Agile: What’s The Actual Process?

The first line of the Agile Manifesto is, “People and collaboration over processes and tools”. But having the right process still helps. Below are some examples. There’s no one-size-fits-all process. Different teams face different challenges and so need different processes. The Design Council has a process called the Double Diamond. A similar approach is Dual-Track…… Continue reading Agile: What’s The Actual Process?

When to use Optional in Java?

“you should rarely use an optional in any other capacity than as a return value”. “you should declare a method to return Optional<T> if it might not be able to return a result AND clients will have to perform special processing if no result is returned”. From Effective Java by Joshua Bloch (Third Edition), pages…… Continue reading When to use Optional in Java?

Published
Categorized as Java

What drives successful companies?

Let’s look at the four outrageously successful companies and see what they can teach us. 1. Apple launched a product different to anything else: the iPhone. It was the first truly easy-to-use, web-enabled computer in your pocket. Using the iPhone was a totally different experience to using it’s closest competitor, the Motorola Razr. 2. Facebook developed killer…… Continue reading What drives successful companies?

Published
Categorized as Agile

The complexity of product development

What makes product development so complex? its’s because the landscape is constantly shifting. Our competitors are changing. New competitors like AgileMD emerge. Google, and other platforms we rely on are constantly changing. (Google do a major algorithm update every three months). Our users are changing. They moved to remote working during lockdown, which impacts usage,…… Continue reading The complexity of product development

Published
Categorized as Agile

Stop Iterating, Start Adapting.

UPDATE: There is a newer, shinier, quiz version of this post here. Our team recently did an interesting exercise. We each had to say which historical figure we would most like to meet. Alex and I both said Charles Darwin, the great scientist. Darwin wasn’t just a great scientist though, he was the godfather of…… Continue reading Stop Iterating, Start Adapting.

Published
Categorized as Agile