Articles on management, technology and Agile

I don’t know, but I’ll find out

As a professional consultant or contractor your experience and skill in a particular set of technologies is one of the key reasons a company engages your services. However inevitably a question will occur that is outside of your knowledge. How you handle that question, in my opinion, defines a professional.

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Stop the Line

Stop the assembly line

In his recent post “Go Faster By Not Working” Adrian talks about how having the entire team stop when the build breaks can result in the entire project going faster.

Lean manufacturing, the precursor to the “Agile” methodologies, has the concept of “Stop the Line”. When a defect in the product is identified, the entire assembly line stops to locate and rectify the factors that caused the defect. 

The major difference in a software development “line” is that there is no physical assembly line, so it is easy to blur the distinction between what is and isn’t part of the product and hence the “line”.

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Labels at Work

I saw this great tweet the other day and it got me thinking about how we label people within our work place.

"When you refer to your coworkers as "the business" you degrade the responsibility of those people to treat IT like human beings"

by Jason Montague

How many times have you heard the people in a development team referred to as “resources” but then heard the developers refer to management and sales teams as “the business”? It seems to me that we all suffer from a need to make people outside of our group “faceless”, but at what cost.

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Inserting content into TinyMCE

When developing a plugin for TinyMCE, you often need to insert content into the document. In most cases, this content is at the current cursor position, or selection. But what if you want to enter the content at the beginning or end of the document, irrelevant of the current cursor position?

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What’s it all about?

A friend of mine at the end of last year posted on her blog

"Mostly, I couldn’t work out what this blog was about. The older posts, while truthful, felt stuffy and unreal. Constructed because they were going public."

After neglecting my blog for most of last year I, like Charlotte, have asked myself what I want out of my blog.

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