Inspect and Adapt

Intellectual property (IP) is an important consideration in all software development, but what is it? Contrux's Steve Tockey has spent significant time looking into IP and how it impacts software development. Steve is joined by Construx's Earl Beede and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt the different categories of IP and their impact on software.

Everyone knows that a Scrum team should do the value-added work of the product backlog. But there are other types of work that may or may not make it into that backlog, yet these types of work are critical for a well-functioning Scrum team. Join Construx’s Earl Beede , Steve Tockey and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt four types of work that should be part of every sprint plan.

Measurement is all about assigning a value or a symbol to an attribute of an entity. Doing it right can reduce project risk. Join Construx's Earl Beede , Steve Tockey and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt how measurement theory impacts your project, potentially increasing risk if you get it wrong.

Why do we keep working on something long past the point where we should have stopped? Join Construx’s Earl Beede , Steve Tockey and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt the various ways we trick ourselves into thinking, “Well, we already spent this much time or money; we can’t afford to lose that!” Find out how much the sunk cost fallacy is costing you.

"How do you estimate something you’ve never done before?" Construx gets that question a lot. This podcast identifies how to approach estimating when you have a lot of unknown items. Join Construx's Earl Beede and Steve Tockey as they look at techniques for making the unknown less unknown, bounding the uncertainty, and planning through the unknown. Hosted by Mark Griffin

Design by Contract is used by advanced developers to lower defects and reduce complexity, making development faster. Construx staff experience for over two decades in a variety of languages ranging from Assembler to Java is consistent with these benefits. Join Steve Tockey, Earl Beede, and Mark Griffin as they discuss why Design by Contract is so beneficial, with particular emphasis on how it reduces code defects, makes remaining defects easier to find and fix, and reduces complexity.

Acceptance criteria are the criteria for acceptance, or so the helpful online definitions say. But what does that really mean? And is the common—almost universal—advice to write little functional snippets correct? Join Steve Tockey and Earl Beede as they Inspect & Adapt Acceptance Criteria. They'll take a look from several angles and suggest ways to make acceptance criteria much more useful for your projects. Hosted by Mark Griffin.

Project risk management was a critical part of well-run software development projects late in the last century. With the coming of agile development practices, however, risk management disappeared. Or did it? Steve Tockey and Earl Beede Inspect & Adapt the role of project risk management on modern development projects. They identify when it is still needed, where it is still happening, and how it can improve your project outcomes. Hosted by Mark Griffin .

Scaling software development is hard. Several patterns have emerged that moderately successful organizations use when scaling. The patterns focus on how to package the work, where and when to make decisions, and how to get teams to collaborate. Join Mark Griffin, Earl Beede, and Steve Tockey as they explore scaling patterns.

All development organizations use software's F word: Feature . But what they actually mean by the word is often unclear, since the software industry has two—somewhat incompatible—definitions of feature . Join host Mark Griffin as he asks Construx's Steve Tockey and Earl Beede to explain those two different uses of the word feature on development projects.

Total Project Quality , Construx's course on how to insert quality throughout a work effort, hasn't always gotten the traction it deserves. Why not? In this podcast, we examine the subject of quality and our (perhaps poorly-named) Total Project Quality seminar. Join Construx's Steve Tockey , Earl Beede , and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt the Total Project Quality course, the topic of quality in general, and the practical things you can do to improve quality and efficiency on your projects.

We develop software primarily on teams, but how do you develop the teams? Construx's Mark Griffin and Earl Beede Inspect & Adapt the different ways you can organize your development team. They look at the pros and cons of different approaches and even offer some help for when you're stuck with a team organization that isn't the best.

How should you spend your always-limited testing resources? Is one part of the product more important to test than another? Construx's Steve Tockey and Earl Beede join host Mark Griffin in looking at one approach to answering those questions: risk-based testing. Steve and Earl look at how to do risk-based testing along with its pros and cons.

In an earlier webinar, Construx's Earl Beede took on many organizations that create product visions with phrases like, be the world's best ‘x’ or dazzle our customers . Not bad ideas but pretty much worthless in helping you make day-to-day decisions on what work is the most important for your business. This is a follow-up, with Earl and Mark Griffin delving a bit deeper into some of the questions that came up during the webinar. You can find the webinar here: https://youtu.be/yVA-k6aWE0k

Construx welcomes Onorio Catenacci to the microphone to ask questions about software development that continue to puzzle him and perhaps to see whether Construx has the answers. Join Contrux's Mark Griffin and Steve Tockey to see if they can give sound, helpful, and actionable answers to Onorio's questions—and find out whether Onorio can stump Construx!

Construx's Jenny Stuart is retiring from the software industry, and we will miss her! In this podcast, Jenny Stuart looks back on her three decades in the software industry and shares stories and wins from her long career. Joining Jenny are three of her Construx work companions for the last 20 years, Mark Griffin, Steve Tockey, and Earl Beede.

Why do software gurus keep talking about the Cynefin Framework? What is it? How is it even pronounced? In this episode of Inspect & Adapt, Construx puts many brains on the topic with Mark Griffin , Jenny Stuart , Steve Tockey , and Earl Beede making the link between Cynefin and doing actual software development work. They cover where Cynefin is best applied and where this sense-making system just doesn't make sense.

Most folks know that the product owner, scrum master, and developers make up the Scrum team, but did you know that these roles are also an accountability triad critical to scaling? In episode #52 of our Inspect & Adapt podcast, Construx’s Earl Beede and Jenny Stuart define the triad and describe its role in scaling agile. Earl and Jenny focus on how each abstraction level in a scaled agile deployment replicates the triad while maintaining the single point of truth (SPOT) rule for that level. They also identify some common pitfalls when the triad is not implemented well and help you see how the triad is a critical tool for your agility.

To be a professional usually means a commitment to ongoing professional development. Doctors, engineers, nurses, accountants, and teachers all require periodic training to maintain their professional status, but what constitutes professional development in software? Can we consider ourselves professional without it? The Construx team will look into the state of professional development in software and give their assessment.

The product owner is often considered the most critical accountability in the triad of <product owner, scrum master, developers>. Why? Because garbage in from the product owner gets garbage out of the developers, so it's crucial to give serious consideration to who is best to staff the product owner role. Listen to Construx experts share best practices, things to watch for, and stories from the field as they Inspect & Adapt the staffing of the product owner.