July 9, 2020

» 4 rules for intuitive UX, specifically (also) meant for developers. These rules are:

  1. Obey the Law of Locality
  2. ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
  3. Pass the Squint Test
  4. Teach by example

All these rules come with great and examples.

» Should you re-estimate your work while you do it or not?, discussed in the context of agile estimation techniques. My stance is to never re-estimate after work has been started, even if it’s a huge outlier. Because we tend to only re-estimate stuff where we have been too optimistic, and not items where we have been too pessimistic - which would then skew the final result. Also, even exceptional outliers are part of the usual business - they happen, and if we take them out by re estimating them, we assume that they will not happen in the future.

» Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?, authored by StackOverflow, which in itself is reason enough to read it.

I think one of the reasons why Scrum (or agility in general) has such as bad standing is because it tends to surface problems which are already there in the company, and makes them transparent. Consequently, it’s easier to shoot the messenger than to acknowledge and work on the problems.

» The longer something has taken, the longer it will take. This effect has a significant impact on any estimate on when an overdue project will finally be done - intuition and hope says it will be done soon, the math and experience says it won’t.

Related to that is the Lindy Effect: The longer a technology has been around, the longer it is likely to stay around. This has implications on, among other things, architecture.