There are three truths we all know about estimates in software development: It is hard, we are really bad at it, and estimated projects always seem to end up running over time and over budget. Now, there are two camps of agile practitioners who approach solving these problems in different ways: The Better Estimates camp—I’ll …
Real men cry. From a young age, however, we’ve been bombarded with the same message over and over: “Boys don’t cry.” This message is ingrained in every aspect of our society, from boys with scraped knees playing football, to teenagers facing rejection from a crush, to young professionals in a cutthroat corporate culture, and even …
My Key Takeaways From Agile Vietnam Conference 2019 On December 8th, I had the honour of attending and speaking at Agile Vietnam Conference 2019 in Hanoi. This was the second time I had spoken at this community-led conference and in both instances I’ve had a great experience and learned a lot. Morning talks I had …
I only recently ran into a now three-year-old Reddit thread that explains Agile to a hypothetical five-year-old. And the most upvoted answer explains Agile like this: Only work on the most important things at any given point in time Break those things into small bite-sized tasks for individuals to work on autonomously Agile delivers value …
What do you do to be productive? In the past year, I’ve been using different tools and strategies to help me focus more and thus, increase my productivity at work. In this article, I’ll share with you three of these productivity hacks to increase your focus and delve into the science behind why they work. …
Radical Candor is a powerful concept that teaches us that, to give proper feedback, we need to care personally for the person we are giving feedback and to challenge them directly. In this post, I’d like to share a story of Radical Candor that had a great positive impact in my workplace. Next, I’ll be …
On August 23rd, 2017, I gave my first agile talk at Mindvalley’s beautiful Hall of Awesomeness, organized by an incredible organization called Women Who Code, Kuala Lumpur (WWC). The event also included a talk by my fellow agilist colleague, Andreea Visanoiu, who presented a comparison about agile frameworks. My talk was about agile teams and it was well …
A tale of two mindsets How does a waterfall team approach a problem? Meet Tim. Tim is a manager of the tech department of a waterfall software development shop. Tim and other managers in the department were worried because the DAU (daily active users) of their online application was in decline. So they gave themselves …
Before becoming an agile coach, I was a software developer for about ten years. Before that, I did a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computer science. Programming books and tutorials out there suggest that writing code is easy. Writing great, quality code, however, is extremely difficult and can be frustrating at times, but it …
Being a Scrum Master is hard There is no easy way of describing it: it’s a hard role to perform, and even harder role to perform well. Even six months into my first year in the role as a Scrum Master, and I would still sometimes not be entirely sure what to do when not …