Quality
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SCRUM IS A BIG CHECKLIST TO INCREASE QUALITY AND SPEED
Checklists are good. They make us remember things. Especially when it is things we do over and over again, when it is easy to forget one step just because we’ve done it so many times already. I mean, we’re just human. If we look around, many operations where risk is high often use checklists. Like pilots. They are fanatic when it comes to following the pre-flight checklist, because if they miss anything, even the smallest thing, it could end in disaster. Lives are at stake. But few airplanes go down because of pilots skipping this step. I think it’s safe to say that checklists work. They evidently increase the quality…
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YAGNI – YOU AREN’T GONNA NEED IT! WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR SOFTWARE?
Never write a single line of code before we really know that we need it. Don’t rely on experience from other systems we’ve written. A new project is never an exact copy of the old one, or there wouldn’t be a need for it. And a software project always changes the specifications during the process. Two facts that tells us that we have to wait to write the code until we really know that it is necessary. Or we will write code that we Aren’t Gonna Need. Waterfall or Ad Hoc? Neither! All software is developed with a goal in mind. An end product. A vision of what we want…
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WHO IS THIS “USER” THAT SCRUM KEEPS TALKING ABOUT?
When you see an example of a user story it always stars with: “As a USER…” But what hides behind this “user”? Who is s/he? Or what? And does it actually give me any value to start every story with a user? The “user” is way to generic. Instead, you should be specific. Who, or what, makes the request? By identifying the stakeholders up front, you stand a much higher chance of making a system that actually works. So, what is a stakeholder, then? The problem with Scrum, according to Tom Gilb A co-worker woke my interest in what Tom Gilb has to say, a while ago. We were sitting…
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FAILURE IS ALWAYS AN OPTION!
The notion of “Failure is always an option” is at the heart of any successful endeavour. Because it is when we fail that we learn. Yes, you have heard this a million times. But have you ever thought about what that actually means? And maybe more important, how you can change your ways of working to really leverage it? When we try to learn a new skill, we have absolutely no idea of how to do it. So we try. We might succeed on the first go, but it is by far more likely that we will do something wrong. And we try again, and again… and again. We keep…