Industrial Logic Blog

Let’s talk about hardware and software, convenience, interruption, defects, and the dreaded Unintended Consequence. Context Some time ago I bought some cool booster fans that sit in my floor ducts where the vent covers usually are. Each of these is an identical semi-smart device that monitors the temperature INSIDE the ductwork. When the AC kicks […]

SprintMojis are a full set of emojis for conveying common feelings during Sprints.

There are so many tools floating around to help us work with each other remotely – screen sharing for meetings, remote desktop control for mobbing and pairing, video connections to maintain rich team engagement, chat channels for quick updates, forums for archived group thinking, wikis for documenting team knowledge. Of course we all want remote […]

With the 2020 outbreak of the Coronavirus, many companies are implementing work-from-home policies. If you are a team that is suddenly converted from being co-located to distributed, here are some tips on staying productive. Team Charter First, this might be a great time to review the team charter. When the team becomes distributed, it can […]

The manager looks across the room at the team members. It’s 8:45 and everyone should be in attendance. Where’s Rob? Surely he’s not still at his desk? “Okay let’s start on the left and go around the room,” the manager says, as she always does.

In A Tale of Two TDDers, I quickly documented what I see as two different defect-fixing behaviors of Test-Driven Development practitioners. I spent all of about ten minutes writing that blog. It generated a lot of interesting discussion, some of which bordered on deep misunderstanding. More detail would have helped. And so I dug through […]

I’m going to be using a metaphor that not everyone can relate to since not everyone is on a speaking circuit. My hope is that this metaphor will teach you two things: how to plan a conference talk, and how to approach doing big things quickly.

The story you are about to read is as much about customer responsiveness as it is about software development. The story lies at the intersection of the principles, Deliver Value Continuously and Make Safety A Prerequisite. Finally, the story is based on real-world experiences in a real code base. Let’s begin… A customer reports a […]

“Oh, no! We estimated 23 story points for the sprint, but we only turned in 20. We’ve failed the sprint!” It seems that a lot of teams, especially scrum and SAFe teams, are spending a lot of time on story point estimates. This is understandable, and also disappointing. You see, you can’t estimate your way […]

Characterization testing, aka Golden Master testing, is a technique where you apply known inputs to a process to verify the output against a known result. I have found this to be a great technique for testing legacy code that does not have many tests. However, my first use of this technique was at a nuclear power plant.