Barney Dellar

In Agile tech circles, we often talk about "slowing down to speed up". For years, I've had a good gut instinct that this is true, but I’ve never untangled that paradox properly. Because slowing down makes you go slower, by definition. What is it about slowing down that paradoxically allows us to go faster? Yesterday, me and my team did an Escape Room together. We did it all together, and solved the problems collaboratively. It struck me that it would be a good learning opportunity to reflect on whether it was faster to work collectively, or if we'd have been faster if we worked individually, but in parallel. But something about the analogy with software development didn't feel right. And then it hit me. There's a missing feedback loop with Escape Rooms. The way we solve the puzzles now has absolutely no effect on the difficulty of the next puzzles, or the puzzles that we'll face next time we do an Escape Room. But in software development, the solutions we...

 I've been doing Yoga for a few years now, and its now part of my daily routine. And as it has become part of my life, I've been reflecting on the lessons that I've learnt from the practice, and how they relate to the world of creating and changing software. Pausing In Yoga, we focus on our breathing, to calm and centre ourselves. We breathe in, we breathe out. And there's a small pause after we've inhaled, right before we exhale. And similarly, there's a larger pause in between each breath. We act, then we pause. Similarly, at the end of a Yoga session, we rest in Shavasana. We lie on our backs, and relax completely, for several minutes. This is a pause to let us relax, to loose any tension, and  to create a buffer between the Yoga and our busy daily lives. We act, and then we pause.  And when we write software, it can be tempting to skip breaks. We might work for a whole morning without stopping. Or we might finish a sprint, and go straight into the next sprin...