I’ve been doing lots of reading recently on happiness; what it is, how it’s measured and its impact on our lives. One thing that has really jumped out at me is the relationship between happiness and health. In one study they measured the happiness of 193 people aged between 21 and 55 and then infected […]
What has the world of safety engineering got to teach us about how to avoid or minimise injury in roller derby and how can that be applied to accidental issues in software? I’m very excited to have written an NDC guest blog on the subject. http://ndc-blog.ghost.io/software-safety-lessons-from-the-world-of-roller-derby/
Recently I’ve been mulling over the Spotify model for organisation of software teams and how widely it could be applied within the software industry. For those of you newer to the concept I’ll give you a quick description here but I also suggest that you read the original paper. Squad – A multi-functional team which […]
If you’re thinking of introducing agile and/or lean practices into an organisation and you’re wondering whether it’s even worth trying, it would be worthwhile spending a bit of time thinking about corporate culture. Culture within an organisation is an incredibly strong force and introducing change is highly likely to fail if you don’t take it […]
I’m a nerd. I’m happy to admit it. For example, I loved maths so much at school that I would regularly ask for extra maths homework. Yes, I was that child. When I was revising multiple subjects I would do a practice maths exam paper as my enjoyable break between revising other subjects. Some pure […]
In roller derby, as in many sports, speed is really important. So much so that as part of the minimum skills (which you have to pass before you can play) you must be able to skate 27 times around a derby track in 5 minutes. Depending on the route you take a round the track, […]
There’s roller derby and there’s men’s roller derby. I can’t think of another assertive team sport with large amounts of physical contact which is played primarily by women. There are male roller derby teams (and even a few mixed ones) and this is becoming more popular, but it is still predominantly a female sport. In […]
When we think about agile development we talk about the performance of the team and not measuring individual performance. If we measure individual performance then we drive behaviours which are counterproductive to our overall aims. For example, one of the best developers I have ever worked with would probably have been viewed as achieving very […]
I am a huge fan of roller derby, which is an assertive sport played on roller skates (see my Roller Derby page for a quick run down of the game). I play recreationally and have great admiration for those who play competitively. There are times when I mull about what lessons we can learn in the agile […]
Welcome to the next in a series of blogs on how we can apply design patterns to everyday development life, rather than just to the code. This time I have chosen the classic Gang of Four ‘Observer’ pattern to look at how we judge the success of agile work and the measures which we base […]
Louise Elliott (@IvanaTerrorBull) 