Codeslinger

I have worked for small and large tech companies, and as I was sitting through the latest training course this week on the importance of obtaining patents for business purposes (a distasteful but necessary thing in the modern litigious world), I was reflecting on how much more innovative smaller companies tend to be. This is, of course, the general perception also, but it's really reflective of the realities of how companies operate which motivates this outcome, and this is fairly easy to see when you've worked in both environments. So, I'm going to write about this a bit. As a bit of background, I have two patents to my name, both from when I worked in a small company. Both are marginally interesting (more so than the standard big company patents, anyway), and both are based on work I did in the course of my job. I didn't strive to get either; the company just obtained them after the fact for business value. I have no idea if either has ever been tested or leveraged, a...

Note: This post is intended to be a tongue-in-cheek take, based on an amalgam of experiences and anecdotes, and is not necessarily representative of any specific organization. That said, if your org does one or more of these things, it might be beneficial to examine if those practices are really beneficial to the org or not. The following is a collection of things you should not do when trying to do Agile, imho; these practices either run counter to the spirit of the methodology, will likely impede realizing the value from doing such, and/or demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept(s). Mandating practices top-down One of the core precepts of Agile is that it is a "bottom-up" organization system, which is intended to allow developers to tweak the process over time to optimize their own results. Moreover, it is very important in terms of buy-in for developers to feel like the process is serving the needs of development first and foremost. When mandated from out...