Posts tagged 3Amigos
Can We Breed Software Leaders, Faster?
- 2024/10/17
- reading-time:
15min
As the software industry continues to flourish, so does the need for mature leaders. In this evolving landscape, two primary goals emerge: motivating and supporting current (entry-level) leaders to grow and breeding a new generation of leaders. As seen in ‘Leading Technical Software Development is Hard! We Must Improve’, the software engineering landscape is evolving rapidly, increasing the demand for more engineers, and consequently, more leaders are needed. At the same time, Scrum (particularly Scrum) has led to smaller teams, making natural leadership progression harder; see ‘Did Scrum Kill the Leadership Route?’. We also have studied some cases in ‘No leaders, no appeal!’, showing what might happen when no experienced leaders are available.
In this blog, we will explore several well-known leadership development approaches, examine how to apply them in software development and determine if we can expedite the process.
No leaders, no appeal!
- 2024/09/06
- reading-time:
11min
After some theoretical reflections in ‘Leading Technical Software Development is Hard! We Must Improve’ and ‘Did Scrum Kill the Leadership Route?’ it is time for some real-world
examples.
What can go wrong without mature leadership?
Did Scrum Kill the Leadership Route?
- 2024/07/26
- reading-time:
6min
Scrum and other Agile methodologies have revolutionised software development, bringing many benefits like improved flexibility and faster delivery. However, they are not without drawbacks. Scrum, with a focus on short-term goals, has the drawback that long-term objectives may seem less important. This may become a significant issue for complex embedded systems. For big projects, with huge codebases and many developers, the importance of (short-term) sprint goals and (long-term) architecture will conflict. Other long-term objectives may have similar issues.
As we have seen in ‘Leading Technical Software Development is Hard! We Must Improve’ leadership is becoming more important, and that the natural growth
path for future leaders —in three axes (What, When & How)— has partly vanished. Maybe for the same
reason.
In this article, we study whether Scrum did have this undocumented, unintentional negative
effect. Later, we will show how to compensate for this.
Leading Technical Software Development is Hard! We Must Improve
- 2024/07/12
- reading-time:
8min
As embedded systems and technical software are becoming larger and larger, as well as more complex, leading those massive projects and teams is more vital than ever—and increasingly challenging. Engineers need substantial experience to lead these projects effectively. However, paradoxically, people seem to have less and less experience in working in big teams.
Adding to this dilemma are the typical role names for senior leadership, which are inflating. For
example, every (little) team nowadays has a software ‘architect’, whereas that role was called
(senior) developer before. As a result, when one needs a ‘real architect’ one is flooded by
juniors. Similarly, a ScrumMaster —once the agile, facilitating project leader— is now often just a
side-activity for a programmer.
But then who is overseeing a scope bigger than a few sprints? Is somebody in charge at the tactical level?
As a side effect, this blocks the desire to grow: many modern architects and ScrumMasters assume they are on top of the world already. In this blog, I describe the need for those leaders and what they need.