Mike Bowler

JiraMetrics v3.0 is out. It's a free, open-source command-line tool that turns your Jira history into agile metrics charts (cycle time, aging WIP, throughput, and more) in one self-contained HTML report. Useful for any team that wants to understand and improve its delivery flow. A major release because it now requires Ruby 3.4 (or JRuby 10) and removes long-deprecated features. Full change log at https://jirametrics.org/changes/ #agile #jira #flowmetrics #kanban #scrum

When I’m teaching user story writing, inevitably someone will write a story like “User wants to log-in”, and this is actually a horrible story. Have you ever gotten up in the morning and thought “Oh boy, I get to log-in today. It’s going to be great!” Of course, you haven’t. No user ever wants to log-in, so writing the story as “User wants to log-in” completely misses the point. Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here: https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/19/user-wants-to-login/

@jvschrag@hachyderm.io that’s why I got the CO2 detector in the first place. CO2 levels are a reasonable proxy for good air flow.

You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room. I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143. That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure. Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here. https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/

I frequently hear teams say: “We talk about the same things over and over and nothing changes.” Every time, it tells me they’ve missed the point of the retrospective. They think the meeting is the improvement. It isn’t. The meeting is where you decide what to change. The improvement doesn’t happen until you actually change it. Most teams I meet are running retrospectives because they’re on the calendar, and nobody questions what’s on the calendar. They brainstorm, group the stickies, vote, write down the actions, close. Then next time, the actions from last time are still sitting there undone, so they brainstorm the same problems again. No wonder they get frustrated, all we’re doing is rehashing the past. A couple of times I’ve walked into a retrospective where the team hadn’t done any of the actions from the last one. I asked whether those actions still mattered, and when they said yes, I stopped the meeting. “Then go do them now; this meeting is over.” The room then goes quiet, and people look at each other, waiting for the catch. Nobody ends a meeting halfway through. You run out the time whether or not there’s anything left to do. So sending everyone back to their desks with time on the clock breaks a rule they didn’t know they were following. Go do the thing you already agreed to do, because the retrospective was never the point. The change was, and the change isn’t done yet. The retrospective is one of the most important meetings your team has. Run it without improving, and you’ve wasted everyone’s time. If you want to run retrospectives that actually change things, that’s what my course Retrospective Magic is about. https://www.retrospectivemagic.com/retrospective-magic

When COVID hit and we all switched to video calls overnight, everyone started reporting how tired they were at the end of a day of meetings. Part of that was obviously that we were in a pandemic and stress levels were high, and yet there was something in the video meetings themselves that made it so much worse. Someone proposed that the culprit might be the video self-view, that little window showing your own face while you talk. So I ran an experiment and turned mine off. The difference was noticeable after even just one meeting. I was much less tired when I couldn’t see myself. When your self-view is on, you’re doing two cognitively different tasks simultaneously: monitoring and adjusting your appearance while also following the content of the meeting. That double-load is cognitively draining, across every call, all day. Turn off the self-view and your brain gets to do just one thing: the meeting itself. Research backs this up. The continuous self-view creates what’s been called “the mirror effect”. The psychological stress of perpetually monitoring your own image has no real-world equivalent, and it compounds exhaustion across every call. The fix takes about thirty seconds. Go into your video software settings and look for a self-view or mirror option. In Zoom it’s under Video settings. In Teams it’s accessible during a call. Turn it off, then check in with yourself at the end of your next meeting day. This isn’t the only contributing factor to zoom fatigue. In my experience, though, it’s the easiest change we can make, and it makes a significant difference. Try it for yourself.