Archives October 2023

Scrum & Creativity

Jeff Sutherland states on page 9 of his well-known Scrum book that

Scrum embraces uncertainty and creativity.

I totally understand how it helps to handle uncertainty well, especially through short inspect-and-adapt cycles. But I can’t see what it does for promoting creativity?

Well maybe in the Retro a bit when discussing how to improve the scrum team’s own way of working together, but what about supporting the generation of ideas and concepts that will be making the software product better? What do you guys think? Am I perhaps missing something?

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Do it together!

This message is so simple, common sense, and yet so often ignored when it shouldn’t be: no matter whether you try to reach your personal (career) development goals or whether you want to start your own business, your own motivation is the key to success.

The other day I took this short 15 minute course titled Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from Motivation Science on LinkedIn. It stated 5 things that are important for people’s motivation, as empirical evidence shows. Two of these things made most sense to me: One thing was that you should create a fun path to that goal and the other thing is that you should do it together with other people.

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Dogfooding revisited

In a recent post of mine on LinkedIn, I explained why it is important to use dogfooding to sell software people love to use. But what if your organization just doesn’t have the same workflows as your customers, which is often the case? This article proposes some creative and practicable ways how you can still bring dogfooding into your development process.

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Vanitas

Modern life is rapidly evolving and this is very present in the IT business. You can see it in the changes in the hardware (who is still using VHS tapes, non-smartphone mobile phones, Compact Discs etc.?), but also in software frameworks, popular open source libraries etc. being used.

This Tech Vanitas is e.g. nicely illustrated by Jeannette May, the key visual of this post is taken from her gallery. I myself have contributed in open source projects in the past. In my time in academic research I was …

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