When working in an agile model, two task management techniques are often at the top of the list of approaches a team might take – Kanban and Scrum. Some call these processes in themselves, but the way I see it is they’re more of a practice or tool for managing tasks. They’re really very similar…
Category: Software Processes
Do Construction Metaphors Still Work For Software?
It’s common to illustrate the software development process in parallels with how the construction world works. It is a discipline of “engineering” after all, and what’s a better known field of “engineering” than constructing a building or a house. Unfortunately, while a lot of it is helpful to put things into perspective, it also causes…
Closing The Loop: Processes
To most, “closing the feedback loop” may sound like nothing more than management jargon. As a matter of fact, it is. But behind every management buzzword, there usually lies a simple truth that we could benefit from paying a little attention to. This is the second of a series of articles related to feedback loops and…
When Agile Doesn’t Make Sense
When I was teaching software engineering almost a decade ago, I always liked to compare building software to building a house. It was this mindset that differentiated a “programmer” from a “software engineer”, and explains why it’s best to catch a bug early (even before any code is written) as it gets incrementally expensive as…