May 2015 – Kurt Kovit

23May 2015 by Kovit No Comments

The Scientific method for interviews

I have been doing interviews for quite a while now and would like to share with you a method that I like to call the scientific method for technical interviewing. First of all the overall process goes as follows: Observation > Hypotheses > Prediction > Experiment > Conclusion I have to confess that during an interview I am not fast enough to do all the required steps so I do some work before. In any case let us go through the stages one by one. Phase 1: Observation Interviews are a short period of time to assess if the person in front of you could be an asset to the company. The candidate probably feels nervous, which will make the whole process harder for both of us. So the first few…

4 Values Of Scrum Masters

Scrum

Recently I have attended a seminar which made me think of some important qualities that every scrum master should have. I would like to point out 4 important values that I think are essential characteristics of a scrum master. Why 4? Because 4 is an even number, less than 5 but greater than 3 (sorry JB is speaking). So here is the list: Positive Attitude Being a person who sees a glass half full does have its share of benefits. Even when things go wrong you should still find a way to motivate the team and lead them in the right direction. Having a positive attitude doesn't mean that you are totally satisfied with the way things are going, you should always aim for better, and use positive constructive criticism…

High Speed Mono Tasking

Human Nature

This should come to no surprise: humans can't multi task. Women can do it better but overall we still suck at this. Furthermore doing things in parallel is much slower than doing things in series. With this in mind we should be focusing on a single task at a time and try to achieve high-speed mono-tasking. Lets take a simple example to proof this theory. Let us assume that you have 2 tasks each of which take 10 mins to complete. If you do one task after the other you will get the following performance: Time Task 1 (time left) Task 2 (time left) 0 min 10 min 10 min 2 min 8 min 10 min 4 min 6 min 10 min 6 min 4 min 10 min 8 min…