can say with 100% confidence that business owners and stakeholders of software releases should be more concerned and involved in the IT release management process. The typical release process covers areas such as requirements specification, feature prioritization, business case modeling, and go-live deployment communication. It’s a set of tasks intended to oversee the requirements, development, testing, and deployment of software releases. Sounds very IT, but it should be a shared business process.
Release management is about adding value. Release Management is also about how IT …Continue reading >>
If your backlog is not a graveyard then you may be short of ideas. In my 20+ years of software, I’ve always had a backlog for software development. The list is full of ideas, customer requests, and defects. It fills faster than the team can implement and some items become aged and never resolved. I’ve come to realize that if I don’t have a list with aged items it’s probably because I don’t have an open channel of incoming ideas and I’m no listening to my customers.
I used to stress over an overflowing backlog and it was a source of frustration. As I matured a bit with software development …Continue reading >>
Manufacturing is about consistent output.
Steady manufacturing is about consistent output at regular intervals. The Ford Motor Company is the classic case study for an assembly line process and mass production. Think about the big idea for what Henry Ford accomplished. The assembly line reduced the labor hours required to produce a vehicle and increased the number of vehicles that could be produced in a given time period. The assembly line started a consistent output of units. It was incremental output, one car at a time.
The analysis of manufacturing involves incremental costs and margins.
If you studied business or economics in school you’ll remember that the marginal cost of …Continue reading >>
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