In the last few weeks, there's been a lot of content floating around focusing on what it means to work remote.

But one thing that many of these articles have assumed is that even if everyone isn't working at the same place, they're all working at the same time. Once you've given up all going to the same office, it's worth asking, do you even need to keep the same office hours? As a manager, can you effectively manage people through asynchronous communication, team members who aren't even online at the same time as you?

One of the most important parts of the Scrum process is the Sprint Review. It’s the chance to show your work to a broad audience, get feedback, and get aligned on where to focus next. Whole Brain® Thinking can be applied here to ensure the outputs land with as many different Thinkers as possible.

Here at Herrmann, our team members are big believers in Agile software development philosophy, particularly the Scrum variety. We've been using Scrum since I started here almost five years ago, and in that time we've been able to expand on the baseline Scrum processes and add a Whole Brain® Thinking spin to them.  The place where Whole Brain® Thinking has made the biggest impact has been how we write our user stories.

Here at Herrmann International one of our key fundamentals is that we try to "eat our own cooking" and use Whole Brain® Thinking in our own work. This post is part of a series where some of our team members talk about some ways they use Whole Brain® Thinking for their day-do-day work.

This post is by our Lead Software Engineer, Andrew Swerlick.

At first glance, software development might not seem like a job that involves a lot of day-to-day Whole Brain® Thinking. After all, a lot of what our team does seems like it's firmly situated in the technical, analytical A quadrant. Sure, we do have to collaborate with other internal teams on product design, requirements gathering, etc., but when it get to the point where our developers put their fingers to the keyboard and start writing code, all the other quadrants go away, right?

When I first started at Herrmann a couple of years ago, I probably would have said yes. But recently, our development team has adopted some practices that are showing me the value of writing Whole Brain® code.