There is a lot to say about leadership. Personally, I consider it a skill that needs to be honed – and developed. There are lots of bosses in the companies out there that don’t have a clue about leadership – neither do I. I attended a couple of courses on leadership. It started off with a course called “From colleague to boss”, and I attended the Problem-solving Leadership course with Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, and Johanna Rothman. Most of them only made me aware about the things that I didn’t know, and the possible directions that I needed to learn more about. Let’s see where I have failed on leading dramatically in my past.

A couple of weeks back, I became aware of a fact about electronic tools that gives a large drag to using it. I see lots of teams struggle with electronic tools. Most of the times these work with a raped bug-tracking tool used for – well, I think – status reporting towards their ScrumMaster during the daily Scrum meeting. That’s broken on so many levels – at least that’s what most team members reported to me when a particular tool was inflicted on them. The infliction usually happens either by sunken cost syndrome (“we invested XXXXX amount of money in that, you need to use it!”) or other self-imposed factors causes (“we work on twelve different planets”, “this paper thing is too touchy for me”, “we are green here, we don’t kill trees”). Let’s explore some of the reasons behind that, and try to come up with clues on why these are broken, and what I think the worst thing about these is.

When I became a swimming trainer, I had to learn various ways to teach kids how to improve their swimming strokes. As part of a seven weekend education course, we not only heard about stuff, but also had to give training lessons to our classmates that proved that we were eligible to the trainer certification. In these courses I learned about a gentle technique that I lately noticed to apply in other fields as well – whether appropriate or not.

Over the past week I came to realize that fixed prices, fixed scope contracts are broken. I am not sure who came up with the concept, but I sense a larger dynamic at play. Let’s explore what’s causing so much trouble around fixed price, and fixed scope contracts.

Over the past few months I have become more and more convinced about the fact that specialization in software development – which includes programming, design, architecture, and testing to me – is a terrible idea. I don’t know when this came up in the history of our craft, and I think we need to stop it – now. I also know that I am probably upsetting some folks with these statements, still I think you should critically read this blog entry, and make up your own mind about the matter.