26 Heuristics For Effective Software Development - Allen Holub

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In this talk, you’ll learn how to leverage Allen Holub’s 26 rules of thumb to create a highly effective software organization. You’ll learn how to infuse real agility (as compared to “Agile”) into your organization.

[@rogerdeutsch5883]

“The most effective organizations are learning organizations. Learning is The Work.” 38:35
Wish more orgs knew this and understood the truth of it.
Fantastic talk

[@piesho]

28:51 The name of that book is "The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge.

[@TheJimNicholson]

I have a vision in my head of having Alan speak to the IT leadership in my organization, but I always end up thinking it would have to look like that scene from Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" where they have the protagonist tied to a chair with devices that force him to keep his eyes open and watch the re-programming.

[@HiddenUsename]

And what were the user stories when IBM was writing DB2? All this "user stories" is crap that Web brought upon us. What's really needed is a smart guy who talks to the users and specs out the features. What you rally need is smart guys. And this is the crux of the issue: all this BS about respect, etc comes from an assumption that you have high quality people on your team. The kind of ppl who signed the Manifesto for Agile Development. Smart and passionate. The reality is far from it. you have to deal with mediocre lazy developers. Which is also doable but the Agile is not the way to make them deliver a decent product. You need a rigid process for that. You need to do it the way the Army does it. And I saw it done in 1990s

[@nuvotion-live]

Assume you have really smart capable people on a project. What resources do you recommend reading on software development process?

[@HiddenUsename]

@@nuvotion-live Simon Brown C4 stuff and everything by Coplien. Anything that's not TDD bs push. But thing is, you never have a team of really smart capable ppl, except in rare cases like some startup or Google Go lang team. U need to be able to make average, often mediocre ppl deliver decent product. And it's done with leadership, mentoring, discipline. I saw it done at IBM. The army like approach.

[@HiddenUsename]

@@nuvotion-live the whole point is that there is no single magic process. the process is established by the senior people on the team, just like a lead surgeon set the process for his team. Read Fred Brooks, he wrote a lot about it.
Same goes for the coding standards. No BS like TDD or some other crap like that.

[@alexanderpodkopaev6691]

​@avsync-live anything published before 2010 should work if uou have real professionals, as they would be capable to choose approach and adjust it to needs. As one ex-M$ project manager wrote, all software development books describe dancing around developers while they wrote code. And yes, it does much more sense if all you've got is mediocrity.

[@HiddenUsename]

@@alexanderpodkopaev6691
if uou have real professionals,
And this is the key! What the last 10 years have been is an attempt to make mediocre ppl deliver something via a process rooted in maximizing FUN for those mediocrities.