Have you ever tried to work with someone with the best of intentions, but it ends in a shouting match? Or walking away with the same or more problems than you started? A colleague was dealing with helping their client with upcoming milestones, and it felt like a similar situation was inevitable. He wanted to […]
A Matter of When, Not If
Prologue You are enjoying a brisk December evening by the fireplace. The tea in your cup warms your hands and fills your nose with fragrant aroma. Then you realize that Christmas is in a week. The Stories in our Heads Are you anxious? Maybe you don’t have time to get presents shipped in time. Maybe […]
What does your [fill-in-the-blank] need to succeed?
Prequel I was preparing for the AgileIndy conference, so I thought I’d gather up some notes for products I’ve worked on and see if I could find some common success factors. I started digging through my old Trello board for blog ideas and started noticing something. A word kept shining through my notes. I thought, […]
WSL, git, and Beyond Compare
Back Story As I was drafting some new blog posts, I was exploring some stuff on the technical side. Part of that was using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to set up git. Since the Windows 10 Creators Update just dropped, it came with a WSL of Ubuntu 16.04. Not too shabby. Since I’m a […]
Storylines: A Tale of Two Products
So, you say you want to build a product? Awesome. How do you get started? In the Days of Yore Day 1 Some people used to (and sometimes, still do) get dozens of people in a room and author this 200 page document that has a bulleted list of statements of what the software should […]
Software Producer: What’s in a name?
SEP had an interesting time establishing the title of Software Producer. We wanted it to mean something, like “Software Engineering Professionals” is not just our name; it’s who we are. Not a Product Manager When looking into the activities that our Software Producer perform, there is a lot of overlap with a Product Manager. That title is […]
Meet the Software Producer
It isn’t every day that a new title is introduced around here. And I get to have the fun of helping define it, because I’m one of the few on the block with that new title: Software Producer. Why do we need a new title? SEP grew out of an engineering focus from its inception. Do the […]
Where have you been all my life?
Someone asked me a few weeks ago how lean/agile (little L, little A) has changed how I worked. At the time, I didn’t think that I’ve changed what I did all that much. Sure, lean and agile practices have refined how things are done. Kanban, story mapping, and product ownership are just some of the […]
What’s in your Utility Belt?
When developing software, we engineers have to use a variety of tools to deliver the right product to our clients. As Batman has practically everything in his utility belt, let’s see what I keep up my sleeve as staples of software engineering. The Soft Skills These are the skills I use for software engineering and […]
