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Planning Poker: Avoiding Fallacies in Effort Estimates
Many years ago I was working as a software developer in a team with three other programmers. We once had a meeting in which our Team Leader said: “You are late again! All of you are late! Actually, you...
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Illusory Superiority: Are you a good programmer?
Programmers are known to be proud of their work. Some developers even feel that writing elegant code is a form of art, and thus they call themselves “software craftsmen”. I am sure that the desire to...
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The Psychology of Reviews: Distinction Bias, Evaluability Hypothesis and the...
Design Reviews are one of the most important activities in the software development process. If a bad design is approved and implemented, it is very expensive to correct that afterwards. Therefore, we...
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On Technical Debt and the Psychology of Risk Taking
I recently read the following message in a developers’ forum (rephrased here): “I’m facing a dilemma. I must deliver the product by the end of this quarter, but there are still many tests I would like...
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Reducing Technical Debt
Last week I traveled to Thessaloniki to participate in the Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAISE’14). I presented a paper at the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Information...
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Agile Practices and Social Nudges in the Workplace
In their best-selling book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness“, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein propose the adoption of interventions to “attempt to move people in...
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The Psychology of Agile Software Development
Why is Agile so successful? It is a fact that Agile methods have many enthusiastic practitioners, who are firm believers that the adoption of Agile processes has revolutionized the way they build...
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To document or not to document? An exploratory study on developers’...
Last week at Stockholm, Sweden, at the Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAISE’15), my colleague Yulia Shmerlin presented our paper at the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of...
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On Anzeneering, Pride and the Definition of Done (DoD)
The concept of Anzeneering was created by Joshua Kerievsky, CEO of Industrial Logic and author of the book “Refactoring to Patterns“. It is derived from the Japanese word “anzen” which means “safety”....
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When Software Development Depends on Individual Heroic Efforts
It is a well-known fact that many software projects fail. Thus it is natural to ask: what is the main contributor for the success of software projects, the processes or the people? In other words, we...
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