Cloudflare is setting a high bar for post-mortem writing but if you want to get started with this, the only parts you really need are: What went wrong & What are we doing about it.
For the more abstract work, it makes it a lot easier for other people to ‘read your mind’ and for you to delegate if you share as much context as possible as Anna Shipman describes here.
Something that bears pointing out regularly: “Plus, contrary to popular belief, agile practices were not invented by the Agile movement. They predate it by many decades.”
I’ve never exactly followed any framework but instead, I played it by ear and mixed and matched what worked best from wherever I could find it. That’s always a bit bothersome (but easily solved) when people want to work with the exact definition of something.
This Jez Humble talk about Continuous Delivery is one of my all-time favorites. As a bonus at the end he also totally demolishes the Google Guy.
Tooling has become so good and so empowering that like in this tweet, many commerce ‘startups’ that are really struggling to hire and retain dev teams (and then utilize them to their potential) would be much better served using Airtable, Zapier and Pipedrive until they break.
With my background in behavior change, I’m very pleasantly surprised to find this quote in what is a connoisseur’s treatment of the nuances of agile/agility: “There is only one way to create business value, and that’s to change someone’s behavior.”
“Changes to one team’s service may be implemented by another team who needs the enhanced capability by what is called an Away Team. This team works on the Home Team’s code to add what it needs according to established engineering standards and then leaves that code in good order to be maintained by the Home Team who owns the service, with help when needed.”
A worth-while apology for Design Thinking:
The newsworthy thing about the Accenture/Hertz story is not that they failed to deliver but how badly they failed and that they are getting sued for it. Getting something that’s not very good for far too much money is an accepted part of doing business with consultancies of that size.
A handy checklist of what you need to take into account when you do (remote) mob programming. Every time we’ve used mobbing as an approach it has paid off thusfar so I’m very interested in deepening the practice.
A good argument that agile leadership is about delegating and divesting decision making power as far down as possible into the informal network.