Category: Professionalism

The fail fast fallacy

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A bunch of lemmings rushing over the edge of the abyss. Is this how the fail fast people treat innovations?

Is fail fast a fallacy? It didn’t take long before Microsoft had to take Tay offline. The story made a big splash online, with many news sites writing about it and friends alerting friends on social media. Business Insider wrote that it was “hugely embarrassing for the company.” Wall Street…

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Technology permeats innovation

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An engineer in the throes of innovation?

Casimir Artmann asked “is this innovation” on his blog. This sparked a debate on Yammer (sorry, internal, cannot share it with you) about what the IT department can do in the innovation space. One of the commenters pointed out that innovation cannot start in IT. It has to flow from…

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Worthless ideas and valuable innovation

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Ideas as lightbulbs. How much are they worth?

Information is so durable that not even a black hole can destroy it. So what happens with a ubiquitous commodity that is more durable than even space itself? It quickly becomes worthless, even worse than worthless. Consider ideas: no sooner do people come up with ideas than they try to…

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Innovation – Resistance is Futile

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Resistance is futile

The great white sharks have been swimming in the oceans for eons, some sixteen million years at least. Will the great whites be disrupted from the oceanic ecosystem after having survived so many changes in the past? It does not seem very likely. Nor did it seem very likely to…

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Social innovation and tech go hand-in-hand

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Voters queuing in western Herat

Innovation is not just about doing new things, it is about doing new things and getting better results. In corporations, successful innovation leads to new revenue, lower costs and higher profits based on new and improved products based on changed operating models powered — more often than not — by…

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Three camera setup for remote video interviews

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How do you create a great vlog post when the person you want to talk to is remote? This is a question that has occupied Casimir and me ever since we started adding video to the conversation. After reading up on the subject, experimenting and failing — remote interviews are not all that easy — we have come up with an approach to make remote video interviews that seems to work. The key is to use the right equipment, and you need more than you think you do, but it does not have to be expensive.
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Confirmation bias in software engineering

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The Primary auditory cortex is highlighted in magenta, and has been known to interact with all areas highlighted on this neural map.

Of all the limits on our cognition, confirmation bias is perhaps the ugliest. Confirmation bias is hard to get to grip with as it leads us to consider even contradictory evidence as confirmatory. Does confirmation bias affect even software professionals? Of course it does, we are all in the grip…

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Legacy software as a valuable inheritance

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Legacy software is often seen as something negative. Wiktionary has a depressing definition of a computer system that has been in service for many years and that a business still relies upon, even though it is becoming expensive or difficult to maintain. I have never liked that definition, because obviously if you keep investing in something for many years, it must be bringing some value to you. As Woody Zuill pointed out to me when I met him recently, the original definition of legacy is much more positive: Continue reading

Start managing your risks

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Golden Stairway - Cathedral of Burgos

We all want to be better at what we do, so we climb the stairs of maturity, but sometimes the steps don’t need to new levels of quality and productivity. What are the factors that hold us back from gaining higher and higher levels of success?

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Mob programming – with Woody Zuill

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Whenever we have urgent, complex work we sit down and do it together. In our every day work, we make do with occasional meetings. Why do daily scrums when you can do day long scrums? That is how I understand mob programming, but that is not why Woody Zuill and his team started with it. Continue reading