Having taken some college courses on Psychology, the subject has always been interesting. Recently while reading Introducing NLP, I came across The Four Stages of Learning. This struck a chord when thinking about the challenges encountered with organizational Agile adoption. The The Four Stages of Learning as described in the book are: 1. Unconscious Incompetence [...]

Posted in Agile 1 Comment »

Social awareness is a critical skill as a consultant. No, I’m not referring to the latest social networking technology, I’m talking about how well you navigate social interaction with others. It’s easy to fall into the habit of sitting at your desk all day long and coding. Coding is your job and hopefully you enjoy [...]

Posted in Agile 2 Comments »

In a recent discussion with a colleague, we were pondering the idea of how a coder can become a consultant. When I say coder, I’m referring to someone who has become skilled at the craft of developing software. This is not a junior developer, but a developer who has the ability to solve complex software [...]

Posted in Agile 3 Comments »

JBoss just published a white paper that describes how Seam enables rapid development of RIAs by eliminating technology hurdles and placing developer focus back on solving business problems. Specific enterprise use cases demonstrate how increasingly complex features can rapidly be introduced into a software product with Seam in an iterative fashion. The white paper is [...]

Posted in Agile, JBoss Seam 1 Comment »

It seems common for developers to look for faults in established technologies when an issue is encountered.  As a developer struggling to learn an unfamiliar technology, it is easy to make mistakes.  These mistakes lead to frustration which, in turn, can lead the developer to blame the technology rather than taking the time to analyze [...]

Posted in Agile 4 Comments »

Improving your development process takes time and effort, but always pays off in code quality and professionalism. When consulting for an organization I always recommend the following 5 steps that I feel are essential to any development process. You may already be using these recommendations in practice as they are all well-known techniques and tools [...]

Posted in Agile 5 Comments »