I met an old man today. He smelled heavenly like a freshly groomed Product Backlog and literally oozed with agile smartness. He gave me an old parchment with few words of wisdom written on this. Then he vanished Cheshire Cat style (his wise and forgiving smile vanished last). I tried to decipher the parchment and…
My first WordPress child theme
I have made my first modifications to a WordPress theme today. I’m pretty proud of myself as I had no prior experience with WordPress-tweaking and the last time I touched PHP was around WWII 😉 Anyway, this post is to convince you that: it is simple you can do it DISCLAIMER: I’m a WordPress noob. I…
High WIP? Frustration guaranteed!
This is the third installment of the series devoted to high WIP. The first one explained the general issues of the high WIP. In the second one, we listed the specific problems typical for software development team. In the last installment of the series, we will look at how high WIP affects the team’s morale….
A penalty for high WIP, or why spreading yourself thin will kill you
This is the second installment of the series devoted to WIP (Work in Progress). As explained in the first installment of this series, each open task leads to some additional work and to a number of problems. Let’s have a look at them. Context switching With many tasks pursued in parallel, we are forced to…
What is WIP (Work in Progress)
WIP, or Work in Progress (AKA Work in Process) is the number of tasks that the team is currently working on. All the tasks which have been started, but have not been completed yet, increase the WIP. Thus, if the first column on our kanban board is ToDo, and the last one is Production, then…
Write it all down
I’ve already written about common patterns of various techniques which are based on the “start with facts” idea. Another, similar one, is based on the idea of getting it all out of your head (before you really start doing anything about it). Numerous techniques are using this approach to start your engines. Take GTD (Getting…
Remote retro with RetroTool
Today we run our first remote retrospective using http://retrotool.io for cards & http://zoom.us for video conferencing. The context: two people developing remotely, after 1,5 week of work, we met to discuss how we are doing We decided to use the http://retrotool.io. Why this one? Few reasons: it is dead simple it seems to work it…
The carpet that bothered them
It happens that when you suggest a retrospective meeting to a team you hear something like: “we sit together and talk often, why the hell should we waste our time for another meeting?” Makes sense, doesn’t it? And yet, my whole experience tells me otherwise. Even though we talk with each other every day, even…
Read it again
Go back to the books you read years ago. The ones you still think about after all these years. The ones you learned a lot from. The ones that helped, inspired or changed you. What will happen? A new discoveries will happen. You see, the things you learn from a book aren’t only what author…
Printing nicely formatted time in Google Spreadsheet
If you need to change some numbers into nicely formatted hours in Google Spreadsheet, then this article is for you. So let us say I calculate some time in minutes and want to print it as a nicely formatted hour. This is the formula that makes it happen (where A2 is the cell number to…