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It is technically impossible, but is it really?
I was watching Star Trek a couple of weeks ago and I was thinking – wouldn’t it be cool if work was just like Star Trek. Then I realised that work is actually a lot more like Star Trek than I thought it was, so let me explain: The whole crew nearly die in every…
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Performance agreements – a first attempt for agile project team members
I was just reading an article on performance appraisals by Shane Hastie. It is a good summary of some of the issues that traditional performance appraisals cause on agile projects. But it leaves two questions unanswered: Where would you start if you actually had to do a performance agreement; and How would you actually know…
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OODA Loops for fighter pilots, business analysts and testers
When I started to learn agile approaches to projects, OODA was all the rage, but it seems to have disappeared from view as modern agilistas move from Scrum to lean to Kanban to ultra-velocitus development. I guess I am still a bit old school, because I still think the OODA loop is the essence of…
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Famous BAs in history: Mark Twain on interviews
I stumbled on a letter from Mark Twain where he comments on “the interview”: Inteviews are pure twaddle Controversially, he claimed that interviews are appalling and should be completely abolished … which would seem to be a strong position for a business analyst to take these days. But then Mark Twain was around at the beginning of…
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Stories for production support teams part 3: stories involving vendors
A long time ago I used to do production support as part of my role (I was a Unix administrator/DBA/system analyst). In those days requirements were really easy for me: people would come to my desk and ask for something, or they would email me or maybe even leave a scribbled note on my desk.…
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Use cases make for better test scenarios
I have encountered Use Cases on several occasions, sometimes they seem like a simple tool that can be used to better understand how a system behaves from a users perspective, while at other times people describe them as terrifying monsters that have murdered people and led to the destruction of entire projects. So I am…
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Regression testing day 2
This article probably makes more sense if you have read regression testing day 1. The aim is to give you a possible way of building good regression testing on a project one day at a time, while testing as you go.
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How can you manage people on projects these days?
Life used to be easy for managers. We had good people who delivered lots of stuff and bad people who stuffed up lots of deliverables. It was easy to tell who the good guys and the bad guys were. But then something significant happened. We discovered that work was not just about performing a set…
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Succession planning as an idea whose time has come
Everywhere I go I am starting to notice consistent problems or patterns of behaviour that hold back some of the best people in the teams I work with. I think they are starting to rank right up their with the Peter Principle as ways to stop good people from reaching their true potential and really…
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What is stepwise programming?
Stepwise programming is a very useful way to prioritise when there are many variables at play. The key benefit of the approach is that you do NOT try to understand and prioritise every thing at once against everything else. Instead you break the problem down into very small pieces and move through each one methodically.…
James King 