Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Chris Hartjes – Why Don’t You Trust Your Developers?: “For most of my career, the reality has been that developers sit there in an open concept office with music being piped into their ears so that people won’t distract them so they can get some fucking work done. Every meeting, every random conversation, every interruption…

Gerry McGovern at CMSWire – Web Experience: Designing for the Obvious, the Boring, the „Of Course“: “Often, making it easy for the customer means doing lots of boring, behind the scenes work. For example, you can make your search work much better by deleting old content. But that’s the type of work nobody really wants…

Sarah Saunders – Find the Rights – IPTC Conference 2012: “People need easy access to images they can legally license or use. For this, we need identifiable icons on thumbnails and easy click through to source web sites. (see PicScout Image Exchange)” PicScout looks interesting, but I’d still prefer open, “semantic web” based image search…

Matthew Heusser at CIO.com – How to Advance Lean Software Development (Beyond the ‚Toyota Way‘): “Lean manufacturing focuses on delivering one part, end-to-end. This is sometimes called one-piece flow. […] To get to one-piece flow, we’ll eliminate multi-tasking. […] Instead of „pushing“ work to the next step in the chain, we pull it. This means…

Quora answers, compiled by Paul M. Jones – What are telltale signs that you’re working at a “sinking ship” company?: “You have a launch party, and no customers attend. […] You complain about how the customers „just don’t get it“ and aren’t „visionary.“”

Donald Reinertsen and Stefan Thomke at Harvard Business Review – Customers Don’t Want More Features: “Determining which features to omit is just as important as—and perhaps more important than—figuring out which ones to include. Unfortunately, many companies, in an effort to be innovative, throw in every possible bell and whistle without fully considering important factors…

Alan G. Carter’s The Programmer’s Stone – Implications for Software Engineers: “The clerical worker, by subjecting the programmer to bureaucratic stress, has forced the programmer into stress modulated focussed attention, and the ability of his or her brain to hold the program that is already there is lost. Hence “evaporation”. In some organizations it’s quite…

My favourite quotes from the Wikipedia page on W. Edwards Deming: “[Deming] is regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage. […] Deming questioned the company’s culture and the way its managers operated. To Ford’s surprise, Deming talked not about quality but about management.…

Occupy Meeting: “Death By PowerPoint, Resurrection By Tablet is a manifesto for a new, more substantial workplace. Stop meeting after the meeting.” Quotes from the manifesto: “Research shows that individuals create best in solitude and isolation. Committees and meetings do not create. Their role is to serve as mediums of dissent and contention. Great meetings…

Matthias Marschall (in 2011) – The three essentials of any agile process: “By making progress (and bottlenecks) visible, helping people focus, and pulling together as a team, everyone starts to be proud of what they’re doing. Suddenly, they want to be responsible for the whole story (not just an implementation detail). They start to take…