Software Engineering as a Craft An Article by Thomas Wilson thomaswilson.xyz The decreasingly tangible product of code, i.e. that all we have are files on a hard-drive, may make it easy to forget that writing software produces a thing. If you produce a wonky chair or an overly long fork, it’s easy to see the quality of work was not great. By calling for a perception of software as a craft, we fight against that ability to forget or not notice the final quality of the product. You could watch two software engineers with different levels of experience, or in different domains, and it wouldn’t necessarily be so easy to guess which is which, at least from a distance. So maybe there is something to be said for the value of software as a craft, for sometimes focusing on the practice of making better, or at least different, software just for the sake of it. craftsoftware
Why Scrum is killing your product An Article by Henry Latham uxdesign.cc Product owner vs. product managerWe optimize what we measure Beware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness agilemanagementsoftwareproducts
Product owner vs. product manager A Product Owner is focused on output i.e. how quickly can we build these features? Product Management, on the other hand, is focused on outcomes i.e. why are we building these features in the first place? agileproducts
We optimize what we measure Scrum does not say “only focus on output”, but, unfortunately, humans will optimize for what they measure. If you worry about story points & hitting your estimations, that’s what is going to consume your attention. That is what you and your team will optimize for. And that is the core critique of Scrum as it is practiced: That it focuses a product team’s attention so heavily on delivery — on building lots of features quickly & efficiently — that teams fail to focus on spending time to discover what the right thing to build is. optimizationagilefeatures