Category: continuous improvement

It's Cool to Break Stuff

May 11, 2009 by Janusz Marcin Gorycki

Photo (c) Janusz Gorycki

I am a proud father of two kids – 5-year old girl and 1.5 years old boy. For the most time they are good kids. But with alarming regularity, every couple of months, they turn out into terrifying monsters. For example, the boy would go to sleep at 7:30 pm each day and sleep well till 7am in the morning. Awesome. And then suddenly he would decide to stay awake for the whole nights for extended periods of time, and his poor parents would of course not sleep as well, turning into walking zombies during the day. Curiously, the little guy does not seem to be tired at all, even after his series of sleepless nights. Or my daughter would one day decide that she no longer likes to eat anything – with the exception of ice cream.

My wife and me used to be disoriented and powerless when this happened – until we consulted a child psychology book that described the phenomenon. And what do you know – not only is such a behavior of a child expected and normal – it is essential for the kid's development! Kids have to break the rules regularly, in order to build something new on top of the rubble.

By now, you can probably tell where I am going with this extended tale of my family life: the same rules apply to the software project. Every once in a while – and regularly – break something and re-fix it in a new way. Otherwise, your project, its internal architecture, its priorities, its target audience, its feature set, will petrify and very soon cease to be useful, attractive and desired.

How to continuously improve your presentations

February 4, 2009 by Peter Stevens

As a Scrum evangelist, I often talk to groups about Scrum. I want each talk and each course to be better than the last one. The best source for feedback is the audience, but usually audience feedback is limited to a multiple choice feedback form. You get a report card, but nothing to build on. I now collect feedback from the participants using a feedback form inspired by Scrum’s Heartbeat Retrospective. This provides useful information and enables continuous improvement as a speaker.