A Business Technology Place (Since 2008)
A colleague told me a story this week about their involvement in a software development project. If you make software for a living you know there is always a desire to produce working software faster. Her story was a tale about requirements, servers, browsers, bugs, and other types of gremlins Read More …
How fast do you want software released? I was part of a discussion this week week about the velocity of production software deployments. I didn’t use velocity in the context of estimating software but rather the benefits of a regular cadence to releases and the focus it brings to the Read More …
What is the secret sauce? What really drives new software features? Do we live in a world where the marketing department rules the day with ROI driven and profit making capabilities from within the software? To an extent, I believe the answer is yes. Businesses exist to make money. Business Read More …
Are we attracted to repetition? Yes. We all are. It touches every facet of our lives. As a few examples, we eat the same types of foods each week, we watch the same TV series, and we read books that belong to a series. A study and report from Alix Read More …
Repetition in youth. That song was awesome! Play it again. Rewind-stop-play-rewind-stop-play-forward-play, call the radio station for a request, press repeat. These actions are all part of my memory as a youth. Back in the days when I spent a fair amount of my income on cassette tapes and CDs. It Read More …
I was talking with a mentor this week about software development and the challenges of aligning IT ideals with business expectations. From a high level we agreed that the purpose of the software development process should be to produce software that generates monetary value, by revenue increase or cost decrease, Read More …
Each week I capture, mark, and comment on blog posts and news articles around the internet. This is short list of three links that I think others will find valuable for their thought lives. A Simple Device Diagram for Responsive Design Planning by Adam Edgerton of Metal Toad Media. This Read More …
I don’t like process waste. Who does? But how many of us really try to change processes to eliminate or reduce waste? In my experience this is a tough topic, and I dare say an unwelcome one, most of the time. The problem is that in an organization processes are Read More …
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 Read More …
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. Read More …
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 Read More …
Working in start-ups and newer organizations has advantages and disadvantages form working in large and more established organizations. With regards to age, more established organizations are likely to use the waterfall method, or a variation of it, for software development. Newer organizations with less people, and not having years of Read More …
In my reading this week I came across a blog post from Tom Peters entitled Strategy: War on Systems. Tom talks about “systems” within an organization and while they are developed with good intentions, they often become inhibitors to achieving the organizational mission. I talk about this very subject quite Read More …
If you do any amount of reading today on current topics in software development you’ll find a growing community for agile development methods in addition to those using the more traditional waterfall development method. Large and/or older corporations tend to use the waterfall approach to software development because that was Read More …
If you have read any of my previous blog posts, you’ll know that I’m all about business process management and efficiency. For better or worse, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how organizations produce work. A common framework for many businesses to produce software releases is to Read More …