The Failure of
Developers need to do stuff that you will never ask them to do, and if they asked you if it was ok to do it, you would tell them, “Let’s do something else.” I’m not talking about “gold-plating” an app,...
View ArticleA "one" is like half a day a walk in the park
No matter what point scale you use to estimate stories, and if you call them “points”, “gummi bears”, or “t-shirts”, people always want to know what they mean. The problem is that the keepers of the...
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Agile Pyramids
I recently returned from a trip to Egypt with Pivotal's own Lara Owen. Like all good tourists, we went and saw the Pyramids of Giza. Like far fewer tourists, we also went to Saqqara to see the Step...
View Article"Obnoxious" Means It's Working
Back at the ‘Labs we start off every morning with breakfast at 8:45, then at 9:05 someone rings the cowbell. The cowbell lets everyone know, “Hey we’re doing stand-up, come if you want, carry on if you...
View ArticleWrite Once, Run Anywhere
In response to some recent web browser related debates: http://sachin.posterous.com/the-web-sucks http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/...
View ArticlePair Benefit #458: Choice
Though I am certain someone could do it, it is hard to dispute the connection between having choices and control over your daily work and overall job satisfaction. The people with more power to govern...
View ArticleExpectations: What if Life was a Rails Project?
In any consulting job, a project truly fails when expectations are not clearly communicated. In Ruby, we have a great tool for communicating expectations about code. What if we applied that same tool...
View ArticlePivotal: Why It Works
My name is Will, I’m 30 years old, and I’m a Pivot. In my three year tenure here at Pivotal Labs, I’ve found that it may be easy to see the parts that make us successful consultants, but that forrest...
View ArticleExecutable Documentation
I try to avoid writing static documentation. It gets old and out of date as soon as the next person comes along because it is logically far away from the code it describes, so event the best intended...
View ArticleExperience Report: Engine Usage That Didn’t Work
On the project I’m currently working on we have a main portal that provides a user registration system and a generic billing mechanism. It also has several sub applications which need to know some...
View ArticleGet Personal, Get Feedback, Get Better
One of our directors shared this article with the managers here at Pivotal Labs about having a personal retrospective. It immediately sparked a healthy debate, and I latched on to the idea because I...
View Article“Drinking the Kool-Aid™” How We Create Value Alignment
Over my four year tenure at Pivotal Labs I’ve heard it a lot: “You guys really drink the Kool-Aid around here, don’t you?” and I’d shake it off with a joke, “Yeah, you can grab anything from the fridge...
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