career How work changed being a Tech Lead In this article I share the things that changed in my work life after becoming a Tech Lead. Especially I will cover how my contribution to the team changed and how my view changed in general.
career My Tech Lead journey I share my experiences of working in a Tech Lead role for the past two and a half years. I write about the fuzziness of the role and what my expectations and those of others have been at the beginning. Finally, no one can tell you what this role is about because every team is different.
agile Working in a non-agile environment When I write non-agile environment I do not necessarily mean an environment that does not use an agile methodologies like scrum or kanban. What I mean is an environment that
focus Email is a suboptimal medium for collaborative work The problems of an inbox are widely discussed. Switching attention because of your unread count leads to a context switch and loss of focus. One solution is to check your
agile When your partner starts improving the process I wrote about our retrospectives already in an earlier article. In this one, I would like to write about my personal experiences of changes that your partner suggests to the
agile My learnings as a part-time scrum master I experienced the pretty fast growth of a company I worked for, in which scrum is used as the development process. When companies grow, teams get bigger or new teams
agile The necessity of the scrum master role In one of my past articles I briefly mentioned the roles in a scrum team. One of them is the scrum master who guides the team to be successful applying
scrum Using an analog or a digital board A key point in scrum is transparency. To create transparency of the work of a team the board plays an integral part. A discussion point in multiple scrum teams I
agile Should I estimate my free-time tasks? When I started introducing agile methodologies in private life and in my family I thought I have to do it the right way. For me this included story estimation. It
agile Fail fast, fail often “Fail fast, fail often”. You read and hear this sentence a lot in the agile world. It is supposed to be a good practice. But why exactly is this a
agile A short introduction to Kanban Nowadays kanban is considered to be an agile software development methodology. In fact, it is also a synonym for a token that is running through a kanban system. Kanban has
family New Year's cleaning For some time already my wife and me take multiple people as an example to reduce the stuff we own and that usually accumulates in your shelves. Over the past
dogs When dogs are the better humans We have our dog for three years. Time passed by pretty quickly. I can say that I learned a lot in this time about dogs: how they behave, why they
focus Focus bursts The world in general and my environment specifically gets filled with more and more distractions. Concentrating and getting stuff done is not easy in this surrounding. There might be people
agile What to do in your retrospectives? I already gave a short overview of retrospectives in the context of software engineering teams. There are several books for this available and I won't go into detail about this.
prioritisation How to keep up with the tasks in your priority backlog? I already presented my actual priority backlog in a former article. When I started using it I asked myself how I will be able to really work on the priorities
agile The sprint length A sprint is an iteration and at its end user value should have been created. It includes the sprint planning at the beginning and at its end the sprint review
family The living agreement When a scrum team is founded one of the first things to do is to set up a working agreement. A working agreement is a contract between the members of
family Get your family on board: Scrum in the family Maybe your family is still manageable - only you and your partner. Maybe it is rather big with you, your partner, kids, a dog? Whatever the size of your family
agile Avoiding mistakes with the Not-To-Do-List In a previous article I wrote about how I try to keep focus when learning new things. While learning I made mistakes that - in retrospective - I would like
prioritisation Prioritising your ideas and projects As a software engineer - or any other kind of engineer I guess - it is kind of natural that you want to suck in as many cool technologies, programming
scrum Scrum: The team and the events In my last article I wrote about the agile methodology scrum in general. I promised to give you an overview of the events of scrum and the scrum team. So,
scrum What is this scrum all about? I am lucky to work in an environment where I have the chance to adapt to changing requirements in short periods of time. As outlined in an earlier article this
blogging How to get started with blogging My first blog started as an aid to memory for myself. I did not want to lose all those information that I collected over the course of a project. I
agile What does being agile mean? The Oxford Dictionary defines agile as being “Able to move quickly” and being “Able to think and understand quickly”. Years ago, a group of smart software engineers thought about how
