Musings of a Software Development Manager

Meri William over at Geek | Manager blogs about the common myth that business equals productivity:
It’s really easy to mistake “busyness” for productivity. The folks always rushing around, having meetings and complaining about how busy they are certainly LOOK like they’re doing a lot. But the reality is that effort and output are not always [...]

Apparently Email Free Fridays are catching on. Sport England announced a national ‘E-mail Free Friday’ in a bid to get people walking around the office in the UK. Veritas, US Cellular, PDB Worldwide Fulfillment services and others have all taken up the idea.
The movement appears to be gathering force in the UK where:
A [...]

Came across this job listing a little while back:

Enterprise Technology Strategy Manager/Director

Skills: Has directed technical teams to complete system implementations
in multiple accounts and is still willing to do so.

Do you dive for the closest seat in a meeting? Sit next to your favorite co-worker? Sit in the back away from the table?
Deciding where to sit should be a conscious decision. Common wisdom is that sitting near the front of a class leads to better grades. This may be merely [...]

SD Forums opened up the registration for the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference a few days ago. So far they’ve got:

Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo: The JRuby Guys from Sun Microsystems
Asuman Suenbuel: SAP
Josh Susser: Powerset “Ruby and Rails”
Tom Preston-Werner: “Chronic”

It’s April 21 and 22, but no location announced yet. But JRuby, Rails, and [...]

Cote: Can you tell me what a business rule is Charles?
Charles: I have no ide…a… It’s an if statement.
Cote: Yeah!!

- Cote and Charles of the Drunk and Retired podcast.
- Episode 85 Web 2.0 As A Cheeseburger.

You figure with a collocated team information will flow freely. It does to some extent, but things can still get missed. On many Sprints one of the key safety mechanisms are the daily standups.
A typical hypothetical example might be a developer reporting an impediment about how they had spent half the day trying [...]

I’ve yet to develop carpal tunnel injuries as a developer. I spend much of the day standing, walking around, talking to staff, and going to meetings. Not much time to spend hours on end at the keyboard without breaks.
One of my brothers who likes to experiment with different keyboards brought over his vertical [...]

Tobias Mayer has a great post on modifications to the standard Scrum that have worked for him. One of these is the idea that tasks are not measured in hours:
Insisting on hours breakdown and having each team member continually update hours remaining on a task is often perceived as a sneaky, micro-management approach. In [...]

Yes, Scrum does have a secret handshake, you can find out about it if you take one of the CSM courses. It’s a little bit of fun nothing all that serious. It also involves ‘woofing’ like a sheepdog. Apparently it’s ruffled the feathers of some ’serious’ Agile practitioners, to the tune of [...]