Is it a good idea to measure individual developer productivity with a tool?
My friend Jiri Knesl and his team have developed a tool that tracks developers’ time and other metrics like number of commits. He claims that he wants to sell it as a tool that helps managers with decision making - he specifically mentioned (in a private conversation) “to decide who to keep and who to fire”.
Math or Language: How to become a better programmer
Traditionally, people good at maths are supposed to be good candidates for programmers. Being good at maths doesn’t hurt, but it is not the whole story. There are other skills, equally important for people to become a better a programmer.
The Impact of Abstraction in the Software Development Industry: How It's Changing the Job Market
Software development as a field develops towards more and more abstraction and it has severe consequences for a job market.
On Productivity of Middlemen and Handovers
In November 2022 I posted an infographic on LinkedIn that got a lot of attention. Essentially, infographic promotes direct communication between product developers and customers. People reacting in the comments brought multiple arguments against this approach. Each argument deserves its own article.
Internal Customer is oxymoron
Sometimes companies defend component teams by bending the term customer. They say things like “other teams in our company are our customers, we have internal customers”. For example, they have a “platform team” that delivers the platform to the application teams - their internal customers. Or they have a testing framework team that delivers the testing framework to the other development teams in the company.
5 Antipatterns to Look For in Scrum Master Job Ads
If you look for a new job as a Scrum Master, there is one puzzle you have to solve before you accept the offer: does the company I want to work for truly respect agile values or not? I went through tens of job ads for Scrum Masters and listed the five most common antipatterns to beware of. All examples below come from real job descriptions.