Wednesday, October 14, 2015

NVC for Agile Developer

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is an approach developed by Marshall Rosenberg to assist in caring for this chemistry during conversations. From a technical point of view, NVC is a method of conducting dialogues.

However, apart from specific techniques, it advocates a set of assumptions and beliefs that might motivate you to think of NVC as a philosophy of treating another human being – and a philosophy where verbal communication is the exact medium.

Read more at InfoQ: Conversation Patterns for Software Professionals - Part 5

Monday, October 5, 2015

Scrum, Kanban, XP, Scrumban, SAFe, Nexus, LeSS, DAD, Evo

There were days in the Java world when we were framework enthusiasts. Every single day new framework was deployed to sourceforge, googlecode, github, bitbucket or so on.

So it was turned out that being a Framework-Junkie led you to really poor architecture (see these articles: * Driven * do not change anything, Extremely Pragmatic Software Architecture, Measuring Software Architecture, Frame-of-our-work, What Exactly Are Patterns?).

Having this technological discussion out of our heads we started new one: what is the best agile framework. Yep, we are quite poor learners. How it possible that people who are trained to see repeatable patterns in the world don't see that we replay the old movie? - searching for the Silver Bullet.

Teams or whole organizations jump from one agile framework to another one - in the same way they jumped from Struts2 to JSF, from JSF to Spring MVC, etc. But they don't achieve desired effects.

If you wonder how to jump from SAFe to LeSS or another, or maybe you wonder which agile framework to use - I know the answer. Are you ready? - IT DOES NOT MATTER.

That's right - an agile framework doesn't do the job - PEOPLE DO. Don't try to bypass teams members skills by a new framework. This is a cognitive bias I described here.

Any framework was developed by highly-skilled professionals as a generalization of their daily routine. Having highly skilled people you will apply any framework, but a framework won't make your people better.

Again, frameworks are useful, but people and their skills are the key success factor.

Friday, October 2, 2015

SoftwareTalks in Gdansk

For those of you who attended in SoftwareTalks in Gdansk.

Hi gyus, I've just spend the evening with some of you and received feedback after my talk.

The most important thing: you might come to conclusion that you won't learn anything new after your thirties.

I am really sorry for that impression, so let me explain something.

I quoted Manfred Spitzer and his book Jak się uczy mózg? where he claims that our intellectual development is the most dynamic before one's thirties, but social development is the most dynamic after one's thirties and takes quite long time.

That was my foux pas that left you with the mentioned impression without any context or explanation. Sorry again. I hope you will reframe this.