2025/11 on Serenity | The intervention consultancy for struggling software teams

Energy Management Beats Time Management in Engineering

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you look at a standard burn-down chart or a timesheet, software development looks deceptively linear. One hour of coding equals one unit of output. If a project is falling behind, the “logical” management solution is to add more hours, ask the team to stay late, work a weekend, or squeeze in “just one more ticket” before the sprint closes. Or if you have the payroll, add more engineers.

But anyone who has actually written code knows this is a lie.

Excellence is a Habit: Why Shipping Software Beats Perfection

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The urge to “rewrite it all” is often disguised as a pursuit of excellence.

We’ve all seen the pattern. An engineer opens a file and becomes allergic to what they see. Maybe it’s messy legacy code, a “temporary” hack that is now celebrating its third birthday, or an architectural pattern that no longer fits the scale of the application.

The instinct is to fix it. To overhaul it. To make it clean, modern, and “right.” This is a good instinct! We should seek to improve things as we go, and developing that conscientiousness is vital for any senior engineer.

"Why Is Everything So Slow?", and how to fix it with Lead Time

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Everything feels…slow. You have an idea, or a critical feature, or an urgent bug fix, but it takes forever to send it through the process. Half the time it feels like it’s not even going through the process, it just dies on someone’s desk. Vanishing into the black box for weeks or months is a silent killer, and it’s both frustrating and disrespectful for anyone who’s making requests/demands on an engineering team.