A few of the most popular articles are listed here, with a bit of each one included to get you started …
Coding Standards Are A Waste Of Time
You’ve been working for hours to figure out why the system you have delivered fails very occasionally.
You have good bug reports that show it takes about 25 days of continuous run time for the failure to occur, and it’s happened at 4 different sites now. You get a spidey sense that it might be related to a timer and pull out your phone and fire up Free-42 (because you like RPN calculators). The math for a 1 msec timer interval says that a 32 bit unsigned int should be good for about 50 days … wait a minute. The restarts happen about 25 days apart!
You find the place where someone did a calculation with the clock using signed instead of unsigned values, and mumble “I wish that we had a coding standard to catch this”.
Said nobody. Ever.
What you really needed was a Developer’s Guide for this project, a test-driven development mindset, and a review process that could work together with continuous integration to have a better chance at catching the problem.
Of course the title is designed to catch your eye, and a coding standard is not a bad thing. Just pick one that’s already out there like the Linux Kernel or MicroPython coding standard and call it a day.
Let's Be Innovative!
Your department has undergone another re-organization because … actually it doesn’t matter. The goal was to step-change the innovation culture so that your company can quickly deliver world-class experiences that delight your customers and exceed their expectations.
Sound familiar? Depressingly familiar? Wasn’t this supposed to be one of the outcomes of the last reorganization? What happened?
First, take heart. Leadership doesn’t wake up one morning and decide on how to make things worse. There is a genuine desire to make things better - what’s missing sometimes is asking the hard questions that drive change in the right direction.
Let’s have a look at why innovation is so hard to achieve in some business environments, and what we can do to turn things around. This is definitely not a list of “5 Easy Ways To Innovate” - it’s more about taking stock of where your organization is today, and deciding on the first steps towards where you want it to be.