Building software is hard — Many people say that building software should be like building houses and wonder why so much effort is needed to build working products. Fundamentally, building software is different from construction as we’re hardly ever building a repeatable product. As such we need to use different techniques to help us navigate…

The “forces” you need to understand to have a profitable business. In this article I’m going to look at Professor Michael E. Porter’s strategy model that provides a way of examining the pressures that influence and constrain a company’s strategy. …

Your organisation is GDPR compliant, but how do you stay that way? — It is all too easy to consider compliance with the GDPR as a “one off” project that will complete and then be “done”. Whilst the establishment of the initial baseline of compliance can be treated as a project (and generally was when the regulation was introduced), the compliance position must…

A look at the strange history of Britain’s Blue Peacock atom bomb land mine project from the 1950s. — In the light of developments in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s frequent reminders that he has nukes, we’ll be hearing a lot of how Russia’s doctrine includes the use of tactical nuclear weapons. These are things like nuclear artillery shells, used for limited objectives, such as wiping out an armoured column…

Using the INVEST approach to ensure that your user stories are fit for purpose — The only real test of whether a user story has been written well is whether the development team is able to pull it from the backlog and begin working on it. Helpfully, there’s a well known acronym that allows you to “test” if your user stories are ready. Each letter…

A list of proven ways to boost your energy levels. — If you’re like me, you have a lot of things you want to do, but often feel too worn out to get things done. …

Mind mapping is a simple and powerful method to create mental models about any subject. — I move between different projects a lot as a part of my consultancy work, As a result, I’m often faced with new organisations, systems, businesses and people and I have to come up to speed fast. Whenever I start a new project, one of the first things anyone new has…

Some ramblings about public relations statements and recent UK political events. — Imagine the scene. You’ve done something wrong, or at least something that might be perceived as wrong; worse still, it looks like that wrongdoing might be about to get out into the public domain. What do you do? That’s right, you or your public relations consultants come up with a…

There’s too much mysticism about user story sizes. Here’s my take, complete with audience participation! — Let’s start at the beginning with the basic principles; there is no prescribed size for a user story. You may have team practices and traditions that mean that stories tend to be a particular size, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to other development teams. Let’s take a look at three…