Understanding Can Be Difficult if There Is Confrontation

When trying to share some knowledge or raise issues, I try to lead the audience (audience being an individual, team or community) on a thought trail rather than pointing out issues directly or just imparting the answer. By laying out a path of thinking, the audience is more likely to engage with the concepts or information you are imparting and become involved in path to the answer. Once on the path, the audience is more likely to accept the outcome.

Okay, so how do you start a thought trail, it sounds like a long, drawn out, boring process!

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The Other Kind of Well-Rounded Developer

For people in software development, a great deal of time is spent working and learning in order to increase the quality of your output and make you a more rounded person. Unfortunately, all this time is spend with your body fairly inactive, leading to another kind of more rounded person that you didn’t plan for, i.e. your body does not get the exercise it wants.

This is a problem for many knowledge worker roles, so here are some things you can do to make you a rounded person in mind and not in body.

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Lean or Agile - Understand and Use Both - Wisely

The term agile evolved to encapsulated the principles behind software development practices such as extreme programming, scrum and other iterative and incremental approaches.

Lean has been around a lot longer, (possibly a great deal longer - Chinese Emperors) but has infrequently seemed to gather momentum in software development until recent years.

On the surface that there is a great deal of commonality between the two approaches. For example with Agile, teams focus on doing enough work to get the job done whilst leaving options open, to help managing the inevitable change with less pain and risk (eg. failing early). This agile practice could be viewed as minimising waste, a lean concept, but do most agile teams have the opportunity to understand that they are minimising waste and the implications of doing so?

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Summary of the Agile Manifesto Principles

Regardless of the processes and tools you put in place to become more agile, you should take the time to appreciate the principles of agile to help you understand what you are aiming for. Reading and understanding the implications of the agile manifesto is therefore a valuable start, although it is just a start of a very important change.

Here is a quick summary of the agile manifesto to get you started:

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Code Is a Means to an end...

Developers should be open about the importance and value of code and not be too precious about their latest creation. An understanding of how good your code should be in terms of what you need to achieve makes you a better developer.

Have a read of the article: 7 Reasons To Hate Your Code

Thank you.
jr0cket


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