The Latest

A letter from the Better Software magazine editor.

In today's organizations, everyone is expected to lead. If you've been waiting for a leadership role to come to you, it might be time to step up and seek out your opportunity to be a leader. Look around you: Self-proclaimed leaders are receiving interesting projects, building enviable careers, and being promoted. In this article, we'll take a look at how Seth Godin's book Tribes can provide a useful framework for leading from the ground up.

Russell Pannone writes that there is inherent uncertainty and complexity in system-software development; you just don’t know what you don’t know. In agile and lean, accuracy (the measure of bias) and precision (the measure of spread) are very important when making a commitment for what you are going to get done in an iteration, but not so important when making an estimate for how long you think it will take you to develop and deliver the entire product.

Michael Spayd - Agile 2010 - Coaching Coaches

Your issue-tracking and version-management systems are powerful tools that you can use to help you manage change and improve team and individual productivity. This article provides some simple advice on how to use your tracking system to be more productive without introducing excessive overhead.

Assembling a group of people and declaring them a team doesn’t make them one. Do you have the conditions necessary for the team to form? What activities have they completed to help them find an identity, their purpose, and how they’ll interact with each other?

The age-old expression "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" is still true to this day. So often the way we greet people, or fail to greet them, sets an irreversible path of leaving others feel completely unwelcome, even if that wasn't the intention.