Healthy Developer

Are you asking team members or maybe your entire company to change the way some aspect of software development is done? Today I'd like to share why software development change initiatives fail all too often. The first thing people are most familiar with around a change is the communication. This can often happen in a meeting where leadership or a project manager states "what" the change is. Though...

Are you making decisions about what technologies and patterns are used in your software product? Today I'd like to talk about some considerations you may wish to entertain when you select technology for use on a product being delivered to customers with software. Evolving software architecture to adapt to product growth can help your team deliver faster and accommodate refactoring needs easier as...

Are you getting ready to redesign a new version of a digital product with software? Avoid the top 5 software redesign mistakes by software companies I see made all too often. #5 – Focusing On Current Customers It's tempting to focus on what current customers of the product have wanted at the expense of NEW customers. If the goal of a redesign is growth, it makes sense to do market research and loo...

Let me share some stories today that will present at least 5 ways pride kills a software project. At the end of the video I'll share three strategies I've used to fight pride. The first way pride can kill a software project is when we become too proud of an opportunity to lead. At the beginning of my career, I had an amazing opportunity to lead a team to build a software product using a new techno...

Companies need to start to A/B software development to find what customers value. Relying on planning up front based on customer feedback and research just isn't competitive anymore! Software development is not like manufacturing. We don't have to make sure it's perfect before we start to build. In fact, that's not a very agile approach - and we'll too often build things that waste money! When we...

To release software smoothly, avoiding time wasted troubleshooting infrastructure issues - you might consider automating your infrastructure as code. To achieve continuous delivery requires thinking about how technologies like chef, puppet, ansible, docker and the like might serve this need for your team and organization. The first step is to determine an approach for using images. If on premise,...

As described in the video on isolating customers from your changes, there are typically a minimum of three environments into which software can be deployed. There are configuration settings used by your application, service, or product with software that need to change depending on the environment. These are called environment-specific configuration settings, and this video describes an approach f...

To release software to your customers, you'll probably need several development environments. To allow a team to make changes to software without disrupting paying customers, we need a way to isolate them. Software developers and engineers working on an agile software development team need an environment where they can make changes under development. The development environment might be a copy of...

You probably know you need to use Continuous Delivery to release software to your customers. There's much confusion in the market around Continuous Delivery. How does it relate to Agile Development? How does it relate to DevOps? In this video, I'll demystify Continuous Delivery by helping you understand the big picture. It's a capability - not a technology. The key innovation is reducing your cycl...

Why are some companies able to engage in creative software development, while others treat it like manufacturing? Since the work we do to develop software is "knowledge work", it benefits from the ideas and experiences individuals bring to each problem. Many companies look at the envisioning phase of an idea that's developed with software as the primary process that benefits from creativity. Selec...

Embarking on the journey to let customers lead YOU to the most profitable solutions? You'll probably need to decide between the two most popular ways agile teams work, and I'm here to help you make that decision. Scrum is a great process when your team needs a scheduled checkpoint for how well they are doing. It is also great when the customer can only respond to change every couple of weeks. Kanb...

It's human nature that businesses have a desire for software estimation. For projects with a fixed scope, typical estimating methods can be off by as much as 70%. And that's a product that doesn't adapt to user needs. If you desire the economic growth that comes from building winning products for customers, the numbers will be even worse. The short of it? Don't bother! Pick a budget for what you c...

Companies can miss out if they don't have the right mindset for agile project management. If your team is pursuing agile practices but doesn't feel that the benefits to the company are delivering on the promised industry hype, this video will explain some of the reasons why that may be the case. I discuss how traditional project management techniques are often applied to software development proje...

Whether producing a software product for a new market in a startup, or introducing a major change in an enterprise - planning a minimum viable product is a good idea. When building a minimum viable product (MVP), you should select a feature that shows users your core value proposition, as well as two features that "delight". The core value proposition is a part of the Business Model Canvas, a visu...

In the first video in my series on Sustainable Software Development, I explain how Lean Software Development avoids a company becoming irrelevant in today's shifting technology market. If you're looking for the reason why lean software development can be the difference between software projects being fun and innovative, or grueling and underwhelming – this video will provide you with some guidance...