It seems to defy all logic, but the best programmers have two usually undesirable traits: They’re lazy and dumb. That’s the point of a classic post by web developer and blogger Philipp Lenssen that I ...

Most of the advice on meetings concerns how to run them. But what about when you’re attending the meeting rather than running it, and the meeting is endless or boring? Certainly, it can help to stay ...

Occasionally, I hear someone maintain that you can’t have too much communication. I disagree. In matters of communication, more is not necessarily better. Sure, too little communication can result in ...

A set of vertices with each vertex having zero or more labels and zero or more properties/attributes. A set of edges with each edge being directed from one vertex to another vertex. Each edge has zero ...

Collaboration is a key part of how agile teams work. Quite often, to work effectively to meet commitments in a self-organizing, cross-functional team, you need to be creative as well. While teams can ...

A transition to agile can be confusing for everyone in the organization. Agile changes many roles, as it works in a much different way from traditional software development processes. Some might argue ...

This is the age of speed dating, speed networking, speed yoga, and, yes, even speed meditation. It’s a time of rush-rush-rush in the attempt to do more, sooner, faster. But there doesn’t seem to be a ...

Behavior-driven development (BDD) and keywords are both widely used techniques to facilitate automated testing. The approaches are similar in that tests can be written in a business-readable, ...

Miscommunication happens all the time. The miracle, though, is not how often we miscommunicate, but how well we communicate given the multitude of ways we can misunderstand each other. This is ...

Everybody knows that the later you find defects, the more expensive they are to fix. Everybody knows that, right? Well, back in 1976, a software engineer named Barry Boehm said defects are more ...

A data dictionary is the information and metadata (The metadata includes database name, table name, column data type, and access privileges) about the data objects themselves. The data dictionary ...

Let’s agree that it is irrational to assume that we can completely define the requirements of a complex system upfront. Few sane practitioners would suggest that was ever an option. I’ve heard some ...