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After reading an interesting post of John Hunter called Dr. Deming Webcast on the 5 Deadly Diseases, I’m wondering if in today’s company we are using poisons to treat the disease of our companies. In Italy, as in many countries around the world, we have sometimes the chance to access to new ideas a little bit after they have been tested in other countries (mainly in the US).
It should be wise not to use what has been proven it doesn’t give good results!
Listen to what Dr.Deming used to say years ago about the disease of our companies and look if they seem like the treatment we have been asked to use today by consultants or managers:
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short term profits – “creative” accounting, focus on quarterly profits
- Annual Performance Appraisals – management by objective, management by fear
- Mobility of management – [see Toyota for a great example of a company that operates on different principles - where the leadership has been with Toyota for decades]
- Running a company on visible figures alone – many important factors are “unknown and unknowable.”
PierG
Courtesy of Daniele Butera, Some Rights Reserved
Interesting post by Michael Hugos called: Agile Software Development Depends on Pair Programming. Michael is at the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago to find about the state of agile software development and live posts about the Pair Programming practice.
A good article especially if you are in some way new to the agile software development paradigms: it gives you a flavor of the benefits of Pair Programming and talks about the Myth of the Hero Programmer.
And I think reality is a bit more complex and we have to remember that the goal is creating value and not adhering to principles or practices. So I agree with what Kent Beck point out in a recent article To Fix Or Not To Fix?: Another Good Question
When I noted that tests needed to be used thoughtfully on the runway I was accused of abandoning my principles, of having no pride, of not being a craftsman. None of these is true, not of testing, not of defects, and not of (coming next) design. The higher principle I follow is to create as much value with my skills and talent as I can.
PierG
Anti IF campaign live @Deiva Marina
PierG
Courtesy of iboy_daniel, Some Rights Reserved
Last week, I’ve written about the Lessons Learned by Kent Beck in his post: Putting Max on the Back Burner.
I think this is the part that what might have more impact on some XP-ers/Agilists:
Ship it and fix it. The product needs to provide value from the first, but it doesn’t need to provide everyone with value all the time. Early sales answer questions about the market size. Early users accept some rough edges if they get to be first and you fix the problems. Not reflexively fixing every defect was a hard transition for me, but, often, answering the next business question was my highest priority. I would recommend installing real-time remote error reporting for anyone bringing client software to market. It was nerve-wracking at first to see all the errors, but in the end the feedback was invaluable
Here is what I gather from this topic adding my interpretation / point of view:
- releases can be used to penetrate the market, drive product evolution, check the market size. Eventually fix and change to penetrate another market and loop the process;
- from the users’ perspective external quality is something they might want to negotiate in a market exploration perspective or to gain some ‘early adoption’ advantage;
- new features, especially in innovative or immature markets, have often a disruptive effect no matter as unfixed they are: they quickly generate a chain reaction of new ideas and than new features. Again a way to quickly explore. Timeliness in this sense is driving more than external quality;
- the definition of DONE is not only related to the ‘acceptance’ of features, is when all users can use it (deploy), can communicate back (logging / error reporting) …
What’s your impression?
PierG
Courtesy of annia316, Some Rights Reserved
Who can afford, in today’s markets, the multi million / billion dollars innovation processes?
Someone might want to invest (many) money in innovation, but NO ONE can wait for the end of the project to start earning moneys!
So we have to change the way in which we make innovation exactly in the same way we are (struggling in) changing the way in which we run regular projects: a just in time innovation made of a set of quick wins!
How’s innovation handled in your companies?
PierG
I ask all my (agile) readers to read the post Collective Responsibility is No Responsibility form the very good blog Herding Cats of Glen Alleman .
I appreciate Glen, he is very pragmatic and focused on reaching results so I’d like to get your feedback about his post and about the doubt the Glen has:
Why is it we get this confused in the agile IT world. Is there a different work ethic? A different egalitarian motivation is let people "try there hand," to learn by failing. Maybe. On the other side how do people "learn" in our world, if they don’t fail?
Feedback please!
PierG
Let me just share a couple of quotes from the Key Note speech of Ivar Jacobson at XP2009
- Architecture without executable code is just an hallucination – about architecture
- Whatever you do, you are not done until you have verified that you did what you wanted to do – about testing
- Law of nature: people don’t read documents – about documentation
- With 2 days of training (and some thousand €), in my C.V. I can add to my PhD in SW Engineering a wonderful SCRUM Master certification – about pros and cons of certifications
Do you agree?
PierG
UPDATE: I changed a sentence that might have seen as offensive for someone
Tenth International Conference on Agile Processes and eXtreme Programming in Software Engineering XP 2009
May 25-29, 2009 Sardinia, Italy
http://www.xp2009.org/
I will be (randomly) at XP2009: hope to meet some of you .. leave a comment if you are going to be there!
PierG
The BetterSoftware conf is publishing (some of) the presentations on SlideShare: here is where you can find the Better Software 2009 Slides.
Among many interesting one, let me suggest the presentation (in italian): “Tu vuò fa’ l’americano: startup in Italia e nel mondo” by Antonio Cangiano. It deals with startups and business models: very good overview, and some suggestions too.
PierG
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