Agile

The general consensus is that AI code is bloated, repetitive, non-idiomatic. A study of more than a thousand Reddit and Hacker News threads poetically called what we are seeing “An Endless Stream of AI Slop”. So when I started my latest project, I kicked it off with an admin-editable homepage. That decision forced me to build user registration, login, auth, and sessions right along with it, the necessary plumbing to wire it all up. There’s nothing in our PRD about a CMS. An editable text box just happens to be a simple feature to review on its own, and building it requires all the same auth logic the real product needed anyway. I deployed it to production and reviewed every line before the fun features got a single prompt. Okay, I reviewed most of the lines. Well, I reviewed some sections. 😁 ...

Why Your Strategic Planning Fails (And How to Fix It) I’ve seen more agile planning sessions derailed by politics than by any technical challenge. It always starts the same way. You get the right people in a room—Product, Engineering, Sales, Finance—and for a moment, it feels like a powerful alliance focused on building the future. A spy’s guide to strategy helped me realize these sessions unfold in three acts: Alliance, Competition, and Endgame. ...

Is the Economy derailing your Agile Transformations? Economic uncertainty hits. Layoffs are all over the news and productivity suffers. Every time, I see people wanting to blame the loss or productivity on budget cuts and layoffs. That is the short term impact, but I see longer term harm playing out. Teams that were thriving on collaborative decision-making suddenly go quiet. The same people who were debating sprint priorities and pushing back on requirements start waiting for marching orders from above. ...

I’m using a hosted version of JIRA and needed to obtain quick totals based on filters that I have setup. I could not find any easy documentation online so I thought I’d share my quick hack. The REST API is very well documented and uses the same JQL as the filters do. In order to view the commit list for an iteration I have some JQL that looks like: fixversion = 20120611 and fixversion was 20120611 ON “2012/06/11” AND status NOT IN (canceled, “on hold”) ...

Development at work has been trending well in the new year and the team is getting excited about our formal incorporation of practices such as TDD and pair programming. I’m definitely perceive an intangible benefit in culture and fun. With a full test suite and engaged developers working out loud coding is fun again. I give a lot of thought to developer efficiency and generating metrics around our output is very important to me. We are at a point in this iteration where I have too many stories in progress and it is taking a few extra days to get work completed and accepted. This does not concern me greatly since this is a new team and it usually takes a few turns to get into a rhythm. I was walking down the hall and one of developers said that things are going ‘Awesome’. I said “Great, but awesome is not a metric”. ...