Modern startups should only have two departments: the problem team (people in contact with customers and prospective customers, understanding and learning from their needs) and the solutions team (engineers designing and building solutions to those problems).

As Morpheus would say: There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. Your first sprints will probably fail. Ours did. But you have to keep going.

Quotes from the Matrix always look cheesy

The Chicken Test

If it walks like chicken and clucks like a chicken, it probably is a chicken. And if the team is treating you like a chicken, then you are probably acting like a chicken.

In our research, we found that the most effective teams were skilled in all five styles, choosing the style that best fit the needs and goals of a project. For example, they might concurrently be involved in deep research on a User-Focused project, while relying on their experience for a Genius designed project, and spend a little time whipping out some one-shot functionality whose results would be Unintended Design.

Since the teams are working with different styles all the time, does it matter? Our research says it does. The teams that produced the best experiences knew these styles well and how to quickly switch between them. They knew when they needed to go whole hog and pull out all the stops for a User-Focused style project, while also knowing when it was important to bang out a quick design, knowing the results would essentially be unintended. Those teams had a rich toolbox of techniques and a solid understanding on how and when to use them.

There is no silver bullet.

Generally, in that group, there will be one or two loud voices. Maybe an Alpha Male or two. The important thing to note is that this is a small group. It will be difficult to reach common ground with a small amount of people.

ouch... that is my daily job.

A do-ocracy (also sometimes do-opoly, which is a more obvious pun on “duopoly”) is an organizational structure in which individuals choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them. Responsibilities attach to people who do the work, rather than elected or selected officials.

do do do!

This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a team of approximately 40 people and how they continuously improved their process over a year's time.

another (free as in beer) book to read

Once the tasks are prioritized and in the bullseye, you can organize, arrange and add structure. You can start to see relationships, which may indicate a different priority. You can start to see categories, which may affect iteration planning. You can begin to add structure. The outcome of this exercise is an easily understood diagram showing the project’s priorities. For teams that aren’t comfortable assigning a number to a task, this is a good alternative to try.

Something more interesting than the usual Excel sheet

The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 34 best practices divided into 7 categories.

premature optimization is the root of all evil

If we had to bet our lives on the continued success and adaptability of any single company (...), we would place that bet on 3M. Using 3M as a blueprint for evolutionary progress at its best, here are five basic lessons (...).

1. Give it a try - and quick!
2. Accept that mistakes will be made.
3. Take small steps.
4. Give people the room they need.
5. Mechanisms--build that ticking clock

Code reviews are fun again! ...almost.

more gentleman than Nat's blameall.py