Industrial Logic Blog

Have you ever felt that someone’s behavior was hostile or aggressive towards you, formed a negative opinion about them and then taken protective action(s) against them? If so, you’ve likely participated in a Cycle of Mistrust. In their must-read book, Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust, High-Performance Organization, Kathleen Ryan and Daniel […]

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.

Have you ever seen someone using an older laptop and just felt bad for them? That’s how I feel when I see most people practicing agile these days. We’ve advanced so far beyond where agile was in the mid 1990s, yet so many teams practice agile like it’s 1999! Meanwhile, agile/lean pioneers and practitioners have […]

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.

To illustrate how defenses can endanger us, let’s go back 600 years to the Battle of Agincourt. In Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents, James Reason uses this 1415 French vs. English battle to illustrate how even today’s high-tech defenses can endanger us. Entering the battle, the English force was lightly-clad and about one fifth […]

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression in the United States, building bridges was a dangerous job. 24 workers died during the 1933-36 construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. One Bay Bridge engineer recalled, The worst aspect was not being able to show any fear. Those steelworkers were merciless, and to preserve our self […]

Throwing away a legacy system and rewriting it from scratch may be tempting, but it is also hazardous. Here are typical issues you’ll encounter:

Is Continuous Deployment (CD) genuinely beneficial to organizations or just a technical geek obsession that doesn’t really provide value? I will answer that question by describing Industrial Logic’s experience with CD, which began in 2010. To get CD to work, we first had to make our Continuous Integration rock solid. Doing that forced us to […]

Does your shop routinely rely on heroism to get work done or solve emergency problems? A culture that relies on or encourages heroism is usually ignorant of the fundamental hazards present in the workflow, code base and workplace. We must not blame the heroes in such a culture. The real issue is almost always a […]

Do your software development tools visualize the hazardous areas of your code? Most do not. This makes our job more dangerous because important hazards are invisible.