ZeroBlockers
Helping teams remove the blockers that hurt the effectiveness and efficiency of software development.
Latest Posts
Evolutionary Architecture: Because Change is the Only Guarantee
One of the big risks of empowering teams is that you lose the centralised control over the system architecture. Empowered teams require the ability to go from idea to satisfied customers without relying on external approvals like architecture reviews. So how do companies prevent their systems degrading into a big ball of mud?
Archive
Evolutionary Architecture: Because Change is the Only Guarantee
One of the big risks of empowering teams is that you lose the centralised control over the system architecture. Empowered teams require the ability to go from idea to satisfied customers without relying on external approvals like architecture reviews. So how do companies prevent their systems degrading into a big ball of mud?
How to Decide Where to Focus your Engineering Efforts (using Wardley Mapping)
"It's just a few requirements, we can knock that out really quickly". The famous last words of many a developer before a project begins its painful death march. The problem is that things tend to be a lot more complex than we initially expect. Fortunately, there are tools that can help us understand the landscape of a project and make better decisions about where to focus our efforts.
Breaking a Complex Solution into Multiple Releases using User Story Mapping
We've been handed a high quality and detailed validated prototype to build. The only problem is that it will take weeks or months to build out the full solution. We need to release value to the business quicker, so we need to break our solution into multiple releases.
Managing Test Case Explosion with Feature Flags: Strategies and Solutions
Feature flags let development teams commit code while still working on a feature to reduce the risk of merge conflicts, and to enable them to release features incrementally.. However, they come with a significant challenge: test case explosion. As each feature flag essentially creates a duplicate version of the system, the number of potential paths requiring testing grows exponentially.
DevOps: A Cultural Change, Not a Technical Revolution
DevOps is often framed as a technical solution: continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, automated testing, and infrastructure as code. These practices indeed form the backbone of DevOps but the technology would be pointless without the necessary cultural changes.
The Hidden Costs of Big Design Up Front (And How to Avoid Them)
When you're building a software system a single new requirement can result in a complete redesign of the solution. While Agile software development advocates for iterative design, this risk of rework leads a lot of companies to continue the Waterfall practice of completing a Big Design Up Front (BDUF) before beginning development. But it's not as straightforward as it seems. BDUF can be a double-edged sword because, while it can help you avoid rework, there are downsides to this approach as well.
When is Enough, Enough? Or When Do You Stop Testing and Start Building?
The biggest risk in product development is building products that customers don't want. But the next biggest risk is analysis paralysis where we spend all of our time (and budget) trying to evaluate whether we are building the right thing. Real product success relies on finding the right balance between these two extremes.
How to Moderate a Usability Test: A Comprehensive Guide
When planning usability tests, one of the first critical decisions is choosing between moderated and unmoderated sessions. While unmoderated testing offers cost efficiency and scalability, it often falls short in providing deep qualitative insights. Moderated sessions, particularly valuable for early-stage designs and complex systems, allow teams to uncover rich, nuanced feedback that can prove even more valuable than quantitative data. In this article, we go into detail on how to effectively moderate a usability test.
How to Create an Experiment Plan (And Why)
It is far too easy to fall into the trap of believing that customers will love what we are building. That is why we go to the effort of breaking down our solutions, identifying assumptions, and then trying to evaluate them. But there is still one hurdle left to overcome - our bias.