Following a recent roundtable, Jeff Van Fleet, Lighthouse President and CEO, has one question on his mind: is the software community sharing its knowledge?
Photo courtesy of Roman Kruglov (Creative Commons)
| To some of you, it may not be obvious that by sharing your experiences and solutions to problems, you’re empowering others to do the same. You provide yourself (and others) an opportunity to learn what each other is doing, reinforce what you’ve learned, and grow professionally. |
Happy Spring!! I hope you are having a great week and enjoying the sunshine, warmer weather, and the beautiful flowers.
Two weeks ago in Cincinnati, we had the opportunity to gather with a room full of senior software managers and executives to discuss how to best reduce software project delays and overruns. Everyone experiences these—some more extreme than others—and there are a number of techniques that people are utilizing that are having a positive impact. We discussed how software defects (not just code defects, but requirements, stories, and design defects), poor planning, and lack of visibility cause unplanned rework which results in significant project delays and overruns. Everyone in the room shared their ideas to address these problems, including moving toward Agile and iterative development methodologies (i.e., smaller is better), performing requirements inspections, automating regression tests, utilizing actionable metrics, etc. It’s one thing to read about solutions in a book, but it’s far better to learn from someone who has pragmatic experience in implementing them. One of the big “Aha moments” for us came at the end of the discussion—not only did everyone feel the meeting was valuable; they all wanted to meet again and continue the dialogue on a recurring basis!
This got me thinking about whether we, the software community, are sharing our knowledge. To some of you, it may not be obvious that by sharing your experiences and solutions to problems, you’re empowering others to do the same. You provide yourself (and others) an opportunity to learn what each other is doing, reinforce what you’ve learned, and grow professionally. Here’s a great article from Forbes on the value of sharing your knowledge. I challenge you to get involved with your regional technology organization, attend roundtable discussions with your peers, and mentor a younger professional. Help someone else and we all grow.
Because our events in Cleveland and Cincinnati have been so successful, we‘ve started expanding throughout the Midwest and Southeast. Come join us at an upcoming event, or feel free to suggest one in your region. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your experiences in sharing your knowledge.
Keep having fun,
Jeff Van Fleet
President and CEO
Lighthouse Technologies, Inc
Software Testing | Quality Assurance Consulting | Oracle EBS Consulting
