Category: Management

Lean and Agile in Software Development

As this post is quite long, you can get it in PDF here.

Some time ago, at the company where I am currently working, I suggested that we could create some posters about Lean and Agile so that people would keep it in the back of their heads on their day to day work. I also made myself available to explain, to the IT department, what Lean and Agile are all about, but because of lack of time, that explanation ended up never happening.

Lately, I’ve found that there are some people around me that have the desire and need to know a bit more about Lean and Agile, about what they stand for, how their practices should impact our day to day work, and what’s there to gain from it. So I decided to write this post in an attempt to cover that.

I’ve talked about Lean and Agile before, in a post titled What is Lean and Agile about Software Architecture but it had a very restricted spectrum. In this post, however, I want to take it a bit further.

Continue reading “Lean and Agile in Software Development” →

Advertisement

Teams: building, managing, leading, performing

Years ago, after finishing my bachelor in computer science, while doing my specialization studies in teaching and, later on, while doing my masters in leadership and management, I had several subjects about psychology, management and leadership. Although I never excelled in human sciences, I always felt great interest in them and was a successful student at those subjects. The explicit concepts learned back then have since been fading away, leaving me with scattered implicit concepts, knowledge that I don’t really know where it came from any more, nor even if it has any validity.

Thus, I decided to refresh and update my knowledge, so I searched for some conference talks and articles about the subject, and decided to leave here my notes about what I’ve learned and re-learned, as well as a few opinions derived from my past team leading experiences.

Building and leading teams into performance is not an easy task, there are just way too many variables to be predictable. It’s after all, a human science. Nevertheless, there are many studies, theories, behaviour models, guidelines, questions and answers that can help us build and lead a team into performance.

Continue reading “Teams: building, managing, leading, performing” →