Steve Vaughn is a twenty-year survivor of the IT wars. He has worked a variety of organizations as a software developer, architect, and ScrumMaster. Steve has spent the past five years attempting the impossible—managing software developers. He is now using this experience to act as an agile coach and help develop high-performing teams.
A new battle has begun in which the combatants are familiar and the prize is your car’s dashboard. Steve Vaughn explains that in 2014 Google and Apple have decided to bring the fight to Microsoft with a major push in the area of connected cars.
In another twenty years our current Internet will seem just as archaic as 2004 does today, and we might very well look back at 2014 as the seminal year when everything changed. The new Internet will leverage wearable computers, anticipatory computing, and user context to deliver data.
Wearable computing requires that an app be designed to complement a user’s activities without creating a barrier between the user and the outside world. Finding the sweet spot between these two constraints is the challenge developers face.
Chances are you have overheard developers in your office talk about APIs, but you might have just shrugged it off as more boring tech talk or a vague Star Trek reference. What you might not know is that APIs are a technology architecture that is transforming the IT economy.
Steve Vaughn writes that if your team is not planning for future releases, someone else will plan them for you. Teams must embrace the fact that strategic planning will happen and take ownership of the process.
Many companies swear by stack ranking, citing retention of high performers and the ability to track performance as two of the biggest benefits. Despite these claims, stack ranking has numerous unintentional side effects that work against a culture of innovation.
Agile has become the primary mechanism by which normally incompatible roles crossbreed and create distinctive positions that bring great value to a company. Steve Vaughn writes on how agile has led to the creation of a new role—the technical product owner—that has benefited his team.
