Feedback is an important tool for working together. As tech lead, I organize on a fairly regular basis feedback rounds with the people I work under and with people that work under me. With this experience, I distilled some tips on how to to set up the feedback rounds with impact.
About feedback
Feedback is an important tool as it gives invaluable information about you, the other person and the team. The goal is to improve his/her work as your own work as team lead.
Preparation
- Plan feedback rounds well in advance. Not only is it important to let the other party prepare, but also communicating the upcoming feedback rounds weeks in advance makes the team aware of the upcoming feedback rounds. It’s easier to create an impact with feedback where an example can be given of the behavior.
- Take enough time. I always plan 1h for each, although it’s not the plan to fill the entire hour. Typical feedback rounds take about 20min, but giving yourself the freedom to go into detail if necessary, makes the conversation open and not overhasty.
- Plan personal conversations. Sincere feedback is feedback done in small groups. For developers, I bring the project lead with me, since the project lead can give another perspective.
- Prepare yourself
- Ask the other to explicitly prepare themselves. Point the other party that a good preparation is necessary.
- It’s important to give both positive as negative feedback.
How to give efficient feedback
- Describe behavior that can change
- Use concrete examples that you have seen for yourself (preferred) or heard from.
- Use the I-form. I noticed that…
- Describe the effect the behavior had on yourself
- Let the other respond
- If relevant: ask for the desired behavior
- Explore the background and/or solutions
Follow up
An important aspect of feedback is the follow up. Plan something a couple of weeks after the feedback and see how the feedback changed you or the one you gave feedback to.
Regards,
Andries
Posted in management.
By Andries Inzé
– July 15, 2010
The program for our upcoming event is complete! Here it is…
18:00 – 19:00: Kabir Khan - What’s Cooking in JBoss AS 6
Kabir will talk about the JBoss AS 6 roadmap, the new development model, ongoing optimizations since AS 6. He will also give a bird’s eye overview of the new projects that will be bundled in AS 6, such as Weld, HornetQ, RestEasy and several more. There will be a short demo at the end showing some of the new features in AS.
19:00 – 20:00: Kris Verlaenen – Looking forward to the future of (j)BPM
There’s much going on in the area of BPM. This presentation will offer you an overview of how the jBPM project will continue to offer you business processes support (in their entire life cycle), while also taking these new challenges into account, like more dynamic or adaptive processes, standardization using the BPMN2 process definition language, etc.
I think we can all agree on the fact that these talks will be very interesting (to say the least).
So… do not forget to register for this event! (Maximium capacity is set to 45 people)
See you soon on the 3rd of June at Xplore premises!
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Andries Inzé
– May 26, 2010
Finally some time to do the review.
Let me start with my biggest discovery: the book is written about jBPM3 and not the newer jBPM4. This is not mentioned on the Packt publishing site. Too bad, a jBPM4 book is still missing in the offering.
Conclusion
PRO:
- Probably the best developers book about jBPM3 so far. Compared to BPM With JBoss jBPM, this book is aimed more for developers and goes further into the technical details.
- The book brings beginners to an advanced level. It does not bring advanced users to a further level.
- I would advice beginner jBPM developers to start with this book. It emphasizes on getting the basics right but does not hide the more advanced features.
- The explanation is good, providing context and sufficient examples.
CON:
- Their is definitely a language impedance for the writer. Sentence are basic, language constructs are poor and almost all the sentences start with “You’ll see” or “You will”. Very sad to see this poor editorial from Packt Publishing. Clearly no review by them, and I blame them and not the writer.
- Some content is noble, but also beyond the goal of this book. Chapters 1 & 2 are not interesting to jBPM Developers. They cover a motivational speech about why you should care for open source, what is BPM and how to create your own BPM engine.
- Some must have advanced topics are missing: integration with test frameworks, exception handling for example.
As stated, I do recommend this book for new jBPM developers since it does provide a rather good learning curve for new developers. Don’t expect this book to be a reference, therefore it is much to verbose and not advanced enough. The userguide of jBPM is a better reference.
Kind regards,
Andries
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Andries Inzé
– January 27, 2010
This is the first book that explains the Spring integration within jBPM. I’ve managed to see a copy of the long explanation. I’m impressed with the explanation and it is very understanding and complete! Saves me the trouble of testing the integration on Spring3 aswell 
I’m also referenced by name in the book, a nice pitch for me! I’ve ordered the book and I’ll publish a review later, but from what I’ve seen it looks very promising.
It’s written by Gary Mak of the best-selling Spring Recipes and Josh Long, an expert Spring user and developer.
Posted in Spring, bpm, jbpm.
By Andries Inzé
– December 17, 2009
Packt publishing is sending me a review copy of the jBPM Developer Guide. I’m looking forward to this book. The summary promises among others:
- Key concepts of Business Process Management to understand how the community leads and implements open source software
- Gain deep understanding of JPDL, the preferred process language, to know how your processes must be defined and implemented
- Convert your projects into fully featured applications with advanced jBPM features such as the persistence service and human task mechanism
- Understand the framework’s behavior in different environments
- Create and configure Human Task activities to model situations where human beings interact with the process
- Understand how the framework handles information that flows through your business process
- Configure the persistence service to reduce risk and perform successful implementations with jBPM
- Improve your process definitions using nodes
- Configure the Eclipse IDE to start modeling your processes
Keep an eye on this blog to read the review.
Regards,
Andries
Posted in bpm, jboss, jbpm.
By Andries Inzé
– December 15, 2009
Ever wondered who is “Developer of the month?”. I’ve found this great app that does just the thing… http://www.statsvn.org/ .
I’ve taken the liberty to run it on the jBPM4 trunk, check it out here!
From the quick start:
Quick Start
* Download the latest release from http://sourceforge.net/projects/statsvn/
* Expand the zip file into some directory, e.g c:\statsvn
* Check out a working copy of the desired SVN module into
some directory, e.g. c:\myproject.
* Change into that directory and type
'svn log --xml -v > svn.log'
* Change back to the c:\statsvn directory
* type 'java -jar statsvn.jar c:\myproject\svn.log c:\myproject'
* Open c:\statsvn\index.html in your web browser
Regards,
Andries
Posted in general, jbpm, management.
By Andries Inzé
– November 10, 2009
Today I presented at the Artesis high school in Antwerp. Great experience 
Students can find the slides below:
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Andries Inzé
– October 22, 2009
As a tech lead, on occasion I’m faced with the question:
- How well should something be implemented? Is it OK if it just works, or do I need to refactor and make it more “generic”?
- When is it done?
- …
The rule I live by is as following:
If I write code, I make it so that I, or anybody else, could reuse that code with ease.
This means:
- Write good documentation, mostly on WHAT it does, not HOW. It’s a whole lot easier to read code if you know what the result should be. It’s not easier to read how something works, then read the code and then guess what the desired outcome should be.
- Write clear code. Hacks or fuzzy lines should be refactored. Hacks tend to get more hackish with old age.
- Create loosely coupled code. Code with a lot of dependencies can’t be reused. Make it a little more abstract if you have to.
- Use generic names. Don’t write classes named MyProjectDataValidatorUtils.
- Don’t hard code project specific stuff. Use property injection instead.
This does NOT mean:
- Write code that can do a lot more than is needed for the project.
- Premature optimization. If I know my project will only have 10 entities, I’m not testing for a million…
- Over document it. We are still developers. Write to many and you won’t really read anything at all six months from now.
If done a handful of projects and I reuse a lot of stuff from old projects. The fantastic thing is, that these building blocks have the tendency to improve over projects. Every project needs specific functionality, and by adding those to existing blocks you end up with some really powerful, reusable parts.
Regards!
Andries
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Andries Inzé
– September 2, 2009
Nils Preusker, Joram Barrez and I have uploaded some demo’s on jBPM4. If you like to start fast and use demo’s which integrates different technologies, this is a good place to start.
You can find the demo’s at the jbpm svn.
Regards!
Andries
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Andries Inzé
– September 1, 2009
I get a lot of questions about the Spring integration, by mail and as blog comments. Almost all these questions can be answered by reading the developers guide of jBPM4, which you can find here .
If you still have questions, please post them at the forums. My spies (c.f. Joram) at JBoss keeps me posted of any Spring related topic, and I’m more then happy to answer the questions there.
KR,
Andries
Posted in jbpm.
By Andries Inzé
– July 19, 2009
