Many organizations forget that planning is all about the planning. You’ve probably heard the saying: “The plan is nothing, the planning is everything”. For me, that means that the process of planning itself is, to a large degree, what creates belief in and understanding of the plans. The plans will break anyhow (we’ll still do […]
Author Archives: Tobias Fors
Is Thinking Allowed?
When I was still working as a contract programmer, I was on an assignment where the boss was from the United States. I didn’t meet him very often, but he seemed like a nice enough guy. One day, he surprised me though. I was sitting in my chair, leaning back for a while with my […]
This Week Online – Saturday, May 14, 2011
This week I managed to squeeze in three days of consulting and two days of public teaching. Side effect: less time over for reading. Still, here’s some of the stuff that piqued my interest online this week. Bright and Terrible Jay Yarow of Business Insider published a short post about what’s it like to fail […]
This Week Online – Saturday, May 7, 2011
Here’s a mixed list of some of the things I appreciated online this week. They might turn out to be useful to you as well. Fake and Shapes Randy Rice published a blog post that listed different testing tools that came up during a tutorial session he hosted at StarEast 2011. I don’t work as […]
Some Help Examining Your Engineering Practices
At Citerus, I worked with my colleagues to create a basic form we can use to take a quick inventory of the current engineering practices in the teams we work with. It was originally in Swedish, but I just translated it into English for use at a client. We’re not dogmatic, so neither is the […]
Sketchnoting the Concept of Flow
I like to take stuff and try to express it in as simple language as possible. That’s my way of checking my own understanding of a concept. One concept that comes up often when we talk about lean software development, kanban and agile is that of “flow”. A couple of days ago, I decided to […]
Thinking Tools for Conference Reviewers
Recently, I’ve been reviewing session proposals for Agile 2011. It’s a rewarding job, even though I’m not getting paid for it. I was asked to help out, and said yes because I knew I would learn a lot from it. Since this is the first time I’m reviewing sessions like this, I started out by doing some research into what to look for.
Programmer Productivity?
I’ll admit I’m a bit confused. Do we still believe that it’s meaningful to talk about the productivity of individual programmers? Assuming we had some agreement in our business as to how exactly one should measure the productivity of a programmer (we don’t), what good would it do us? Let’s say we discovered that he most productive programmer is […]
Writing: It’s Not Just About Writing
I try to write regularly. I write a lot more than I publish, and that’s OK for now. I’d like to publish more in the future however, so I keep trying to improve my productivity. One thing I’ve found that helps, is to do something that moves a writing project forward, even if it’s not […]
Too Much Talk About Methods
I believe there’s too much talk about methods, and too little about how they are introduced. Methods can be very helpful, especially when used mindfully. What does that mean? To me, using a method mindfully implies, among other things, introducing it in the right way. The right way for me is with minimal hype and […]