Stacey on Software: Agile

  • Lies, Damned Lies, and Software Development Estimates

    Yes, that might be an odd headline for me to make, given that I actually run a software development company. Or is it. I was catching up on…

  • Taking a stand, saying NO to software development quotes

    Starting Tuesday, I will no longer issue quotes for software development. I've been doing a lot of thinking about our Software Development…

  • Doing Waterfall Badly

    You know, as much as Agile gets a bad rap for companies that poorly or inconsistently implement it, I absolutely hate to see Waterfall…

  • What You Want vs. What You Need

    People are inherently bad at making this distinction. We want lots. We don't need so much. I want a chocolate bar. I really don't need it. I…

  • The Concept of Millitasks

    Since I've been back at TWM and getting involved in the day to day operations again, and I'm back on task to formalize our procedures…

  • Continuous Improvement: Tools or Process?

    Any organization who wants to survive needs to realize that they need to implement some level of Continuous Improvement. This is a concept…

  • Agility, Software Development Estimates and Buying a House

    Lately, software project estimation has risen to the surface as a discussion topic at Three Wise Men . The flurry of smaller proposals we…

  • Decisions In The Dark

    We write software today , it's important to always remember this. Often when we are asked to write software, we are typically provided with…

  • Software Development Is About People

    We as an industry forgot this for a long time, and I am proud to be part of the movement to bring it back. I hear all the time from people…

  • 7 Simple Steps to a Successful Software Project

    1.  Imagine an end-result in only the coarsest detail Let's face it, we're all human. We can't juggle everything in our heads, and we don't…

  • Avoid Technical Debt with Planning

    So, you get it. Technical debt is bad. So what do you do about it when you have it? First step is probably to try and avoid digging yourself…

  • [DRAFT] Specialize or Generalize?

    I've seen some thoughts floating around today around what kind of mix of generalists or specialists should you have on an agile team. It…

  • [DRAFT] Emergent Design: Refactoring and the Stable Dependencies Principle

    The Stable Dependencies Principle (link on C2 - wiki.c2.com/?StableDependenciesPrinciple) is often expressed as a principle applying between…

  • Exploring Farming Metaphors for Software Development

    Our friends who live down the road from us, always have such a beautiful garden and take amazing care of their animals. The way they've…

  • Who are you?

    What’s your job title? What does it say about you? What doesn’t it say about you? We are human beings, doing what we can with the tools we…

  • What is an Agile Technical Practices Coach?

    The Past Software development today is very different than 10 years ago, and worlds apart from what it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago, we…

  • Lenses

    I started wearing glasses a few years ago, entering in to that cycle of a new prescription every few years to renew my focus. Thinking about…

  • A Nurturing Culture

    I drew this picture to illustrate a few ideas, and it’s long overdue for an explanation beyond the few folks at whom I’ve stood in front of…

  • Coding Is Social

    This past weekend, I took part in the PTBOGameJam03 event in Peterborough, Ontario, an event that has steadily grown since August 2016. In…

  • Scientific Management

    In 1909, Frederick Taylor published a paper entitled The Principles of Scientific Management. At this time in history, things got made by…

  • Functional Decomposition and Customer Centricity

    When we use Functional Decomposition to break down efforts on a software development project, we work through how a system needs to work in…

  • The Spaces Between

    The Spaces Between On teams that are newly cross-functional, or in places with waterfallish reflexes, the coaching opportunities lie in…

  • Agile Enough

    When I look back at my career, I’ve been gathering ideas about agile from others since the manifesto. Testing versus checking. Last…

  • Cross-Functional Agile Teams

    In an agile organization, our primary concern is the flow of value - "concept to cash" as we've heard from the DevOps and Continuous…

  • The Work

    When disciplines in software development are so segregated, those outside a discipline may think only of the final result. Developers type…

  • The Work

    When disciplines in software development are so segregated, those outside a discipline may think only of the final result. Developers type…

  • Splitting Product Design and Implementation

    Why do we continue to separate the design of a product from its implementation? When we design a product in one place with one group of…

  • There Is No Agility Without Technical Agility

    There Is No Agility Without Technical Agility As we wish to adapt continually to an ever-shifting set of stakeholder needs, it is vital that…

  • Thinking over Typing 2.0

    Thinking over Typing 2.0 As a developer, I've found it possible to describe to ChatGPT my general programming style and have it generate a…

  • I care not for this agile coach, bring me another!

    Coaches disrupt the comfortable status quo. We ask uncomfortable questions, ask people to try new things, and challenge their opinions…

  • Simplistic Example

    A Simplistic Example Let's start from a simplistic example so that you can get a sense of where I'm thinking. The way I work as a developer…

  • Diversion #1: Agents

    The idea of an Agent is something that has developed over the course of applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to problem solving. You can…

  • Diversion #2: LangChain & Pydantic

    I've been doing a lot of my ML coding in Python. Honestly, for a long time I resisted it, but the tooling moves so fast and is so simple to…

  • A Quick Update - Trying to Dig Myself Out

    It's been 4 months since the last post, and I wanted to put out this interstitial post just to cover the time lapse. Since my last post…

  • Leveraging Iteration and Decoupling

    You gotta love the "AI" newsfeed these days, fast and furious. So, along the path of writing this 6th instalment, a number of things emerged…

  • Complex Example

    Stepping Up the Complexity Up to this point in the blog series, we've laid a little groundwork, and demonstrated a very simplistic example…

  • London and Chicago Style TDD, A Design Perspective

    London and Chicago Style TDD, A Design Perspective In the field of TDD, two primary schools of thought have emerged, that are often used in…

  • The Bionic Coach

    Introduction Being extraordinary, it's a good feeling. My first electronic enhancement was a calculator. Forget long arithmetic, this was…

  • The Bionic Developer

    This post has moved, I have renamed it. Read the post here - What Is A Developer? I've been using the word "bionic" for a few years now as…

  • What Is a Developer?

    Thanks to a colleague, I came across this article today, and it's been energizing. The author and his editors at O'Reilly have put together…

  • Gen AI in Software Development, Not Coding 1

    I feel like I want to do a "stop talking about Gen AI generating code" series. Maybe I'll just drop a few of these out ad-hoc, see how folks…

  • What Do You Design?

    I was talking with a colleague today about how GenAI is rewriting all our playbooks. Not just the technical ones—the organizational ones too…