economy

Trade-off: Go For Quality

What typically happens when product development decides to create a superior product? The most likely result is 1. slower delivery or 2. costlier development or 3. both slower delivery and costlier development. Why? You don’t get something for nothing. Producing a higher quality product takes more development time, which delays delivery to the customer and [...]

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Trade-off: Go For Speed

The people whose opinion counts the most choose to go for faster delivery speed. Their thinking may be sound; in this case, they want to beat their competitors to market. Choosing faster product delivery visibly sacrifices product quality and, in my experience, it often invisibly sacrifices the economy of product support. In this post, I [...]

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Rethinking Employee Rewards 2 of 3

In my first entry on employee rewards, I emphasized the importance of knowing the recipient well enough to reward them with something that is meaningful to them. But there is more to effective reward programs than providing a meaningful award. Let’s take a step back and explore answers to the questions: What is the purpose [...]

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Rethinking Stand-Up Meetings, Part 2

I argued in my first article about stand-up meetings that the right participants were the key to a successful meeting rather than whether the participants were standing up or sitting down. Despite my dislike for forcing people to stand up, I mentioned in that article my positive regard for other elements of the standard stand-up [...]

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Looking Back, Looking Forward

Have you every compared your skills to another person? How about upping the comparison by comparing yourself to an earlier version of yourself? In this article, I compare my skills today with my skills 20 years earlier. First published by Software Testing and Quality Magazine Volume 2 Issue 2 March/April 2000. <> I’m forty-five, with [...]

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