people

There are many, many people online who like to comment on things. A few are lucid, most are harmless, but some are… Well, let’s just say “not very nice”.

There are many ways to structure management of product teams. Some of those management roles are vital, while others can be really problematic.

What if you work in a place that doesn’t need to do A/B testing of the latest feature set and isn’t driven by competition to deliver a new capability every other week? What if you work for the dreaded “Enterprise”? Should you still do…

Do you know how capable your technology team is? How do you assess its capabilities? What do you look for?

I was curious about how much an optimally sized, fully self-sufficient, highly talented software development team would cost. So, I decided to collect some data and find out. It turns out that such a team in Los Angeles costs a bit…

Imagine that you’re tasked with recruiting a development team to build a new product. What would that team look like? How big would it be? Who would be on it?

There is an old saying in basketball that you can’t teach height. For most basketball positions, having a few inches on your competition helps, sometimes a lot. Being a natural athlete helps too. So, basketball GMs try to draft the…

As the practice of Continuous Delivery enters the mainstream of software development, it’s important to understand its impact on every aspect of building and releasing software products from software engineering to quality assurance,…

I recently ran across a fascinating letter sent by the CEO of a small Ukranian consulting company to his employees.

Our technology team been forever searching for a good way to capture knowledge (things like discussions, ideas, tips & tricks, technical documentation, etc). Seems simple, yet a good system to capture all this knowledge proved to be…

People often say that a good indicator of a healthy team is the willingness of its members to give feedback (and vice versa). Let’s parse this out.

Most devs are naturally inclined to start finding solutions as soon as we hear a problem stated. Yet no matter how satisfying it may be to immediately board the bus to Solution Land, it is always worth it to take a moment and ask…

I would guess that most CS students don’t know what they need to pay attention to. After all, there are millions of ideas competing for their attention and they all seem equally important. But they’re not.

For some reason, the good people at the Code Project asked me to do an interview. I did and you can read the results here.

I met a student recently who was looking for a software engineering internship. As I often do in these situations, I asked him to describe a cool project he worked on. He trembled slightly, adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses, and began…

I recently finished an interesting book called Tribal Leadership. The book is full of insights about how people behave in groups and what it takes to lead them.

In a previous post on Agile testing, I looked at how Microsoft Test Manager and Twist from ThoughtWorks Studios allow QA and Devs to collaborate on creation of functional tests. In this post, I will examine how well each tool allows…

One of the key tenets of agile development is that testing is a shared responsibility. Everyone on the team is expected to figure out what to test and to test the product. In essence, the entire team co-owns all tests. Yet some types…

Good devs are hard to find. There just aren’t that many of them out there and you have to go through a lot of people to find them. Because this can be a very time consuming process, I’m always looking for ways to become more efficient…

The hardest part of conducting a job interview is quickly figuring out whether there is someone great sitting in front of you. Doing that is especially difficult if the person does not make a good first impression. For that reason, I’m…

Most developers who don’t want to go into management think that their career path must lead them to become an “architect”. When pressed on what it means to be an architect, they usually describe the role of a technical leader: someone…

A colleague recently mentioned to me an interesting psychological phenomenon called the Incubation Effect, which is an observation that people do better at problem solving if they put the problem aside for a while before coming back to…

I do lots of job interviews and one of my favorite questions to ask is “How do you keep up with technology?“. The answers I usually get fall into three buckets: “I read lots of blogs and news” Given the pace of change in our industry,…

Software development is a team sport (Yes, I realize that lone wolf coders can accomplish amazing things, but that just doesn’t scale well). To succeed in a team sport, you need a good team. To understand how to build a good team, you…

I was on the CTO Panel at the 2010 SoCal Code Camp at USC. The event was recorded and a few clips with yours truly made it to YouTube. Enjoy!