• Why do release planning? "A release plan helps a team avoid finishing a series of sprints and feeling that, while they always worked on the highest priority items, the collection of work completed does not add up to a satisfying whole."
  • Built to Learn: "No marketing team. No engineering team. You need a problem team and a solution team."
  • I'm really enjoying reading Steve Blank at the moment, particularly his war stories of understanding the customers and building the marketing department of a US startup in the early 80s.
  • Large-scale software engineering and kanban, touching on branching-by-feature, something we're gradually leaning (ho ho) towards at FP...
  • Matt Wynne on automated acceptance testing: "prioritising the tests with the highest chance of failure seems to be the key here: The reason write automated tests is because we want rapid reliable feedback about any mistakes we’ve made. Fail fast has long been a motto of XP teams, but perhaps we’ve forgotten how it can relate to our build."
  • The Fog Creek Professional Ladder; I plotted us on this, and was pleasantly surprised to see we have - broadly, but not exactly, and certainly more by luck than judgement so far - achieved a similar mapping.
  • The Pomorodo Technique for personal time management. I tried this today, and will be continuing it throughout the week to see if it makes any difference. Nike+ proved to me that monitoring my own behaviour modifies it (for the better, in that case). Let's see...
  • We tried baseball, and it didn't work. Heh.
  • Five whys. NEVER USE THIS IN PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS.