Category Archives: hands-on

I’d like to summarize several patterns where Scrum (a well known Agile process) combines with Kanban (an evolutionary improvement method). These patters are pretty obvious to many agile coaches and people in the Lean-Kanban community. But I feel I need … Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking about Michael Kennedy’s LSSC’12 talk, Set-Based Decision Making – Taming System Complexity to Ensure Project Success and ways to explain it to those who weren’t there at the conference. Kennedy’s ideas go well beyond set-based design or … Continue reading →

The 20% time has become popular in the software industry in recent years. Even though most programmers don’t work at companies that have 20% time, most have heard or know someone who works at a place like Google, where programmers … Continue reading →

A couple of months ago I decided that it was time to try something different and erased my Personal Kanban board where all lines crossed each other at 90-degree angles. I thought it was time to experiment with a radically … Continue reading →

It Started at the Library I took my children to our city’s public library since a very young age. We visit the library at least twice a month. The library has an enclosed hall on the first floor for children … Continue reading →

I’d like to chime in on the discussion started by Abby Fichtner, a.k.a. HackerChick in Kanban is the New Scrum and continued by many people in comments and blog posts (such as this one). I don’t find anything to object … Continue reading →

In our last book club meeting, we revisited Chapter 7 of Eric Evans’ Domain-Driven Design and tried to create a checklist for turning a domain-model into an object-oriented design. This is what we came up with. 0. The model is … Continue reading →

In 2002, I had the only layoff of my career, from a company that had spent some time building a product (and they didn’t come) and landed right away in a DevOpsy lean-startapish Internet ad firm. Of course, words such … Continue reading →

Last weekend, I went to the Communitech Coding Dojo in St. Jacobs, not far from Waterloo. Coding dojo is different from a code retreat. In a code retreat, you have the same problem all day and use each iteration to … Continue reading →

When you’re writing software that interacts with another system, do you really know how that system behaves when it encounters errors? Do you really know what happens when you call IFooRepository.GetFoo(), which is supposed to return an object of class … Continue reading →