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Tom’s team is preparing a highly anticipated release, but QA hasn’t gone well.  More bugs were found than were anticipated.  Too many fixes have been of the hack-n-slash variety, meaning there could be lingering problems after the deploy.  There’s also a concern that tech debt is being accrued which will have to be paid later…

My kids loved two things when they were twelve: Harry Potter and Jelly Bellys.  So when Jelly Belly released the Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans box, we had to try them!  I mean, how awesome would Harry Potter Jelly Beans be!!! (Turns out, less awesome than you think…) Driving home from the store, a chubby…

Today in the Tech Lead Mentoring group, Sarah* mentioned that next Tuesday her team was having a “no code day.”  Suddenly it got quiet, as everyone stopped to listen. I asked, “Oooh… what’s that Sarah?”  Sarah explained that a “no code day” was a day set aside to work on non-coding engineering activities.  Some folks…

Guillermo wrote me back yesterday to let me know how he solved the “demotivated, disconnected programmer” problem.  I’ll let him tell you… I started seeing this behavior in my developers, so what I did was to introduce a “Customer Support value hour.” Programmers have to sit with the CS people for an hour and see…

“Jamie just wants to be left and code.” Does this sound familiar? If so, maybe you have a developer who: 1. Doesn’t openly participate in retrospectives or team meetings 2. Complains meetings are a waste of time because they reduce engineering time 3. Doesn’t offer features suggestions or ideas to the group 4. Hates dealing with…