About Thomas Owens
writing about software engineering
By education, I'm a software engineer. I focus on agile and lean software development, software process improvement, and quality management. My goal is to enabling software engineers, teams, and organizations to be successful. I have experience with a wide variety of types of software systems, ranging from embedded systems to desktop applications to web applications.
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Posts
Software development as engineering. Placing Agile Software Development within historical context. Choosing between staying with Scrum or migrating to Kanban. Scrum failing versus the organization failing to implement Scrum. When to change from estimated productivity to actual productivity to support planning. Managing a large risk register. Assigning risk ownership for risks associated with depen...
September 2026
Oct 01, 2026
16 views
Managing multiple stakeholders with competing needs and interests. Forecasting the capacity of a team for planning an iteration. Integrating threat modeling into the design and risk assessment processes. Branch name conventions and Conventional Branch. Technical debt isn't just mess. Logging and managing technical debt. AI-generated source code and the GPL's "preferred form of the work". Choosing ...
August 2026
Sep 01, 2026
87 views
Security governance at scale. Presenting technical risks to non-technical stakeholders. AI tools' impact on a team's cadence and speed. Tracking and visualizing work that spans multiple "tickets" in a work tracking system. Work estimation - avoid it when you can, but there are good practices when you can't. Poorly run daily standups can impede a team's morale - short, focused standups can be extre...
July 2026
Aug 01, 2026
120 views