This blog post is about: what's wrong with Scrum-ish retrospectives, what's the better alternative, why questioning yourself is nothing about self-doubt or slowing down the decision-making, is it necessary to abandon "retros" and why awareness leads to clarity (and what does it really mean).Scrum was a great idea, invented by brilliant people, with great intentions in mind. No doubt about that. A shame it didn't work out ... One of its brightest spots was emphasizing the role of retrospecting over what went well & what could use some improvement - it has even got a dedicated ceremony: some even tend…
This blog post is all about: ruling time out of the equation (because it's very deceptive), what happens when Purpose meets Social Contract, what does Autonomy really mean (and why freedom is a minor part of it), whether 50h is better than 40h (or you simply need to go beyond 60h ...), why over-time has nothing in common with seniority and how do all these things correspond to Engineering Culture.Part I of the series can be found here.Where were we? Just about to get into the details of what constitutes a work environment of high achieving where teams truly…
This blog post is all about: a special kind of contract that is almost never written down, comparing rat-race with inspired evangelism or a quest for workplace happiness, what does happen when "social contract" is broken (& why does it happen), why respecting "social contract" (and first - having it at all!) makes such a difference.I've started few series of blog posts - one related to compensation, another to the level of commitment required to achieve the success, but ... I've recently found out that I can't conclude any of those without introducing one important concept (that rarely gets named…
This blog post is all about: what Jack Ma has in common with Elon Musk, whether we always condemn people who sacrifice personal balance to pull over-time (in fact we ... don't), is "up-or-out" culture unfair, how does Cristiano Ronaldo differ from a creator of next-generation Internet start-up ...Some topics seem to be very sensitive in our (Software Engineering) community: female engineers & diversity, crazed job market & salary bubble, hype-train proneness, ... The issue of crunch does belong to this category undoubtedly. Widely condemned, actively opposed by Agile approach to building software (good!), still omni-present in gamedev, but apparently reduced by…
This blog post is all about: the definition of what Model Debt is (& what isn't), how is it created (& why), how to avoid growing Model Debt, whether Model Debt does have anything in common with Technical Debt (& can one use technology to fix it).Disclaimer #1: I was considering writing this post for some time already (as another step in my "Fiber-Driven Development" observations), but the final "trigger" to finally give it a go was attending "Technical debt isn't technical" by Einar W. Høst (at DDD Europe 2019) - I think the author has made a tremendous…
This short article is all about: the end of non-fiction books (?!), how to extract (& preserve) KNOWLEDGE out of raw information, what kind of tools can be used to support this process, why it requires more effort than just understanding the written words.Few days ago someone has linked me a very interesting article - "Why books don't work" (https://andymatuschak.org/books/). I honestly recommend reading through it (at least "the books" part - because there's a separate one on lectures), but if you're super-lazy ... it's about an observation that reading non-fiction books is very ineffective as the typical…
This post is all about whether recent Accenture/Hertz drama proves anything (or is it just an unlucky incident), why did I join consulting company back in 2000s & what has (IMHO) changed since then, are there any valid reasons to hire Enterprise Tech Consultants & why they will prevail (anyway).Disclaimer: I've worked for an international top tier consulting company for over ten years (until 2017) ranking up to the level of a Senior Manager. This job gave me an advantage of experiencing with my very own eyes how this industry (Enterprise Technology Consulting) had been evolving & what…
This post is all about how we've decided to revamp our FINAL approach to E2E automated testing in a way that was supposed to maximize the chance of final success. Warning, post contains: AK-47, what's wrong with "tightening the screw", why JavaScript is better than Java (;>).Previous post in the series can be found here.Where were we? At the end of part IV, our E2E automation was going nowhere. Or, to be more precise, it was far too slow to get us where we were aiming (Continuous-bloody-Delivery). That's was the perfect moment for an ...EarthquakeWhat kind of earthquake…