I’m an OK speaker and a better listener. I tend to passively engage in regularly scheduled meetings (you know which ones I mean). When some interesting points arise, my radar lights up and I lean forward. When some of those points turn into horrifying half-truths, I gasp inside my head and wonder what in the hell that person was smoking. By the time someone sticks their foot completely in their mouth, I’m frustrated as hell and jump into the conversation bent on “fixing” it.

And you can imagine the outcome…ugghhh. However, I’m lucky to have a great boss who noticed this tendency and suggested I take some speech lessons. There, I learned a tremendous amount about myself and, more importantly, how others perceive me while I’m speaking to them. I now realize how I can become more successful in affecting the difficult changes I’m helping to introduce here at work. And it all starts with a positive connection to your audience.
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For nearly four years Dan and I have shared our experiences and ideas about agile development and DevOps.

We would like to ask you, our dear readers, how we could help you to become even more agile and have more fun doing your job.

Please help us to understand your needs better by taking our short survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MKYQPL5.

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Dan & Matthias

Desktop application development is traditionally done in waterfall development mode. Specifications and requirements are gathered over a period of months before being unleashed upon a “pool” of developers for implementation. Development times run into thousands of man days after which a “beta” product is released to the QA team (or perhaps some very brave customers). After another thousand days of bugfixing, you slap a product version onto a shrink wrapped box, burn the CD-ROM and ship.

While it may be hard to believe, this is how the majority of software development has been done for almost half-a-century. The older the company, the better the chance they follow this exact release cycle. There are annual budget meetings to determine which departments and projects will gain the largest developer pools. It’s excruciating to watch these behemoths try to introduce agile into such an environment and I believe budgets are toxic to agile development!
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Consider the following: People are complicated and companies are run by a lot of people. A relationship between two people is complicated. Relationships between companies? Well, you see where I’m going.

Outsource a software development project requiring 10 developers, an on-site team of 3 managers and 4 developers, involving a total of 4 external companies. Surprised that the shipped product is more complicated than you originally planned? You shouldn’t be.
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You know it within an hour of working with them. A special kind of sysadmin or developer that not only knows how to do their job, but really cares about doing it right. This is the person that makes you refactor that duplicate method or add that one last test. The kind of engineer that dots every i and crosses every t. David Lutz (@dlutzy) tweeted this last week “Of the IT professionals I’ve worked with, talented sysadmins and programmers, only a select few are worthy of the title Engineer.”, which really struck a chord with me.
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