Category: Agile

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…

How do you motivate people? You don’t! The only thing you can do is to create an environment that doesn’t reduce people’s motivation too much. If people work in a competitive environment or have no say about what to do, they will be less motivated. The three Cs of motivation are: Cooperation Content Choice  

This is a brief summary of best practices to adopt when testing a developer’s skills. The general idea Tests should be as similar as possible to real-work activity. Have the developer work on real issues with a member of your team is preferable to timed questions and quizzes. It’s likely that, if you use the…

Why do I work remotely? I lived in London, UK for many years. My family live in France. At a given point I wanted to rejoin them. Modern technology allows me to work remotely and enjoy living with my family. I don’t have the stress of commute. I can work more and get less stressed…