Author: esantanche

The word deadline reminds me of uncivilised times when guards were shooting prisoners who were trespassing a line, sometimes even invisible, representing a limit beyond which there was freedom. Prisoners died for going beyond the deadline. Software projects die for managing to stay behind it. What kills projects that respect deadlines How can a project…

You get a wonderful idea for a software product. Or it may be anything high-tech. You want the world to benefit from it. You hire the best developers money can buy. In your impetuosity, you don’t consider that now you have to deal with a black hole called human motivation. You know only one way…

It’s 1841, the 5th of October. A train is flying at full speed from Worcester, Massachusetts to Albany, New York. You are the conductor. You are happily singing because you are on schedule and everything is fine. Your happiness, however, is about to morph into terror. You see a light in front of you where…

One of the reasons for which 70% of software projects fail is that they catch a disease called “Running Developer” and die from it. A project suffering from this disease and not diagnosed in time may survive for many months or even years. Its breathing becomes eventually laboured until it stops. Is it possible to…

These days if you are not Agile you must hide yourself, maybe in a church. When there, you may find people who have pity of you and grant you asylum despite the right having been abolished in 1623. Before Agile, software projects were failing at the same rate projects meant to build skyscrapers would fail…

You are starting or run a high tech company and need to build software. You read that the majority of software projects fail. You are at ease with technology and maybe you wrote some code yourself, but the idea of doing it with others gives you the creeps. In this article I’ll tell you about…

I know from personal experience and from history that human beings have been using fear against others to make things happen for a long time. They use it against themselves as well. It has never worked. It has been counterproductive instead. Why are they still doing it? What prevents them from understanding its real effects?…

There are two main reasons for which developers may be bad. They may lack intrinsic motivation, the fire that lives inside good developers and that only them know how to stoke up when it grows weak. You can’t set that fire. They may have worked in dysfunctional environments that snuffed out their motivation. They may…