Articles tagged “communication”

• A failure as an opportunity Fail­ures hap­pen, es­pe­cial­ly in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment in­dus­try, where mul­ti­ple fac­tors can in­duce fail­ure, from un­re­al­is­tic ex­pec­ta­tions by the cus­tomer to the in­com­pe­ten­cy of the staff to the se­vere…
  management 34 communication 27
• Quality and practice: convincing as a consultant When you act as a con­sul­tant in a com­pa­ny, the first thing you must re­mem­ber is that you're not the per­son who takes the de­ci­sions. While you might be the source of in­fi­nite wis­dom, peo­ple will lis­ten to you, or they will not. When your voice is not…
  communication 27 quality 36
• Quantifying time and cost: why do we always get it wrong? Dis­cus­sions like this hap­pen all the time when you work in IT. You are giv­en a sum­ma­ry which bare­ly de­scribe the pro­ject, you have no time think­ing about it, and then you re­ceive a strong pres­sure from your boss be­cause some PHP code mon­key from a…
  communication 27 quality 36 management 34
• Seven lies to stakeholders Those are the points that are fre­quent­ly sub­ject of mis­un­der­stand­ings or plain mis­in­for­ma­tion be­tween IT per­son­nel and stake­hold­ers. En­coun­ter­ing one of sev­er­al of those points in a pro­ject is a good in­di­ca­tion that com­mu­ni­ca­tion should be re­viewed.…
  communication 27 management 34
• Do requirements matter? For the last decade, I've met in my life hun­dreds of French pro­gram­mers, de­vel­op­ers, leads and CTOs. None of them knew the dif­fer­ence be­tween func­tion­al and non-func­tion­al re­quire­ments. This wouldn't be so dis­turb­ing if it were lim­it­ed to France:…
  requirements 3 communication 27
• Taking hostages with Waterfall It is ear­ly sum­mer, year 2013. A com­pa­ny I was work­ing for starts a new pro­ject sched­uled for re­lease in Sep­tem­ber. A few days ear­li­er, the pro­ject man­ag­er de­ter­mines that the pro­ject should take…
  management 34 agile 10 communication 27
• Visual management I dis­cov­ered [Vi­su­al man­age­ment blog][1] in 2013. Al­though I al­ready heard about Kent Beck's Big Vis­i­ble Chart, I've nev­er ac­tu­al­ly seen vi­su­al man­age­ment in prac­tice be­fore. For me, tick­ets went straight to Fog­Bugz or TFS and re­mained there,…
  featured 8 management 34 agile 10 productivity 36 communication 27 workplace 7 backlog 2
• Elaboration through sharing The risk of work­ing alone is that one may start to have a sim­pli­fied vi­sion of a prob­lem, and not be­ing able to see be­yond this sim­ple mod­el. This hap­pens to me a lot; to­day, I have an ex­cel­lent il­lus­tra­tion of the prob­lem. Every­thing start­ed with…
  stack-exchange 4 communication 27 short 50
• What if the team would just circumvent the “productivity measures”? Work­ing with teams and com­pa­nies which ex­pe­ri­ence prob­lems, I can't no­tice a strong cor­re­la­tion be­tween the way man­age­ment treats em­ploy­ees and those em­ploy­ees treat pro­jects they are work­ing on. It al­ways amazes me how many CEOs are ex­pect­ing their…
  productivity 36 management 34 communication 27
• And what if most projects were research projects? When I start­ed to work on the lat­est pro­ject re­quir­ing skills in Lin­ux, Python and Node.js, that is three do­mains I nev­er used be­fore, I was very clear with my­self: the pro­ject will take what it will take, maybe two months, maybe six, maybe three…
  management 34 communication 27
• Google Search is great, or why should your internal documentation be public Re­cent­ly, I an­swered a ques­tion on Pro­gram­mers.SE about doc­u­men­ta­tion tools such as Con­flu­ence for the in­ter­nal doc­u­men­ta­tion of the pro­ject. My an­swer was bad­ly writ­ten and I had no enough time or in­ter­est to rewrite it cor­rect­ly, so I re­moved it.…
  featured 8 communication 27 productivity 36
• Early and “where to start” questions I al­ready dis­cussed how Stack Over­flow en­cour­ages lazi­ness and how most per­for­mance ques­tions are wrong. The more I fo­cus on the ques­tions asked by my peers, the more I no­tice how in­com­plete, raw and…
  communication 27
• Packages, dependencies and interaction between teams Re­cent­ly, a ques­tion of Pro­gram­mers.SE passed un­no­ticed, be­cause of its length. This is un­for­tu­nate, be­cause the ques­tion high­lights a bunch of mis­un­der­stand­ings with­in many teams on a broad range of sub­jects, from Con­tin­u­ous In­te­gra­tion to…
  rant 34 productivity 36 management 34 communication 27
• Visual management and the everlasting tasks Near­ly a year ago, I de­scribed how I im­ple­ment­ed vi­su­al man­age­ment in my com­pa­ny. My us­age of vi­su­al man­age­ment re­mained rough­ly the same, but over time, I dis­cov­ered one as­pect I wasn't think­ing of when I wrote the orig­i­nal ar­ti­cle: the tasks which…
  short 50 management 34 agile 10 workspace 1 communication 27
• The harm of emotional response I can't stop notic­ing how emo­tion­al pro­ject man­agers can be, and how much harm could emo­tions cause to their pro­ject. A week ago, I had my­self an in­ter­est­ing case when my emo­tion­al re­sponse dur­ing a call with a cus­tomer led to a neg­a­tive con­duct on…
  short 50 communication 27
• Questioning the goal of the project Re­cent­ly, a friend of mine ap­proached me with a rewrite of a soft­ware prod­uct. A small com­pa­ny where she works has a small piece of desk­top soft­ware writ­ten ten years ago in WinDe­v¹ by an in-house de­vel­op­er left five years ago. The pur­pose of this…
  requirements 3 agile 10 communication 27 short 50
• Expensive projects are really cool Fol­low­ing my pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, a col­league told me a sim­i­lar but much more im­pres­sive sto­ry which hap­pened to him. Since he doesn't en­joy writ­ing too much, he in­vit­ed me to tell the sto­ry here. Six years ago, Nico­las was hired as a free­lance…
  communication 27 featured 8 management 34 short 50
• A bug or a change? A fea­ture is de­liv­ered to a cus­tomer. The cus­tomer com­plains that some­thing doesn't be­have as ex­pect­ed and cre­ates a tick­et in a bug track­ing sys­tem. Should we clas­si­fy this tick­et as a bug or a change? The ques­tion mat­ters for many soft­ware…
  rant 34 communication 27 agile 10
• XY-problem and project estimates A year ago, I was work­ing as an ar­chi­tect and IT con­sul­tant with a com­pa­ny on a large soft­ware pro­ject. The pro­ject was es­ti­mat­ed by their in-house lead de­vel­op­er, and I was asked to re­view the es­ti­mate to check if it's cor­rect. The only prob­lem was…
  communication 27 thoughts 6 short 50
• Estimation vs. commitment I love es­ti­mat­ing soft­ware pro­jects. Oh, who am I kid­ding?! Most IT pro­fes­sion­als hate be­ing asked how long the task will take. They hate it for a good rea­son: they find it worth­less, and they know their es­ti­mates are usu­al­ly wrong any­way. As such IT…
  management 34 communication 27
• Working with the people you manage A few years ago, I worked in a com­pa­ny in Poitiers. Things went well un­til our boss left, and a new one ar­rived. The new one ap­peared to be, well, a bit proud of his new sta­tus, and, nat­u­ral­ly, de­cid­ed that he has plen­ty of im­por­tant things to do and…
  communication 27 management 34 rant 34
• Introducing... a pen In most pro­jects, soon­er or lat­er, some­one asks him­self which tool should be used to make di­a­grams. It may be that the team wants to doc­u­ment their ar­chi­tec­ture, or ex­plain some­thing to a cus­tomer, or... what­ev­er. Long sto­ry short, one needs to do a…
  communication 27 productivity 36
• Blogging and plagiarism A few days ago, I was con­tact­ed by a CS stu­dent who want­ed my ad­vice on his on­line pres­ence. He had an in­ter­est­ing CV, a de­cent web­site, and a blog which had reg­u­lar ar­ti­cles—much more reg­u­lar than mine. I en­joy a lot work­ing with stu­dents who did…
  short 50 communication 27
• Ratings in a CV Heard to­day a dis­cus­sion of two col­leagues about a pos­si­ble im­prove­ment of a CV by adding for every tech­nol­o­gy a rat­ing, show­ing the mas­tery lev­el of the per­son in this par­tic­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy. I'm sor­ry about those col­leagues. They have a deep…
  rant 34 hiring 15 communication 27
• Minimum viable product An in­ter­est­ing ques­tion on SE.SE got my at­ten­tion re­cent­ly. The ques­tion is about things that may hap­pen to a pro­ject, in a con­text of a pro­ject which is tar­get­ed to be de­liv­ered eight months af­ter its start. A dis­cus­sion that fol­lowed showed that…
  management 34 agile 10 productivity 36 communication 27
• Designing documentation and technical emails A few years ago, I was work­ing on a pro­ject where a part was done by a team in Lon­don, and the oth­er part was de­vel­oped in France. To com­mu­ni­cate, we were us­ing among oth­ers the Web­Hooks, for the sole…
  visual-design 1 information-design 1 communication 27 quality 36
• Reviewing code through dialogue Re­cent­ly, I tried a new tech­nique which mix­es pair pro­gram­ming and code re­view. I don't know if this tech­nique has a name, and I don't even know if it is used by some­body else—sure, I haven't seen it…
  communication 27 code-review 2