Articles tagged “productivity”

• Process purists and productivity · Picky about methodology Re­cent­ly, I found [an old ques­tion][1] from 2011 on Pro­gram­mers.SE. The orig­i­nal poster ex­plained a prob­lem his team has when us­ing Scrum, and asked for ad­vice. From his ques­tion, it also ap­peared that he's not ac­tu­al­ly us­ing Scrum, but rather…
  productivity 37 agile 10
• Linters rock, but they are slow I love lin­ters. I love them so much that I'm ac­tu­al­ly con­sid­er­ing to use some of them at pre-com­mit stage to re­ject com­mits which con­tain er­rors. The only thing which is the rea­son I hes­i­tate to do it is that some of them are quite slow. Cur­rent­ly,…
  code-style 3 quality 36 productivity 37
• Trial-screens setup: the definitive guide You got your sec­ond mon­i­tor. You've seen how much it en­hances (or de­grades) your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Now, you are dream­ing of hav­ing three mon­i­tors. Or maybe you don't have dual-screens set­up and you're jump­ing straight to three mon­i­tors set­up. Or maybe…
  featured 8 workplace 7 productivity 37 hardware 11
• 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 37 communication 27 workplace 7 backlog 2
• 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 37 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 37
• Did you know that Ruby is faster than C? In the past few days, there was on Pro­gram­mers.SE at least three ques­tions ([ex­am­ple][1]) which can be sum­ma­rized as: “Which pro­gram­ming lan­guage is faster, this one or that one?” This is an­noy­ing. I al­ready as­sert­ed once that it makes no sense to…
  productivity 37 rant 34 performance 14
• The documentation is the spec A prob­lem en­coun­tered by most de­vel­op­ers and teams is that any pro­ject re­quires to per­form a lot of tasks in par­al­lel. Writ­ing code im­plies do­ing a bit of de­sign, refac­tor­ing should be done at the same time, but there is also test­ing, and…
  short 50 productivity 37
• Measurements as a precursor of culture of quality When au­dit­ing dif­fer­ent IT com­pa­nies, the no­tice­able pat­tern is that com­pa­nies which per­form bad­ly have prob­lems in every imag­in­able area. I've nev­er seen a com­pa­ny which has out­stand­ing work qual­i­ty…
  productivity 37 management 34 quality 36 workplace 7
• Scripting languages, automation and productivity I re­mem­ber Prag­mat­ic Pro­gram­mer book en­cour­ag­ing to use plain text, and what could be more pow­er­ful than Lin­ux shell and a script­ing lan­guage to work with text in or­der to trans­form it? That's why…
  productivity 37
• Teaching patterns Col­lege de­grees in IT-re­lat­ed dis­ci­plines are known for not teach­ing some cru­cial things that every de­vel­op­er should know. Many stu­dents may be proud of con­tribut­ing to dozens of pro­jects, but don't…
  productivity 37 rant 34 thoughts 6
• Micro-services in a context of high complexity and low code quality One of the most prob­lem­at­ic things of a soft­ware de­vel­op­er is how to han­dle the in­creas­ing com­plex­i­ty of a giv­en code base and the de­creas­ing qual­i­ty of it. Code which, when orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten, was read­able and un­der­stand­able, looks com­plete­ly scary…
  short 50 productivity 37 quality 36 refactoring 12
• Servers monitoring UI proposal In the young in­dus­try which is soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, most do­mains are filled with ap­pli­ca­tions made by de­vel­op­ers with no thoughts about the end users. Bul­letin boards, for in­stance, were an ex­cel­lent ex­am­ple of ter­ri­ble, un­ac­cept­able user…
  user-experience 11 interaction-design 10 productivity 37
• Workflows Im­por­tant note: this ar­ti­cle fo­cus­es specif­i­cal­ly on Share­Point work­flows. What is writ­ten here doesn't ap­ply to Win­dows Work­flow Foun­da­tion (WF) and sim­i­lar work­flow tools, which have a per­fect­ly valid us­age and em­pow­er de­vel­op­ers with the abil­i­ty…
  rant 34 productivity 37
• Topography of tests Im­por­tant note: this ar­ti­cle is writ­ten for de­vel­op­ers who don't prac­tice TDD, that is more than 99% of de­vel­op­ers I know. TDD is a very dif­fer­ent world, and a few as­ser­tions I make in this ar­ti­cle don't ap­ply there. For in­stance, my skep­ti­cism…
  testing 8 productivity 37 quality 36 featured 8
• Linters and style checkers: how to save hours of painful debugging I'm al­ways im­pressed with the con­sis­ten­cy of screw-ups caused by the un­will­ing­ness of pro­gram­mers to fol­low ba­sic guide­lines. To be more spe­cif­ic, I'm talk­ing about my own screw-ups here. I've been con­vinced a long time ago that: Style check­ers and…
  productivity 37 short 50 quality 36
• 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 37 management 34 communication 27
• Corporate environment: the death of creative thinking The na­ture of cor­po­rate en­vi­ron­ment sti­fles cre­ativ­i­ty and makes the most in­ter­est­ing pro­jects im­pos­si­ble to do. Let me ex­plain it through an ex­am­ple. A few months ago, as a pro­ject man­ag­er in a…
  productivity 37
• Telecommuting and procrastination My col­leagues and I had re­cent­ly an in­ter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about let­ting de­vel­op­ers to work at home. They high­light­ed that one of the is­sues of telecom­mut­ing is that it makes it dif­fi­cult for the…
  productivity 37 management 34 quality 36
• Person-centered metrics and self-organizing teams We can­not re­li­ably mea­sure de­vel­op­ers' pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and this is the ma­jor el­e­ments which push­es many man­agers to fo­cus on less rep­re­sen­ta­tive as­pects of de­vel­op­ers' con­tri­bu­tion to a pro­ject and a com­pa­ny. Some com­pa­nies do a re­al­ly bad job,…
  management 34 quality 36 productivity 37
• Interfaces in microservices Ob­serv­ing large in-house sys­tems which ei­ther use SOA ap­proach­es or even at­tempt to mim­ic mi­croser­vices, I con­stant­ly no­tice a pat­tern which makes those sys­tems sub-op­ti­mal and dif­fi­cult to main­tain. A tiny Hel­lo World-style ap­pli­ca­tion can eas­i­ly…
  productivity 37 quality 36 microservices 2
• 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 37
• Hidden costs of freeware libraries There are so many open source li­braries and frame­works out there for de­vel­op­ers to down­load and use that it is very tempt­ing to use them uni­ver­sal­ly, with­out ask­ing one­self if a giv­en li­brary or a frame­work is re­al­ly nec­es­sary for the pro­ject. With…
  productivity 37
• Bulky, heavy, fat ORMs A long time ago, I wrote the fol­low­ing in the de­scrip­tion of Or­seis. I nev­er liked ORMs. They are bulky, heavy, fat. They build SQL queries be­hind my back, and I don't like it. I want to be in con­trol. Re­cent­ly, a per­son asked on SE.SE how is it…
  productivity 37
• Gated checkins are evil I was re­cent­ly talk­ing with a de­vel­op­er about a pre-build strat­e­gy he wants to set up in his team which uses trunk-based de­vel­op­ment. His idea is that in or­der to pre­vent prob­lem­at­ic code from hit­ting the trunk in ver­sion con­trol, a client-side…
  productivity 37 testing 8 rant 34
• Why do you need a productivity consultant Many of the per­sons who learn about my pre­vi­ous ac­tiv­i­ty as a pro­duc­tiv­i­ty con­sul­tant are won­der­ing what sort of prob­lems I was solv­ing, and why would a giv­en com­pa­ny be need­ing a con­sul­tant in­stead of solv­ing those prob­lems on their own. This…
  productivity 37 workplace 7
• On bug tracking systems There are no good bug track­ing sys­tems, and I'm about to ex­plain what makes them not good and why good sys­tems weren't de­vel­oped yet. To be­gin, let's il­lus­trate a jour­ney of two per­sons work­ing on the same team: one of the pro­gram­mers and a prod­uct…
  rant 34 productivity 37 user-experience 11 productivity 37 management 34
• Take risks, fail fast In many soft­ware de­vel­op­ment teams, the source code is sa­cred. Its sa­cred­ness is caused by two fac­tors: The code is the ul­ti­mate ex­pres­sion of the in­tel­lec­tu­al work of the de­vel­op­ers. If you have any­thing against the code, it means that you're…
  productivity 37 quality 36 refactoring 12 rant 34 requirements 3
• YAGNI principle in action Dis­cussing YAG­NI with col­leagues, I of­ten find my­self in a sit­u­a­tion where they give me a con­crete ex­am­ple where they were very hap­py to think about a giv­en fea­ture or as­pect be­fore it was re­al­ly need­ed. As those dis­cus­sions al­ways fol­low the same…
  rant 34 productivity 37 quality 36 refactoring 12 agile 10
• Build complexity I'm al­ways amazed at the ca­pac­i­ty of large and small com­pa­nies to pick the tools which would make their build as com­plex as pos­si­ble. It's like they en­joy pay­ing mon­ey for some­thing which will cost them even more mon­ey. The core prob­lem here is the…
  rant 34 productivity 37
• 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 37 communication 27
• Workflows, ETLs, and pure magic Five years ago, I wrote a rather opin­ion­at­ed and very crit­i­cal ar­ti­cle about Nin­tex Work­flows, a per­fect­ly use­less prod­uct which makes your life mis­er­able while you're pay­ing for it. Nin­tex is sold as a so­lu­tion to al­low non-tech­ni­cal per­sons to…
  quality 36 productivity 37 python 5
• When testing is not fun enough On reg­u­lar ba­sis, some col­league starts com­plain­ing in an in­for­mal dis­cus­sion about the low qual­i­ty of some pro­ject he's work­ing on. It has to do with code qual­i­ty, or lack of tests, or both. Every…
  testing 8 quality 36 rant 34 productivity 37
• Languages usage over time I start­ed pro­gram­ming a long, long time ago. The old­est source code I can find in the archives is from 2004. Back then, I was sev­en­teen years old, us­ing Vi­su­al Ba­sic and some­thing that I be­lieved…
  productivity 37 quality 36
• Using LOCs to validate hypotheses In my pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, I was talk­ing about the tool which gath­ers the diffs from the ver­sion con­trol com­mits, and uses them to com­pute the num­ber of lines of code (LOC) per lan­guage over time, in…
  productivity 37 quality 36
• Why is positive premature optimization still wrong? When ju­nior pro­gram­mers do pre­ma­ture op­ti­miza­tion, it is easy to see how it could harm the pro­ject. They guess that a giv­en change would make their code faster, and since they don't mea­sure the ac­tu­al…
  profiling 5 performance 14 optimization 3 productivity 37