Sunday reading
It’s a beautiful sunny day so I decided to catch up on all those open browser tabs that I’ve been meaning to read. Here are the links and a few comments on what I read:
Finding a Path - Katrina Clokie
Nice short piece on alternatives to learning to code for testers that want to upskill. As a developer leading a team of developers and testers this is quite a valuable post. Coding doesn’t suit everyone and having other options to suggest is important. What’s interesting is that these alternatives just as easily apply to developers upskilling as testers.
Sex and the Startup: Men, Women, and Work - Kate Losse
The style and content of this piece are great. It reads like a well cited journal article and tackles sexism in tech from an angle I’d never considered. Looking at the fundamentals around founding a start up that ingrain a toxic culture from the very get go. I only wish modelviewculture would deliver their print version to NZ. I would subscribe in an instant.
Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed - Mike Hadlow
I’ve been hearing a few murmurings that agile is dead. This post was on my to read list to try get a grasp on what people mean by that. After reading, something didn’t quite sit with me. The points about blindly following Agile methodologies were bang on. The same can be said about following any process without knowing why. Focusing on “non-technical” managers being universally bad and the line “The skills and talents of individual programmers are the main determinant of software quality.” didn’t seem relevant to the discussion. We don’t need more Rockstars. We need people talking to each other and understanding the why in everything we do. Oh and don’t read the comments.
Reports of Agile’s Death, yadda yadda… - J. B. Rainsberger
This didn’t shed any light on agile’s death either, other than there is misunderstanding about what agile means and a few points on what agile “can be”.