James King

What you do next matters.

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  • Agile release planning game downloads

    There are now three versions of my agile release planning game so I thought I would add them to the site so people can download them directly: The original version The basic game covers release planning and also the challenge of planning for new features, fixing defects and being impacted by technical debt. It works…

  • Ask the team about technical debt – the creeping doom graph

    I was just talking about the sad state of affairs where some teams know they are making life harder by taking shortcuts or creating workarounds that will slow the team down in the future. In fact, my grandma had some pretty good advice on this: There never seems to be time to do things properly –…

  • Growth or reduction in technical debt – why not just ask the team

    I just posted an article on measuring quality and maintainablity.  But I am waiting for my tea to boil so I thought I would start a new article. One of the things that often interests me is that teams feel like they need to cut corners this week to get their work done even though…

  • Measuring quality and maintainability

    We often say that we are focused on quality and yet only report on time and money when reviewing our projects.  Or we report on “the number of defects” but not on the actual “quality”, not “the ability to maintain this system when we go live”. I think this is because people often thing that measuring quality…

  • Estimating the impact of technical debt on stories – heat maps

    I have been in several conversations recently about how we take refactoring and technical debt into account when estimating work on IT projects. For those not up with the jargon – refactoring involves improving or simplifying your code without changing the functionality.  This means that the code can run faster and more reliably, be better…

  • Questions for project audits – part two

    When auditing a project (or taking over a project or even taking on a senior role in a team) I like to go and talk to everyone in the team. When I do, I generally ask them the same questions to get a better feel for what is going on. I really liked a set…

  • Questions for project audits – part one

    I was talking to a colleague recently and promised to share some of the questions I ask when auditing a project (or taking one over). My first question is generally “what is the project about?” But that generally leads to a vague answer.  So I use my “question compass”: These are the questions I use…

  • Recent photos

    I took some photos in a recent workshop and when I was emailing them I came across these ones on my phone. When I grew up in Western Australia we had corny number plates like “WA – the state of excitement”.  Similarly, in NSW we have the phrase “The premier state” on some number plates.…

  • Ask yourself if you can do it – don’t tell yourself

    I just came across some interesting research on motivation. Apparently it is more effective to ask yourself “Will I succeed” than to say to yourself “I will succeed”. Will I apply that lesson next time I want to achieve something important?

  • Agile and ITIL – Handing over knowledge

    At first pass, agile and ITIL approaches may seem like natural enemies.  This is certainly true if : Agile is for cowboys who evade testing, write code without knowing why and think that documentation is close to pure evil; and ITIL is a pack of non-thinking drones who create multiple unnecessary roles, random gateways with no…