Musings of a Software Development Manager

Getting DSLs to be business readable is far less effort than business writable, but yields most of the benefits. – Martin Fowler Software transparency to business experts is a great goal. I’ve met plenty of sophisticated business users who at least could do some basic SQL and whip together lots of nice reports in Excel. [...]

Flipping through the Google Chrome documentation my brain was screaming–”This has to be Scott McCloud“. Turns out it was. Scott was a big deal back in the dot com days with his book on “Understanding Comics” and it’s applicability to designing web sites. I actually saw a great talk from him back at the Web [...]

As a developer, especially a developer who is comfortable building servers and slinging code in vi, you don’t want to hear the no word from the sysadmin. You want to be agile and install your own app. You want to configure the extra JNDI settings yourself. And you’re wrong. I’ve worked in environments where sysadmins [...]

Keeping you backlog in order doesn’t tend to happen in isolation. My past experience is the backlog drifts because of a concentration on completing day to day Sprint tasks. You can tell when the backlog has drifted, the planning meeting goes long. Kane Mar suggests an approach of using a Story Time meeting. A Story [...]