In the software world, the term 'imposter syndrome' has become a part of the common lexicon. It's so prevalent in our industry that even the mighty Jon Skeet wrote about it ... twice! Now if somebody as talented as the 'Chuck Norris of programming' has a hard time accepting praise, how are we supposed to?

A common thing agile teams are asked to do is plan, given historical performance, how much work they think they can reasonably commit to in a fixed increment of time. I'm going to tell you that in most cases, this is the most destructive thing you can do to a team, a product and your business.

Why? Because you are passively planning to be mediocre.

In our efforts to create a better workplace (which is a good cause), some cultures have grown into a state where we expect positivity from everybody we work with at all times. So much so, that negativity, scepticism and uncertainty have started to become socially unacceptable attitudes. 

The majority of businesses that produce a software product choose to sell their wares by having the most features, or as I've most commonly heard it put; the 'richest feature set'. Businesses like this will court new clients only to find that winning that particular deal comes with a catch.

Sometimes the capacity and skill set of the team vary drastically from sprint to sprint and even mid-sprint. When that happens you'll want to pay close attention to how the team is doing against the sprint backlog. All else being equal, that's the job of the burndown chart.

The trouble is, it doesn't handle this situation very elegantly at all because it assumes even capacity and that isn't always the case.

Here's a simple way you can get around that problem.

That awesome quote is attributed to Peter Drucker; a man of many skills and one who's wisdom I have an enormous amount of respect for. Like all great ideas though, it's a little too abstract to be of practical use without some extra thought and effort.

Without the extra effort, these ideas will inevitably be abused by people in support of their own agendas. It's not their fault of course, we all do that. In this case, I see more and more that we are starting to miss the point in an attempt to measure everything.

I sat in a presentation once in which the topic of discussion was mission statements and vision statements.  I've got to be honest, I still don't think there's much difference. As a matter of fact, a lot of time seems to be spent talking about what the actual difference is. It's kinda confusing.

Most companies have them though. Do you know yours? Maybe you do, maybe you don't but let me ask you this. Does it have any effect at all, on your day-to-day activities? Do you use it to help focus critical decision making? Not in my experience. Not even once.