Teams in agile are a very specific construct. Teams are made up of 6 to 8 people… sometimes a person or two more, sometimes a person or two less… but the idea is that everyone should be able to talk to everyone else and pay attention to what each other are doing. They should be able to work together. They should be able to collaborate with each other. They should know each other. Teams should have everything and everyone necessary to deliver the stuff that is in their backlog. Whatever it is the team is working on, they shouldn’t have…

Larger organizations often have to support a myriad of applications that live on several different platforms. Some are home-grown, some are third-party packages, and some are externally-hosted services. Some are relatively young and others date back decades. Even the ones that happen to be written in the same programming language may require different system configurations or different versions of libraries. It’s a challenging mixed bag of platforms and applications. A common strategy to deal with this complexity is to avoid making any changes at all unless a vendor threatens to drop support for an application or a system platform, or…

One of the challenges in coaching is how to help people internalize and “own” a new technique or method, after they’ve experienced it and decided they like it. Often, people use the new technique or method as long as the coach is present to encourage them and remind them. As soon as they’re on their own, they tend to revert to the familiar. How backsliding happens You’re working with your coach and test-driving code. You aren’t accustomed to test-first development, and you have to pause and remind yourself to write a microtest that will cause the necessary production code to…

It seems whenever a new method or new technology makes its way into the IT world, it takes a while for people to come to grips with it. People are quick to embrace the externalities but often slower to shift their thinking. When relational database technology was new, indexed files were the norm. For several years, people designed their databases as if they were indexed file systems. Every table was laid out like a file with the primary key as the file key. It took some time for people to start to think in relational terms; to stop fighting RI constraints and…

Here’s one I hear all too often (paraphrased): “Our team doesn’t support customer-facing application software. We support a set of internally-consumed APIs for our SOA environment. Therefore, we can’t use User Stories. The User Story is one way of describing a piece of work to be done. The canonical form “As a something I want something so that something” is only an example to help people get started, when they aren’t sure how to write User Stories. It isn’t a “rule.” One hopes people don’t remain at a beginner level forever, and they get comfortable with the idea of lightweight…