Comments on: What would you like your software developers to learn?

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:12:50 +0000

I want the people I manage to get from what the customer thinks they want to what they need and can use.

I do this by getting them to put something into the customers hands as fast as possible, no matter how simple, and iterating from there. I get them to focus on workflow improvements rather then adding shiny things!

By: George Dinwiddie

George Dinwiddie — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:00:11 +0000

Zeb, Tim,

What about the followup questions?

By: Tim Walker

Tim Walker — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:52:29 +0000

Executable requirements and other agile best practices.

By: ZebZiggle

ZebZiggle — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:18:19 +0000

1. Learn the business. How do we make money? How do our customers make money by using our products? Why are these features important?

2. Sort of a variation of Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) in code but Don’t Do It Manually (DDIM) with business processes. Are you collecting metrics manually? Are you doing builds manually? Are you setting up/tearing down manually?

Automate it and never do it again.

3. Don’t get attracted to shiny objects. It’s easy to go down a technical rabbit hole because something is cool & new. Keep focused, stay on the task at hand. When the core work is done … go play in the woodshed.

4. Don’t make broken windows. There is a business process for a reason. If you aren’t contributing to making it better or maintaining it, you are making broken windows. Before long the process fails and it’s chaos.