People - Morten Nielsen

Keeping knowledge workers loyal

In a previous post I discussed how to keep knowledge workers motivated. There is a flipside to keeping them motivated because being motivated is only enough the keep the knowledge worker working well, but it might not prevent him or her from leaving. It’s not guaranteed that the employee

People

Keeping knowledge workers motivated

I went through a rough spot recently, which caused me to look more closely at the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. This post describes what I found out in a non-personal way because I think this can be highly useful for companies looking to keep their employees. To summaries,

CI

Continuous delivery implementations differ due to company testing culture

I just finished reading a post about continuous delivery at Outbrain. It’s quite interesting they made a trip similar to what we have done at RemoteX. However their setup is some what different than in the our. They use a tool called Glu to do deploy to the their

People

Development as a team or development as stars?

A good friend and colleague of mine Johan Andersson read somewhere that you can see the communication patterns of a company in the architecture. I can see how that makes sense, but I think its much clearer than that. I think you can see the communication patterns of a company

People

A pull process

While reading The Power Of Pull, I came to think about push and pull processes. Now the definition of these is not the same as a push or pull process as used in that of lean processes, instead here a pull process regards an open platform on which participants can

analytics

My presentation at AS2010

I held a presentation at AS2010 about handling defects. The slides are up, unfortunately there is not text in the slides and there’s no audio track… but for those who wish to see my slides you can find the at: http://www.slideshare.net/agilasverige/hantera-felhantering

People

Inventory in software

I’ve been thinking a bit about all these factory references that occur when discussing software development. So here is an inventory management view, I guess. Inventory, viewed from a lean perspective is waste. If you can keep your process running with minimal inventory, then you can decrease costs for

analytics

Measuring defects

I was working on performance tuning for the mobile client of RemoteX Applications when I found a tool called EQATEC Analytics. Six month later I added it to our clients for the first time. EQATEC Analytics is quite interesting, for RemoteX it solves an interesting issue. Error reports are hard

People

Troubleshooting

Sometimes I’m amazed. I came to work this morning, and someone came at me in slight panic. A system that is central for our customer operations is having an outage what do we do. Apparently what they had tried to isolate the problem was checking again and again if

Alt.Net

Alt.Net Code sparring session

Last week we had a code sparring session in Stockholm under the flag of Alt.Net Sweden. Peter Hultgren, also a member of Alt.Net Sweden came up with the idea. During the Coding Kata held a few weeks ago at Avega we identified a few problems with the setup.

People

How you write code is a habit

These last couple of days we have been having a internal TDD course at RemoteX. We had the help of Andreas Brink, whom guided us in testing and over all code quality. One of the things I noticed during the course is how heavily influenced I was by old habits.

People

Understanding code

“I can look at code and understand it but i cant write code” There seems to be a common misunderstanding that if you can read code and “understand what it does” you understand the code. I’m sorry, If you cant write the code yourself, you do not understand the

People

Is software development too complicated?

.Net rocks had a panel discussion a while back, regarding the increasing complexity of software development. A panel discussion they have been refereeing back to a few times in the shows since. In general venting the possibility that all the options available is just adding complexity and might not result

People

Meetings: Focus on Doing

My time spent in meetings has been increasing the last couple of weeks. I’m no fan of meetings. One of the reasons I don’t like meetings is that most of the time they are not as productive as they could be. So last week I had an idea,

People

I write laws

I went through a business contract, analysing it for weaknesses. I found a not likely case, but still pointed it out. “You should be a lawyer”, the lawyer says “I write laws”, I reply. Now why am I writing this? Well, there are similarities to developing Laws and developing business

7Habits

Seven Habits: Exercises for habit 1 and 2

In a previous post I described a session where I’m helping a former colleague in her 7 Habits course. I’ll just describe the exercises me and Anna covered. Homework Anna had me do some homework. To think of which things affect me, what worries me about them, and

7Habits

Seven Habits

A Former colleague of mine is attending a Seven Habits course. She asked me to help her out with her homework. The concept is that we go through some exercise as she takes on different habits in the course. Today we met for the first time to discuss this. Basically

People

We need more automated tests

During the end of the the 20th century, IBM had a TV commercial that I’m quite fond of. I can’t find it on YouTube, but its quite short. There are two suites talking, one reading a magazine. The one with the magazine says “We need to be on

GTD

Tooling idea for Getting things done with teams

Roughly 1½ year ago I produce a plugin for team-system to allow me to report bugs quickly though as I’m working with the code. The idea behind it was from the Fogbugzintoruction video where I think its Joel Spolsky who says something along the lines of “it should take

GTD

How I work with code the unit test part

I wrote a blog post about how I work with code. The basic idea is that I record actions that I need to take as I work with the code in a format that is readable by the other developers in my team. In case I get run over by

GTD

Getting things done with teams

With this concept of quickly creating new tasks and with the GTD and How I work with code ideas. An idea for a new tool popped up in my head. The tasks that I create based on working code, are cluttered with my own opinions. With the Getting Things Done

People

The user always knows what he or she wants

He or she might even know how to say it. It doesn’t mean that a developer will understand. http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0676.html Communication is everything.

GTD

How I work with code

In Getting Things Done, David Allen discusses a work flow of how to handle things you need to-do. Now when I work at a coding task I often find places that could need some refactoring love, or needs to change in some way. There might be potential bugs, violations of

Books

Getting things done

I just started reading “Getting things done” – by David Allen. I’m roughly 25 pages in, but now I have to stop to write this blog-post just to clear my mind. The reason for why I started reading the book is that I found Tracks though mor.ph and started

People

Computer anxiety

I just talked to a neighbour of mine over the phone. She had a computer crash this morning, and basically panicked. Now as I talk to her I notice one thing that I’ve noticed over and over again. Most non-technical people are actually afraid of computers. Now she knows