Know how to run data-centric development teams?

"The management of a software delivery team is a technical leadership role, responsible for guiding development teams through the process of building and operating high quality, scalable, secure products that are always available through catastrophe and planned maintenance alike. A manager in the Engineering team must ensure the consistent application and continuous improvement of these principles while keeping user experience at the core of what the team does."

Read the rest here, and if you are that guy (or girl!) then get in touch.

Words Matter - Fashion & Function

As engineers we're always focused on function and aren't really into fashion quite as much. Some of the contents of our wardrobes will attest to this! We regularly engage our customers at their own level to understand the requirements for our latest effort but the words they use to describe what they need will be just as much about the latest fashions as they will the functions.

Michael Rands, on his excellent blog Rands In Repose, makes this distinction particularly well in his latest post The Words You Wear.

In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means.

He goes on to list some of those fabulous words that are thrown liberally into our requirements gathering and provides an alternative subtext of what is really being said. Some of my particular favourites are;

Executive Summary - A brief assessment given to executives. If this summary were shown to those who actually do the work, they would giggle.

Milestones - Magically created dates that mean nothing, but give executives the impression that progress is being made.

Silver Bullet - The last ditch strategy to beat up another company who is currently kicking the shit out of you.

Dr Seuss got it right in Horton Hatches the Egg: "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant." Function or fashion as long as we are all clear on what is meant then our efforts won't go wasted on bad requirements.

Don't ignore the pain!

Pain is a way of telling us there is something wrong that needs to be addressed and that doesn't just mean the physical pain our bodies experience when we are sick telling us we need a cure.

In our working lives we regularly deal with a variety of pain; from the outdated systems we interact with to the outmoded processes we have to follow. This pain is telling us there are things that need addressing too. Rather than this pain making our lives unpleasant we should embrace this pain and see it for the opportunity it presents to improve and evolve the environment around us.

Chris O'Leary in his essays on The Paradox of Pain made a great argument for this a decade ago;

Most products and services that we use during the course of our days work fairly well, every now and then we will come across one that can be best described as...

- Cumbersome
- Dirty
- Tedious

...and that makes us say...

- What a pain in the ass!
- There has to be a better way!
- This is so stupid!

Most of the time we don’t do anything about it and just put up with the pain. There are a number of reasons for this. The biggest one is that as we grow up we are told...

- That's just the way it is.
- Be reasonable.
- Don’t rock the boat.

As a result, we learn to ignore the pain.

We don't ignore the pain when we are ill and neither should we ignore the pain we experience at work. It's a signal something needs medicine! Chris sensibly goes on to propose those 8 Laws of Pain which can allow us to turn that pain to our advantage and even in some circumstances make it become a pleasure - and not in the S&M sense!

We all have a fair share of pain in the work place but that's a good thing as it means we have lots of opportunity to make our environment better for the good of all those around us. On top of this, as the quote at the top of the article points out, we can be unreasonable in the process, and who isn't unreasonable when they are in pain!