When I started at my current job one of the things I was excited about was the chance to use trunk based development. I had wanted to see it in use on a larger project for a while, as most of my previous experience was with branch based development. A quick description of how I worked before and how I work now. On…

Identify your issues npm audit Start here to identify your issues. Click the links and read about the problem, it’s a good way to learn! Fixing your issues If you’re lucky, npm audit fix will fix your issues. It updates packages to versions that won’t cause breaking changes where available. …

At the beginning of this year I was presented with an excellent opportunity to compare estimation methods. We had several pieces of work required on a service which I had bundled up so we could work on them all in one go. The work Visual redesign of the website We had a fairly nebulous request to refresh…

Originally published at https://eleanormollett.com on the 1st February 2020 I heard about the concept of being the shit umbrella right at the beginning of my time as a delivery manager. In my experience, it’s spoken of as a badge of honour by delivery and product managers, and often wistfully of…

Originally published at https://eleanormollett.com on the 20th April 2020 It’s now over a month since we’ve been working remotely. Before this all happened I had been planning on writing a post about how we were steadily removing columns from our board, some of the techniques we had used to replace…

How delivery managers and product managers can encourage and support pairing by developers — Pairing has come up a few times in discussions I’ve had about good practice on delivery teams, and there still seems to be reluctance to champion it, or even embrace it. Sometimes this comes from the delivery manager themselves, but more often from a general feeling that their organisation won’t…

Recently I built my own react app to learn more about react and get in some coding practice. I am a delivery manager and don’t often get the chance to code day to day, so have set it as my learning and development objective. Once I had it written, I…

As most of these posts have, I’ll start this one with “I’m really not that fond of roadmaps” — I tend to find them very restrictive. The roadmaps I’ve seen before have tended to be linear, and have dates. This is the entire point in a roadmap for some people…

For a long time, I have avoided estimation. I’ve generally found that story count and cycle time has served me well enough if I do need to provide forecasts, and I have only provided ‘how long might this particular feature take’ forecasts, rather than “when will I get all of…