What has surprised me over the course of my career has been the number of times that even within a single organisation — and therefore in the context of the same culture — a single change of manager has radically, and rapidly, changed the dynamic of both my working environment…

In this blog I argue that as a developer working in a team, the more frequently you incorporate incoming changes the better — problems are spotted quicker and you can adjust your work to fit sooner, saving greater pain further down the track. Working small is beautiful. I’ve been a…

In my previous post, here, I wrote about Allan Kelly’s first two workshops I attended. This post describes the second two workshops and some final observations. Workshop 3: How do you value a story? The third workshop contained one of my major memories of the course. As a developer there’s been plenty of times where we’ve been asked…

I have recently taken the opportunity of participating in Allan Kelly’s online workshops on Stories & Value. I’ve seen a few talks by Allan at various conferences around the UK, and had seen some of the material before, but I found it really insightful, with each week building on the…

I was given a copy of ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin’s book, Clean Code, about ten years ago now. It seems like hyperbole to say that it had a revelatory affect on my career, however it did; it gave me something of a USP. If you’ve worked in the Software industry for…

As alluded to in my blog on Sprint Calendars, you will have seen the Monday at the start of a Sprint was labled as ‘Tech Day’. I introduced Tech Day to give explicit permission to the team to tackle tasks that might feel hard to justify to take on in…

Logging seems a really dull topic to blog about, but its actually incredibly important and very easy to do badly — it does require some effort, and you won’t get it right first time (guaranteed). At a recent discussion about handling issues a customer comes up against, there was a…