Matt Blodgett

Value, value, getting value to users. Work on the most valuable thing, always. You could probably summarize the Agile philosophy as "de...

Teams vary in the amount of handwringing their leaders do about sprints that aren't perfectly rightsized. What if we bit off too much wo...

Writing unit tests is one of those tasks that software engineers often see as tedious. In fact, I've heard from fellow engineers that un...

One of my optimistic beliefs about software engineers is that we're full of good ideas about how things around us could be improved. We...

The Product Owner has the final say in backlog prioritization. But who writes the backlog? Is it always the product owner? My experience ...

There are tensions in Scrum anywhere you have intra-sprint cycles that must resolve by the end of the sprint. In my last post I wrote about ...

After working for many years in the software industry, almost always using a methodology resembling Scrum, there are certain tensions that I...

Recently I was re-reading Joel Spolsky's classic blog post  The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code . I hadn't read that post in many...

Vision is so important in software development. Without the engineers understanding the overall vision, they can't resolve ambiguity in ...

It's interesting to listen to the word choices that people use in the daily standup . "I should be done with that today." ...

Spike is fun to say.  Spike! For the unfamiliar, the spike is a concept from Agile methodologies that means a time-boxed backlog item wher...

I wrote in 2017 a post called Don't Trap Your Clients in the Bikeshed . That post was about avoiding the trap of seeking feedback on tri...

I’m constantly shocked that business people don’t make much of an effort to communicate to engineers the impact of their work. It’s par for ...

Pull requests can be a pain to review, but there are things submitters can do to make them easier to manage. I have some opinions about wha...

A lot of companies have a regular practice of "Lunch & Learns"—a series where engineers within the company give a presentation...

I read a post by Max Countryman recently titled Let It Fail   ( Hacker News discussion ), where he talks about the importance of failure in ...

Fred Brooks passed away this month. I first wrote about him on this blog in April 2007 , right after I had finished reading his seminal boo...

I've written a lot about the concept of sustainability on this blog, and it's something I'm constantly thinking about with rega...

Have you ever heard that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it? I've had the experience several times when I've joined a ne...

When sprints are well planned and sustainably paced, it's natural to have developers who have finished all of their committed backlog it...