Socratic questions revisited [infographic]

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post examining Socratic Questions. Socratic Questions are a method of pull influencing that can be used to stimulate critical thinking. To help make the question types easier to understand and remember for use in practice, I have gone back and created an infographic illustrating the 6 types of questions. The infographic is shown below (click on the infographic for the full size version). »

Continuous delivery tool landscape

I have been having a lot of discussions recently about tooling to support continuous delivery and DevOps practices. There is an incredible and ever increasing array of tools available for these practices. Whilst a number of vendors have developed one-stop solutions or suites of integrated tools, many of the tools in the space tend to be tightly focused on addressing a particular problem. Unfortunatley this can be confusing and overwhelming, especially to people starting out, making it difficult to know where to start and which tools to consider. »

Using data to identify the impact of Southern Rail industrial action

I, like many others, have been affected by the ongoing industrial dispute over Driver Only Operation (DOO) on Southern Railways. On some days this amounts to delayed or cancelled trains with extended journey times and the inconvenience of standing all the way into London and on others, like today, strikes leave no viable way of getting to work in London at all. There have been many attempts to measure and demonstrate the impact of the industrial action such as the use of the #todayimissed hashtag on Twitter (see below), a recent passenger survey conducted by The Association of British Commuters and even a tongue-in-cheek video game. »

Standardisation in the Enterprise

In enterprises there is often a strong desire to standardise. The reasoning is simple: if we are all doing things the same way, using the same technology, then we can simplify our operations, benefit from economies of scale and make our people more fungible. So by extension, not standardising means duplicated effort, resources and expenditure. But are things really this clear cut? Perhaps we should begin by thinking about the meaning of the word standardisation and understanding the alternatives. »

Remote pair programming

During a previous job I spent a lot of time working with delivery teams on other continents, helping them develop software. I was lucky enough to visit them on several occassions for a week at a time, and whilst I was there made lots of progress working with the on-site developers. Unfortunatley I was not able to stay on-site for the duration of the project and so needed to find other ways of collaborating with the teams remotely from back in the UK. »