Tag: agile

Agile is great. Agile is wonderful. Agile is the savior of all things related to Software Engineering. On paper. In practice, classic Agile is difficult, confusing, frustrating, and just downright hard to implement. Because of knowing that many people would argue the preceding statement, we need some contextualization here. Therefore, a clarified statement reads: At a small company with less than 10 software developers and a handful of hardware engineers, where the projects change constantly and the number of people working on any single project can change from week to week, classic Agile is difficult, confusing, frustrating, and just downright hard to implement. Some aspects of Agile are awesome for small teams at small companies. This is doubly true when the current projects closely follow the needs and opportunities for the business. Smaller companies do not have the luxury of buffers between the Engineers and the opportunities. Often new opportunities require…

The next topic to tackle from a post category standpoint is in regards to Engineer Management. This is an important topic for me as it describes what I do every day. My current role has a title of “Director of Engineering”. As someone who leads and manages others, especially Engineers, the role can be fun, exciting, challenging, and sometimes frustrating. I would like to use posts in this category to talk about this role, the methods used, and most likely the many ways that I get things wrong. While looking on Unsplash for a good image to use for this post I came across the puzzle picture above and it jumped out at me as a good talking point. Sometimes managing people and projects can feel like you are trying to complete a puzzle while blindfolded in a dark room and the pile in front of you contains a dozen…

Tag: agile

Using Rick and Morty To Solve An Agile Estimation Dilemma

#EngineeringMgmt