Category Archives: management

The Impact of Staffing Practices on Software Quality and Productivity

Posted on June 7, 2009 by Derick Bailey

A Junior-Heavy Organization Companies tend to staff various teams with an experience level of employees that have a very junior heavy bias. That is, for every person with senior level experience in the organization, there tend to be multiple mid … Continue reading →

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Why “No Issues” Is Not An Acceptable Answer

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Derick Bailey

Many of the software development teams at my company now practice the daily standup from Scrum project management. There’s a lot of great value in these meetings, even if a team is not practicing anything else from Scrum. The Anti-Pattern … Continue reading →

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The Emergence Of Knowledge In Software Development

Posted on March 23, 2009 by Derick Bailey

At this point in my career, I’m convinced that software development is an empirical process. That is, we cannot predict the exact shape, size, complexity, … or any of a number of other properties … of the software that we … Continue reading →

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It’s All About The Benjamins, Baby.

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Derick Bailey

Puff Daddy got it right. No, I don’t mean having money and wealth. Never mind the actual lyrical content or intentions of those lyrics in this song. The title alone tells us everything we need to know about justifying anything … Continue reading →

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Quality Must Be Built In – It Cannot Be Added On

Posted on February 27, 2009 by Derick Bailey

Quality must be built in, it cannot be added on. … well, ok. I’ll admit that it’s not entirely true. If you don’t mind spending exorbitant amounts of money doing rework, causing projects to be late and over budget, and … Continue reading →

Also posted in how we do it, improvement, lean, mentoring, quality, software, team | 3 Comments

“One Team, One Aim”. It’s All About The Journey, Not The Goal

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Derick Bailey

I heard the phrase “one team, one aim” while listening to the audio book version of “Extreme Toyota”. This is a phrase that marks part of the core philosophies of Toyota, according to the book. There are many different philosophies … Continue reading →

Also posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Favor Defect Prevention Over Quality Inspection And Correction

Posted on January 31, 2009 by Derick Bailey

In the manufacturing world, you would never find a company that assembles a bunch of parts into a final product before inspecting any of the individual parts, and they would not wait until the end of the assembly line to … Continue reading →

Also posted in how we do it, lean, software, team | 6 Comments

On The ‘Success’ Of A Project

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Derick Bailey

I recently saw this question asked and answered in an after-project retrospective paper. Was The Project A Technical Success? While I am not trying to address who asked the question or what the answer was, the question on it’s on … Continue reading →

Also posted in how we do it, team | 4 Comments

Management vs Leadership

Posted on January 23, 2009 by Derick Bailey

Manage up. Lead out and down. You ARE A Manager If you work FOR anyone, in any context, you’re a manager. You mange your boss’ expectations of when you will have something completed. You manage your customer’s expectations of what … Continue reading →

Also posted in how we do it, improvement, quality, team | Leave a comment

Improving Our Industry: Its Time to Educate Outward, to Improve Inward

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Derick Bailey

For so long there have been so many advocating the benefits of the various Agile, Lean, Iterative, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it-these-days methodologies. We, as software developers, seem to understand the benefits of these methods. So why, then, do we still have customers … Continue reading →

Also posted in community, improvement, quality, rant, software | 21 Comments