CategoryAgile&Lean

Inspired by my activity at Mozaic Works as an agile & lean coach, helping companies make the transition. Also by my activity as a leader in Mozaic Labs, a product development company, where we apply what we teach others.

How to Change An Organization

H

I’ve recently commented on a conversation in the Agile Coaching group on LinkedIn. I’m reproducing my comment here because it relates with a misconception that I see often.

The question it started from was, in my words, “Is a training enough to change the way a department works?”. My answer is below.

When The Hammer Becomes More Important Than Driving Nails

W

Back in the 1980s a few developers realized that common patterns appear in the code everybody was writing. They documented them in 1995 a famous book called “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. Today, many software teams have a guideline stating they must use design patterns. In early 1990s, one former US AirForce pilot became Chief Engineer of a software...

5 Whys Shouldn’t Be 5 And Shouldn’t Be Whys

5

Romanians have a class of jokes called “Radio Yerevan” jokes. My favourite one is: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery? A: In principle yes, but: it wasn’t Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov; he is not from Moscow but from Odessa; it was not a car but a bicycle; he didn’t win it, but it was stolen from him...

Information based backlog prioritizing

I

The general rule for prioritizing the backlog is that you do it based on business value. From the business perspective, this makes a lot of sense: you maximize the ROI by doing first the things that create the most value in the context of your product, be it monetary or non-monetary (e.g. number of visitors on the website, number of registered users etc). You define the goals during the release...

Better User Stories

B

Some of my readers may already know that I like to challenge every practice that is accepted as norm in software development. I always ask a few questions: What is the value of the norm? How can we get the same value in other ways? Is one of the above ways better (or at least worth mentioning)? I’ve recently realized that one of these norms in agile software development is user stories, and...

alexbolboaca.ro Reflections on design, craft and software

A new home for merging ideas about design

It is my strong belief that software design can learn a lot from other design disciplines. I wrote blog posts, a book and did talks on this topic, and it was time to group them all together. These ideas have now a new home: https://codedesigner.eu. My plan is to add more blog posts there, and to involve other people doing work in this area.