Joe’s Lightweight Software Engineering Approach

I'm currently working in a medium sized organisation heading up the developers in one of the business units. Whenever we onboard new people into the business unit, I will very quickly introduce them to what I call the "Software Engineering Process". It's not really a process, more a set of heuristics and principles, although you … Continue reading Joe’s Lightweight Software Engineering Approach →

Exploring Culture Through Questions

I joined Instaclustr 2 weeks ago as a Managing Engineer. I'm really excited to start working in a new company, but it can be a bit daunting to enter a new community of professionals without understanding the existing culture. What are the existing cultural norms? What are the problems and pain points? Is everyone happy? … Continue reading Exploring Culture Through Questions →

Elephant Carpaccio

I co-facilitated Alistair Cockburn's elephant carpaccio exercise yesterday. This is an exercise to teach developers and business analysts: How to slice large applications into 1-day to 1-week requests, from the business perspective How to slice application requests into 15-30 minute work slices, from both the business and programming perspective Previously, there had been some discussion at work … Continue reading Elephant Carpaccio →

Develop a Team Vision

This post describes the first day of my Bringing Distributed Teams Together series (read that first to see the larger context of this post). TL;DR Using combinations of clean language, active listening, conflict resolution models, and directed questions from the facilitators, all the team members were able to gain empathy and understanding for each other … Continue reading Develop a Team Vision →

Bringing Distributed Teams Together

It was a very busy week for me - representatives from all the teams that I work with were in London for three days of group workshops. I was running around trying to make sure everything happened when it should, which was quite exhausting. In the end, pretty much all the participants gave a big thumbs up to the … Continue reading Bringing Distributed Teams Together →