Posts

Agile development prizes discipline over ceremony. It’s a promise to raise our craft and to foster professional behavior across all aspects of software development. I’ve seen teams ship junk, and just casually accept defects, and make poor lazy trade-offs. It’s surprising to see some of those habits being tolerated at some organizations. If we want respect for our work, quality and discipline must be nonnegotiable. Discussions for your team Are we being professional and constantly finding opportunities to pair, clean out tech debt, and refactor? Do our cycles produce quality (almost) bug free output each time? What practices are we following to prevent unsafe or low-quality releases? How are we guiding our team to continually improve our level of professionalism?

Of all the agile processes, Extreme Programming (XP) is the clearest, most complete, and least muddled. Many other software developerment approaches that were invented afterwards are a subset of - or a variation on XP. I don’t dismiss those approaches; some fit specific projects types. But when I want my builders to learn what the original agile software development approach was about, I point them to XP as a great template to start with. ...

Want to stop wasting time building the wrong thing. Every iteration ask the stakeholders, what should we build next? They answer in business-value order, and we implement in that order. Yes, features have dependencies — we’re builders; we handle them. The point is simple: let stakeholders decide priority so the team can focus on delivering value. When stakeholders say a feature is low value, we don’t build it yet. When they point to something critical, we give it attention first. ...

Have you ever had the project stakeholders demand everything by a fixed date? Tell them plainly — if you want every feature, the timeline will stretch. Don’t argue; Show the data. When stakeholders insist, ask them to choose: accept a later date or reduce scope. In rational organizations the numbers win: teams deliver what’s prioritized. Help the stakeholders scrutinize the plan, identify what truly must ship by the deadline, and gently defer the rest. It hurts to drop features, but real choices beat false promises. ...

The fastest way to finish is not to cut corners — it’s to raise the bar on quality. Quick‑and‑dirty doesn’t speeds things up. Trash code, missing tests, skipped reviews - they slow the team down. When technical debt accumulates, every change takes longer, bugs multiply, and momentum dies. Instead do things well: keep tests in the flow, do reviews, refactor relentlessly, and protect sustainable work practices. These habits look slower at first, but they pay back quickly in reduced rework and faster, safer delivery. ...