Month: January 2014

  • Failure Rates
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    Failure Rates

    “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”—Thomas J. Watson, IBM

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  • Pair-Author Backlog Items for Faster, Better Results

    Pair-Author Backlog Items for Faster, Better Results

    Product Backlog Item (PBI) writing in Scrum is best done by pairing a Product Owner with an architect or team member. The Product Owner brings a stakeholder perspective to the table, and PBIs should include that “value perspective” in every case. When the PO is not “primary”, you get PBIs that have no demonstrable stakeholder…

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  • How We Charge Our Clients

    How We Charge Our Clients

    Senex Rex charges by the day, not the hour. This allows us to focus, to think, to innovate. Tracking time obsessively, as many lawyers and consultants do, turns them into automatons who can follow the rules, color inside the lines, who might take a dysfunctional situation and make it average. We’re reasonable, of course. If…

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  • Agile Resolutions
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    Agile Resolutions

    January is “New Years Resolution Month” for me. I plan what I’ll improve in the rest of the year and how I’ll do it. Roughly 88% of people who make New Years Resolutions fail [Lehrer 2009]. Twenty years ago, software projects had extremely high failure rates like this. The software industry started adopting “agile” management…

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