Boston Continuous Deployment Engineer SCRUM 
Startup Lessons Learned
MARCH 16, 2009
XP and Scrum don’t have much to say - they punt. If you look at the origins of most agile systems, including Scrum and XP , they come out of experiences in big companies. Both Scrum and XP had a role which you could happily call by the modern title "Product Manager". Embedded in that assumption is why startups fail.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 15, 2008
See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. I would add -- think of your development and running your business like a PM/Developer uses Agile or Scrum in software development. No more, no less.
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Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 10, 2008
If you want to do continuous deployment, youd better be able to certify that build too, which brings us to. Daily builds are giving way to true continuous integration, in which every checkin to the source control system is automatically run against the full battery of automated tests. Do you make daily builds?
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 5, 2008
The VP Engineering spends all of his time trying to make sure the programmers understand and implement the spec. Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Each iteration takes longer than the previous one.
Startup Lessons Learned
NOVEMBER 18, 2008
At IMVU , we called this person a Producer (revealing our games background); in Scrum , they are called the Product Owner. Thus the power of the Chief Engineer is very large even though he (and they are all men so far) has no direct reports other than a secretary and a few assistants who are themselves being trained to be chief engineers.
Startup Lessons Learned
JULY 29, 2009
We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. One last thought.
Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 9, 2009
No engineering team. But where it makes sense, that team may also include engineers building new experiments or prototypes to try with customers. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. You need a problem team and a solution team."
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