Industrial Logic Blog

When we are refactoring, and especially when we are teaching refactoring, our partners are surprised to see us extracting methods which are only (currently) called once. There is often an assumption that the only reason for extracting a method is so that you can call it from multiple places in the code base.< /p> While […]

Typical training workshops are informative and can be a lot of fun. Teams get away from their normal work for a week or so, try out new technologies and techniques on prefab examples, give the instructor a quick rating, and then go home to their normal jobs. Is this the time for traditional classroom training?

The Agile world is awash in metrics and measures, but most provide little benefit to teams. What if we could change our set of measurements to support safer software development, continuous improvement, happiness of our project community, and careful craftsmanship? In short, what are some Modern Agile metrics?

Large changes are hard. Hard enough that they seldom happen, outside the context of a crisis. What if changing wasn’t a traumatic event but a lightweight, continuous process?

Let’s say that I ask you to calculate all the happy prime numbers between Planck’s constant and the speed of light expressed in meters per minute. Did you immediately start reciting numbers to me? Odds are that you did not.

Here is a story board to consider. Is it healthy? Is it being well-operated? New scrum practitioners may say that it looks great if that’s the first day of the sprint, but indicates serious problems if it looks like this on the last day or two.

Kanban boards (AKA “story boards”) are used by most Scrum, XP, and Kanban teams. They are a kind of Big Visible Chart used to visualize the work of the team in a straightforward way. As useful and simple as they are, in practice many are set up in ways that discourage teamwork and collaboration, ironically […]

One of the ongoing discussions in our eLearning is on the topic of Technical Debt. Does technical debt cause employee turnover?

Your team is having a frustrating day. The demo led to arguments and accusations. The feature is not going to ship. This isn’t the first time. The analysts have redoubled their efforts, adding more prose, more diagrams, more explanatory text, yet frustrating disconnects remain. Miscommunication during handoff creates waste and rework. Disappointment creates frustration and […]

A manager told me that one of his reliable developers seemed to be struggling to maintain focus and wakefulness through the work day. Often we see productivity as a matter of raw effort and motivation. A less enlightened manager may have chided the developer for his lack of energy and attention. The manager may have […]