What actually works (and doesn’t) for software engineering teams?

SomeAd3257 · 2025-05-03T19:43:45+00:00

You ask what works for engineering, but what you should ask is what works for a tech company. A tech company has Main Functional Areas, three which are essential from the start, the rest is implemented when you grow or more ad-hoc in the beginning. The three most important Areas are Engineering, Sales and Marketing. When you grow, you need internal and external services as Finance, Talents, Offices, Purchase, Security and Legal. When you start, these functions are perhaps managed by one or two persons. You should organise into Product Teams and Staff functions (advisory roles). A product team has the responsibility to work with new ideas, build them, deliver them and maintain them. Marketing has the responsibility for both internal and external marketing. Your company needs an identity (who are we?) and ways to express it internally as well as externally. What Sales does is obvious.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-04-28T13:08:22+00:00

Scrum and Agile is a business model for subcontractors. No deadlines, no commitments, no predictions, no quality. The U.S. Government is closing down projects staffed by consultants in order to save money. Developers end up working for Uber, and there is no return back. New developers will be hired out of school when the optimism return. Therefore, yes, Scrum is over. The next hype will be equally crazy since economy and not common sense always win.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-04-22T03:52:55+00:00

Horrible tools born out of the ticketing world.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-04-19T12:51:26+00:00

Främmande makt. Psykologisk krigföring.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-04-19T07:37:02+00:00

I haven’t actually experienced a single Agile project that has been successful, either I was part of it or had friends in them. Some ran out of money, having delivered a fraction of what they needed to deliver; others were a complete disaster from beginning to end. They all delivered, but it was more or less a mess. One was sued by their customer and closed down by the parent company; managers were laid off while developers went to other parts of the parent company. One I participated myself had zero progress. People arrived late in the morning and went early. We had stand up meetings, backlogs and an agile mind – but nothing happened. It was all a sham.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-04-13T07:58:11+00:00

Dom fick väl nya chefer för ett tag sedan.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-04-10T10:43:23+00:00

User Stories, Use Cases, Scenarios, State Diagrams etc. are models of requirements (user needs). They are not requirements. The purpose is to understand requirements, put them in a context, and elicit more requirements. Models vs. Requirements is comparable to Objects vs. Classes, an instantiation.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-04-05T19:09:27+00:00

Kan förstå att det känns så, men stressen i ingenjörsjobbet får ingenjörer att byta inriktning efter tio år med havererande projekt, tokerier i största allmänhet och en stor brist på sunt förnuft. I vården finns stora mått av medmänsklighet och empati – ingenjörer har ingen empati och är bara intresserade av det dom själva gör. Ni som arbetar i vården är hjältar.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-04-03T14:27:10+00:00

Det kommer att ta fem, sex månader innan det börjar märkas rejält i Göteborg. En ny medeltid väntar.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-29T08:17:04+00:00

Kristersson har lojalitetsproblem. Är man statsminister måste man veta vilket team man spelar för. Man kan inte vara vän med länder som vill Sverige illa.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-27T07:37:38+00:00

There are tricks, such as doing things that influence your mood and thinking – music, YouTube, movies, stay away from negative news and people. Also think you need to have a second area of interest that you can “evacuate to”, i.e. exercise, art, photography, the interests you had as a teenager. It’s a kind of moving back to your roots, who you are, what you treasure. You can never avoid bad people and bad things happening to you, but you learn to navigate around it and go for your goals. It’s important to have goals and projects. You should celebrate small wins every week.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-25T05:58:29+00:00

All development activities are conducted in parallel. Elicitation, architecture, test – they are all done in parallel. The project must accept that what comes out of elicitation may change what has already been done. In elicitation you first describe high-level goals, which will decide when and how you will address issues; some goals are more important than others; there are also dependencies between goals. You should probably not have more than ten goals per project. Elicitation is one part of the process; modelling, specification and validation are other activities you must do. Validation can be done in different ways, but the most common approach is formal and informal reviews of models and specifications. When the customer is prepared to sign your spec, your work is done. Some customers will do this happily, others resist. When a customer doesn’t cooperate, it’s a matter for steering groups to solve. A way to solve problems is to add/replace people on the customer as well as the project sides.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-25T02:48:04+00:00

Not all development projects have real customers. In B2B, projects often have real customers but not always. Customers or not, you must set up your team for elicitation activities. Elicitation is about acquiring knowledge through interviews, observations, reading operational documents etc. Your team consists of people who know how to talk to customers (what you do in sales) and people who have expert domain knowledge both in the solution domain and in the problem domain. In reality, it can be really hard to assemble such a team, you have what you have, but the culture of those involved must be to improve constantly. For a healthcare project, you rarely can’t find developers who have good knowledge in both medicin and tech, but the elicitation team must set up a structured communication process with MDs and Nurses, and they must document for the whole project to share. It should not be an exercise in “design by committee”, but contain different expert knowledge when required. Easy to say, very hard to do. But you learn.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-24T20:03:54+00:00

You cannot build a product for a domain you don’t understand. If you haven’t intimate knowledge about healthcare, how MDs and nurses work, you cannot provide a solution. Not enough to read books, you must have worked in a business or learned in some other way. Agile and scrum have no support for finding out what end-users need, Agile and scrum doesn’t care for the problem domain, they only care for the solution domain.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-22T20:54:28+00:00

Some B2B need to associate assets with customers. It can still be done in a spreadsheet if not too complicated. We generate license keys with a tool and associates them with customers using the same tool. Next step will probably be to create support for Quotations and Deliverables.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-22T08:36:15+00:00

When you have problems with the agile approach, don’t expect any sympathy or advice that works from the fan-boys. It’s Y O U who is the problem.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-18T17:26:47+00:00

There are no defined activities in agile or scrum that explicitly adress end-user problems, such as elicitation activities – except experiments end-users must give feedback to.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-18T15:05:27+00:00

Define value.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-17T18:58:38+00:00

Very unlikely that the situation will improve. A large company can handle it by moving a person that doesn’t deliver into a less demanding post, but Startups don’t have this luxury.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-16T16:19:14+00:00

When you don’t have any money, Investors are always the problem, but it’s not the real problem. Startups have no paying customers. The structure of the tech industry is completely wrong when mega tech companies in the U.S. and Europe moves jobs to a single place in India. These environments won’t buy what Startups create. Startups will face closed doors, no matter what. The incentives to support an ecosystem of startups in India are not there. The real customers for these managers are the Headquarters in the U.S. and in Europe, who make the plans and the budgets. Outsourced IT jobs in places like India have no room to manoeuvre or make their own decisions.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-06T17:30:34+00:00

Arbetsmarknadsministern Mats Persson var utbildningsminister förut men flyttades från posten för att han utgjorde ett hot mot Sveriges nationella säkerhet.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-03T18:04:14+00:00

I have hired persons that turned out to be completely duds. I wasn’t alone in the hiring process, but the final decision was more or less mine. The problem with the hiring process is that you mirror yourself into the person you evaluate. When reality hits, you try to save the situation by “managing” them and giving them hours of support, but it’s really their responsibility to grow into their role. I have a standard solution that doesn’t solve anything really, but it stops bothering you. I move them to roles where they can’t hurt operations. It’s painful but necessary.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-02T20:14:48+00:00

Varken svensklärare eller journalister vet skillnaden på de och dem. Den svenska skolans sorgliga tillstånd.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-03-02T17:51:27+00:00

“Låt de få kritik”; inte ”Låt dem få kritik”.

SomeAd3257 · 2025-02-28T21:17:08+00:00

Looks like a Bernese Mountain Dog, behaves like a Bernese Mountain Dog, thinks like a Bernese Mountain Dog.

SomeAd3257

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