What Are Blockers? In scrum, a blocker is anything that is outside your control that is impeding progress on your task.  Usually this has to do with a dependency on another team in the company. For example, suppose you write test software to validate hardware’s functionality.  You have some dependency on the hardware team in […]

Music as a Tool for Focusing Have you played many video games? If you’ve played at least some strategy or RPG games, you may notice the background theme.  Usually this is some music that plays for a few minutes then repeats.  So if you are stuck on a level, you will end up hearing that […]

What Is Technical Debt? Every time some software is designed and written, decisions are made (consciously or unconsciously) about its quality. Does the code have unit tests? Does it have some automated system testing? Was TDD used to design that piece of code? If quality is not put into the initial release due to pressing […]

SVN is Simple Subversion is a source control system that is fairly intuitive, even to those not too familiar with source control. There is the concept of “checking-in” source code to the common location so production or other developers can use your code.  The main branch is normally called “trunk”. Branches might be used to […]

Success does not often happen overnight.  It is usually the result of a lot of work behind the scenes that not very many people see. First, let’s discuss my inspiration for this post, then we will explore how to set yourself up for success. An Example with Testing The inspiration for this blog post comes […]

Slow Feedback Leads to Waste In one of my previous positions, we took a lot of time waiting to be able to test our code changes. The code was in C++.  Testing a change first required compilation.  If it was a clean build, this took anywhere from 10-30 minutes.  For a non-clean build, the quickest […]

Starting to Do Scrum Correctly is Hard! I have been part of one company that transitioned to scrum. On another contract I worked on, the team stated they were agile, but that really meant they just held “status meetings” (that were called standups) every morning. The third company had a few teams attempt to start […]

My Software Development Working Environments I have been in several different software development environments throughout my career.  It is so interesting to see different company cultures and how they work.  You can learn a lot from it.  Using scrum has given me an appreciation of how it has some ideas to help fix some downfalls […]

The Plugin that Killed Your WordPress Blog You’re going along, working on your WordPress blog.  Everything is going great!  You make some updates on your system, update some plugins, then move along. The next day, you just so happen to notice your website is painstakingly slow.  Or, worse yet, you get a dreaded 404, 500 […]