Episodes
68
Latest episode
Jun 2026
Language
EN-US
World-class software development requires far more than language/platform expertise and steady sprints. Join us as we describe time-tested, industry-proven software best practices at the team, organization, and leadership levels, sharing examples from recent engagements with software teams of all sizes. Construx is led by industry leader Steve McConnell, author of Code Complete and More Effective Agile . Software experts first and software trainers and consultants second, our team has seen what works and doesn’t work in hundreds of software organizations. Host Mark Griffin spent the first half of his career as an electrical engineer doing silicon hardware design and leading software automation teams. He moved into the sales side of software because he wanted to spread the value of what his company was building. It was supposed to be a one-year assignment that turned into the second half of his career. His balance of deeply technical skills and right-brain artistry also makes him a masterful home brewer!
Everyone knows that a Scrum team should do the value-added work of the product backlog. But there are other types of work that may or may not make it into that backlog, yet these types of work are critical for a well-functioning Scrum team. Join Construx’s Earl Beede, Steve Tockey and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt four types of work that should be part of every sprint plan.
Measurement is all about assigning a value or a symbol to an attribute of an entity. Doing it right can reduce project risk. Join Construx's Earl Beede, Steve Tockey and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt how measurement theory impacts your project, potentially increasing risk if you get it wrong.
Why do we keep working on something long past the point where we should have stopped? Join Construx’s Earl Beede, Steve Tockey and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt the various ways we trick ourselves into thinking, “Well, we already spent this much time or money; we can’t afford to lose that!” Find out how much the sunk cost fallacy is costing you.
"How do you estimate something you’ve never done before?" Construx gets that question a lot. This podcast identifies how to approach estimating when you have a lot of unknown items. Join Construx's Earl Beede and Steve Tockey as they look at techniques for making the unknown less unknown, bounding the uncertainty, and planning through the unknown. Hosted by Mark Griffin
Design by Contract is used by advanced developers to lower defects and reduce complexity, making development faster. Construx staff experience for over two decades in a variety of languages ranging from Assembler to Java is consistent with these benefits. Join Steve Tockey, Earl Beede, and Mark Griffin as they discuss why Design by Contract is so beneficial, with particular emphasis on how it reduces code defects, makes remaining defects easier to find and fix, and reduces complexity.
Acceptance criteria are the criteria for acceptance, or so the helpful online definitions say. But what does that really mean? And is the common—almost universal—advice to write little functional snippets correct? Join Steve Tockey and Earl Beede as they Inspect & Adapt Acceptance Criteria. They'll take a look from several angles and suggest ways to make acceptance criteria much more useful for your projects. Hosted by Mark Griffin.
Project risk management was a critical part of well-run software development projects late in the last century. With the coming of agile development practices, however, risk management disappeared. Or did it? Steve Tockey and Earl Beede Inspect & Adapt the role of project risk management on modern development projects. They identify when it is still needed, where it is still happening, and how it can improve your project outcomes. Hosted by Mark Griffin.
Scaling software development is hard. Several patterns have emerged that moderately successful organizations use when scaling. The patterns focus on how to package the work, where and when to make decisions, and how to get teams to collaborate. Join Mark Griffin, Earl Beede, and Steve Tockey as they explore scaling patterns.
All development organizations use software's F word: Feature. But what they actually mean by the word is often unclear, since the software industry has two—somewhat incompatible—definitions of feature. Join host Mark Griffin as he asks Construx's Steve Tockey and Earl Beede to explain those two different uses of the word feature on development projects.
Total Project Quality, Construx's course on how to insert quality throughout a work effort, hasn't always gotten the traction it deserves. Why not? In this podcast, we examine the subject of quality and our (perhaps poorly-named) Total Project Quality seminar. Join Construx's Steve Tockey, Earl Beede, and Mark Griffin as they Inspect & Adapt the Total Project Quality course, the topic of quality in general, and the practical things you can do to improve quality and efficiency on your projects.
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