Read

Chapter 5 of the Sutherland book: Waste is a Crime

Assignment

This week, your team should be starting on making changes to your code base.  These may be small (!), but you should be guiding them toward tackling the highest priority task identified by your community partner.  The goal for the end of the week will be a working demo of your code.  How will you use the ideas in this chapter to get there??

As always with these journals, write about what you find compelling in the reading!!  Apply your reading to your planning, report on results, and reflect upon how this experience might influence future leadership approaches.

Thoughts to guide your planning and reflection:

• How does agile and scrum lessen the amount of work waste??  **
• In academia and business (more or less equally, since I’ve worked in both worlds), there are many, many activities that do not lead directly to the equivalent of “working code”.   What activities have you seen while working in internships, prior group projects, and maybe even the current group project that do not contribute value?  How might you prune them down?
• Both Neem Serra last week and this week’s reading caution against overworking.  Burnout is a major issue in software development because of a strong cultural tendency to use working long hours as a way to try to overcome structural problems in the development process and also to “signal” to management that you are committed to the job and want (“deserve”) a promotion.  How can you avoid overwork now and in the future??  How can you guide your team to do the same??
• Sutherland is strongly against multi-tasking.  Why?  Do you agree or disagree??

** Similar to the story at the beginning of the chapter, I worked on a software product for 3 years that sold almost no copies because the market it was aimed for (small to mid-sized banks) had been bought out by larger banks during the development period, and the remaining market was too skittish to invest in a major software product.