I am an engineering and software product leader, and agilist. For more than 20 years I have worked in the kitchens where software sausage was made, and served it up for consumption by end users.

Kirk Tanner, CEO of Wendy’s, a popular United States fast food chain, announced plans to test “dynamic pricing”, also known as surge pricing, as early as next year. Let me get my retaliation in first, as Jack Reacher would say.

SOLID principles are a set of design principles widely used in software development to create well-structured, maintainable, and scalable code. While they are mainly applied to traditional programming languages, some of these principles can be adapted and applied to infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools like Terraform to enhance the quality of infrastructure code.

Defense Innovation Board (DIB) recommends in its Do’s and Don’ts for Software document: “Require customized software solutions to match DoD practices. For common functions, purchase existing software and change DoD processes to use existing apps”. I am so glad that the DoD is attempting to institutionalize this way of thinking. It should be an example to others.

Humor is a coping mechanism. I don’t mean to make light of a tragedy.

I’m proposing to build software functionality for collaboratively developing and maintaining clinical value sets, around which we can form a community that can work together to develop practices and processes to improve quality, share the work, and use tangible results.

Five questions business leaders should ask themselves before embarking on agile transformations.

While you’re pivoting towards agile in the cloud, remember that nothing means anything anymore, and everything means exactly what you think it does, whether it does or not. It’s the dawn of Vulgar English.

Tell me about your “greatest weakness”.

Amazon deployed a package to my doorstep, after which I delivered it into action. Or was it the other way around?

Micro-things don’t solve technical or technological problems. They solve the problem of how to structure a sustainable organizational model for developing software products.

As a consumer, how many times can you hear, “the computer won’t let me do that…” before you vote with your feet by walking across the road to a competitor, where you get to deal with real people?

The second in the Delusions of Agility series, “Pivoting” has become a thing, but in the minds of many it’s the wrong thing, and simply misleading. It’s time to address the real issue.

This series of short posts examines the assumptions that are baked into the expectations of the benefits that agility delivers, and about the desired outcomes. It starts by enumerating the symptoms that indicate that agility is but a delusion.

If you’ve been a member of a scrum team you’ve probably had to agree on what done means. But there's nothing like the project management industry for turning a good idea into a bureaucratic truncheon.

You will be invited to meetings, and you will have to manage the stream of invites. If you were discerning and diplomatic, you could earn yourself a reputation for being a team player, as well as a valuable contributor and productive developer.

Do we gain more from compromising engineering standards in the short term to bring a product or feature to market faster, than from pausing, or slowing down future productivity, to prevent or pay down technical debt?