Industrial Logic Blog

What’s the best way to deliver and grow systems? There are several possible approaches. One approach is pure waterfall: “plan the work and work the plan”, phase by phase, with a big bang delivery at the end. Measure progress by “(estimated) % complete”. A second approach is used by many Scrum teams: develop a Release […]

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.

Refactoring is at the heart of the way we improve code. We make changes to the code for the purpose of making it easier to understand and easier to modify while maintaining the same behaviour.

What is agile’s most valuable practice? It’s called Evolutionary Design. No other practice does a better job of managing risks in software development. Evolutionary Design influences how we organize people and teams, plan what to build, collaborate, integrate, develop and release. So why aren’t more people using it? Perhaps they don’t understand Evolutionary Design and […]

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 […]

I’ve returned to piano lessons after a 30-year gap, and I’m struck by the challenges of learning, whether for fun or work.

Then I ask, “Do you trust your developers’ estimates?” They always answer no, not really.

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

It’s been ten years since my book, Refactoring to Patterns, was published and twenty years since the gang-of-four released their classic, Design Patterns. I was thrilled when Refactoring to Patterns won a 2004 Jolt Cola award and delighted to see the book translated into seven languages. Since the publication, I’ve co-authored a series of in-depth, […]