Category: R&D Management

Published on 26 January

Feature Flags as Business Enablers

By Alexander FO , In R&D Management, Software Architecture

Introduction Deploying code while working in a team can be tricky. If you have multiple developers working on the same repository orchestrating the feature release becomes problematic. Teams usually ask themselves whether a they can deploy to production their current dev branch and whether such a deploy process will be safe and won’t break existing features and/or introduce non working untested new features to the production environment. Features flags can be a mechanism that allow safe deployment of entire branches thus reducing the lead time of features from the developer’s laptop to …

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Published on 11 May

What Exactly Does An Engineering Manager Do? A Candid Look

By Alexander FO , In R&D Management

Introduction Engineering is the department in the organization that actually builds the product that the enterprise sells. In the world of the knowledge worker, employees don’t stand near the assembly line tightening screws. The modern knowledge worker is a software developer who creates products using code. The role of the engineering manager, likewise, doesn’t resemble the worker of an overseer or foreman in a factory. This post is about what an engineering manager does and what exactly their role is in the department in particular and in the enterprise in general. Beginnings …

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Published on 11 April

How to Conduct a Developer Performance Review

By Alexander FO , In R&D Management

Performance reviews are a common and well-established practice in almost all companies, from startups to large enterprises. In this post, I’ll give my take on how to conduct an effective performance review for developers. I’ll provide general guidelines that apply to any profession. In addition, I’ll provide some tips that apply specifically to conducting performance reviews with developers. What Performance Reviews Do Regardless of the type of company you work for, performance reviews accomplish the following: The employee can give feedback about their general well-being and attitude toward their particular position and …

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Published on 18 January

Agile Project Management: The Field Guide

By Alexander FO , In R&D Management

Software projects differ from projects in other engineering disciplines. For instance, if you think about a construction project that’s late and off schedule, you’ll (rightfully) think that adding more construction workers to the pool of employees working on the project will speed things up. The same happens for software projects, no? Well, no. It doesn’t. As described in the seminal book The Mythical Man-Month, “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” (p. 25). How can that be?  This post is about agile project management in software projects and will try to …

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