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Empathy, Engineering, and People
A discussion of empathy in engineering: Erin Cech at Rice University agrees that empathy is essential and names our current culture in engineering a ‘culture of disengagement,’ one in which engineers focus almost exclusively on technical details with little or no attention to empathy and moral issues. Cech’s recently published results show that engineering students’…
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Master the basics first
Very good advice: Until you can reliably deliver what you thought you could deliver, focus on how you define and build software. You don’t need Lean or Kanban or to improve your stand-up meeting. You need to learn how to define, build, and deliver software. Don’t be distracted by nuance if you can’t get the…
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Regulating development
An interesting post on the Ken Schwaber blog: Our shortcomings were surprising to me. When I rolled out Scrum, I thought that the excellent developers that had been stifled by waterfall processes would emerge, and we would again do great work and build great software. Much to my surprise, many never had those skills or had…
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how to ensure you’re always worse than you could be
I’m a little OCD. I’m a little exacting, and precise. I blame it on my background. I’ve got an engineering degree where I was taught to define and measure systems. To improve performance, reduce risk, to evaluate alternatives and measure results. I spent a quarter century in a ballet studio, perfecting the nuances of both…