3 weeks ago

Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2019

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile, Team leadership

3 weeks ago

30May

Few weeks ago Stack Overflow presented the results of their annual Developer Survey. I recommend having a look into that as there are lot of interesting insights in there. Link to the results: Technologies Top 10 of most popular technologies (programming / markup / scripting languages) are: Top 10 of most wanted technologies are: And Python is the fastest-growing major language today. Challenges...

Read onRead later

8 July 2017

Benefits of using Scrum [over waterfall]

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

8 July 2017

08July

Agile is probably the best approach when it comes to developing complex IT solutions. It’s widely used in product development, but unfortunately, it’s still not that straightforward when you’re working for external clients. The problem is that in far too many situations it’s the corporate purchasing department that awards the seller with a contract, and fixed-scope, fixed...

Read onRead later

20 May 2017

Tracking progress of the release

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

20 May 2017

20May

Having a potentially shippable product every sprint lies in a heart of Agile, but in many organisations – especially the ones that don’t work in SaaS model – a product is not released to the market every sprint. Sometimes frequent delivery is not possible (i.e. in case some additional tasks like a translation of a documentation, legal approval, etc. have to be done at the end of the...

Read onRead later

9 April 2017

Splitting large features into smaller stories – Elephant Carpaccio

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

9 April 2017

09April

Many teams transitioning to Agile struggle with delivering a potentially shippable product every sprint. Producing a piece of software that provides a business value to a client every 2 weeks seems impossible. Usually, teams say that they can deliver either front-end, or backend, or architecture design for a given feature, but not all these together. It’s a common problem for many teams...

Read onRead later

26 February 2017

Transparency

By Piotr Nowinski

In Team leadership

26 February 2017

26February

Transparency is a key value in Agile organisations. It improves employees’ motivation and make the teams perform better. At the same time, transparency is difficult to achieve, because it usually requires serious changes to company’s culture and mindset. You can’t do it overnight, but fortunately, each and every step towards this goal counts. Transparency allows for building an...

Read onRead later

8 January 2017

Art of Delegating

By Piotr Nowinski

In Team leadership

8 January 2017

08January

Introduction Empowering people and teams is critical for organisations to gain competitive advantage and succeed. Smart delegating of responsibilities results in more engaged employees, better culture and improved overall productivity of a company. Knowledge and experience are shared among a larger group of employees which in turn increases organisation’s flexibility and agility. However...

Read onRead later

12 November 2016

Inter-team Commitment Stories

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

12 November 2016

12November

Managing complex and lengthy projects is a challenge. When dozens of people are working on the same product in parallel there has to be a mechanism for identifying and resolving dependencies and cross-team blockers. In traditional projects, it’s a PM’s task to ensure that all the team members are working on right tasks in right order. She is the one who decides about priorities...

Read onRead later

2 October 2016

Estimating software projects

By Piotr Nowinski

In Projects

2 October 2016

02October

Couple weeks ago I came across a great article about software estimation by Pawel Brodzinski which made me think about how my approach to estimating software projects has evolved over time. At the moment I work in product development where Agile approach is used to deliver new increments of software. We have stable teams and we use Story Points and Velocity to estimate and plan our sprints and...

Read onRead later

12 August 2016

Rewards and recognition

By Piotr Nowinski

In Team leadership

12 August 2016

12August

Introduction An effective reward system can motivate employees and increase their work performance. It can have a very powerful influence on people’s behaviour and, therefore, many organisations implement it as an integral component of their compensation strategy. However, not all reward programmes are beneficial. Moreover, inefficient systems are counterproductive, destroy creativity, hurt...

Read onRead later

18 June 2016

100% utilisation myth and slack time

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile, Team leadership

18 June 2016

18June

In my recent blog post I covered a topic of limiting Work in Progress. I briefly mentioned that in many companies working on many tasks in parallel is somehow more important than accomplishing them. 100 utilisation myth Many organisation believe that their employees should always be busy with work which results in aiming for their constant 100% utilisation. At first glance it may sound reasonable...

Read onRead later