Articles on Engineering and Technical Leadership - page 12

Previous Insider Circle Newsletters

How to Estimate Anything Quickly

10 Mar 2021 | Leadership

Estimating projects, huge ones, seems to be an activity that causes groans and protests. I understand why. Often there’s a tension between accuracy and knowing that they can’t be accurate. When confronted with estimating a large body of work, I employ a variation on affinity estimating that takes 10 minutes and gives a preview of where the monsters are hiding in the road ahead.

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When It Comes to Knowledge Transfer

03 Mar 2021 | Leadership

A recurring theme for my clients is knowledge transfer from one group to another. With these transfers’ regularity, one might expect a certain level of expertise in these transitions, but more often than not, they are full of challenges and surprises. So here are my current thoughts on how to handle knowledge transfer.

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Taking Two Bites Of an Ice Cream Cone

15 Feb 2021 | Leadership

Often I wind up working with teams and managers who want to know more about how to get started with automated testing or realize their efforts are backfiring. For the last of those cases, it is almost always because they adopted the ice-cream anti-pattern of testing, but I teach two techniques that help them get back on track.

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When to Stop Work

02 Feb 2021 | Leadership

There are a number of times in any given project or product development cycle where you might have to consider stopping work. I want to explore some of those ideas and share a story.

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Knowing the Details and Trusting the Team

01 Feb 2021 | Leadership

I often work with leaders who have a team or several teams of developers and want to trust them but wind up surprised and frustrated when news breaks. This incongruence feels a little hopeless because, on the one hand, they trust the team to take care of things, but then things still go wrong. What do you do about knowing the details and trusting the team?

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