A Tale of Organizational Structures

architecture-building-glass-417363

A promising young software professional recently asked me about the roles that exist between the customer and software engineers in a “typical” company.  My initial reaction was to describe a cross-section of business analyst, product manager, and software architect roles.  On later reflection, I realized that I was taking the basis of my own answer for granted.  This post … Read more

Agile, Tribal Knowledge, and the Trail of Documentation

It's all ones and zeros

When I encounter a software company that claims to be “agile,” I often also hear something like this: “We’re an agile shop. We don’t do documentation because we don’t need to.  Documentation goes obsolete quickly.” Yeah, right. Whenever I hear such things, there is a part of my brain called the bullshitathalamus that quickly utters … Read more

Navy SEALs and Software Leadership

Pirateria informatica

What can software people learn from Navy SEALs?  Plenty!  If there is any organization that knows something about unit integrity, teamwork and operational leadership, it is the Navy SEALs.  While I am not a SEAL, and I certainly would not claim their skills, I have applied some SEAL-inspired principles in the software domain. I’ve always … Read more

Software Development Culture

Development Culture = Party

We live in an increasingly globalized and dynamic world, and the software engineering space is not immune to the challenges that this presents.  Companies are starting up, shutting down, off-shoring, near-shoring, and sometimes all of the above.  This post presents a hypothesis around the definition and assessment of a software development culture.  For the sake … Read more