Is Pair Programming THE Agile Practice?

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

Does Micro-Managing Help You Succeed?

I have often written that micro management is a bad habit in some way indirectly sponsored by companies themselves.

I wasa talking about micro managing your directs, I’ve never thought about what some colleagues of mine define “PierG’s driver” that is micro managing UP.

In How Micro-Managing UP Can Help You Succeed, they guys from Management Craft writes:

Leaving your manager in the dark is not a good strategy, and can hurt your career.

Read the post and tell me: does micro-managing UP help you succeed?? What do you think as a manager and as a direct?

PierG

Anti IF campaign

Anti IF campaign live @Deiva Marina
PierG

Ship it and Fix it

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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:

1. 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;
2. 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;
3. 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;
4. 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

Just in Time Innovation

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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

Google Docs in Microsoft Office

Courtesy of the Google Operating System blog

Do you want to open a Google Docs document with you Microsoft Office tool?? Here it is: from the Google Operating System blog, OffiSync.

With a Office PlugIn, you can (among others):

Save your documents online in Google Docs and access them from any computer.

Open any Google Docs file directly from Microsoft Office applications.

Add collaborators to your documents and manage their permissions.

Find any document based on its content using the powerful integrated Google search feature.

Communicate with your collaborators right from within your shared document.

Nice!!

PierG

Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask – Anthony Tjan

You are a mentor and have a mentor: haven’t you?

If yes or if in any case interested to this topic, have a look at:

Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask – Anthony Tjan – HarvardBusiness.org.

PierG

Cut Costs the Smart Way

Another good post in the Harvard Business Publishing site: Rita McGrath writes about better ways of cutting costs. In A Better Way to Cut Costs, Rita reports some findings from a workshop she attended about that topic.

Here is what emerged:

1. Beware the hidden dependencies: you might cut in areas that are related in a hidden way to real (perceived) value or to your main value proposition for end customers!
2. Speed is good: ‘The more quickly you can identify cost-out opportunities, the more likely you are to gain credibility and the more good news drops to the bottom line’
3. Out, out, complexity: KISS
4. Not all customers are good customer: ‘firing’ customers is sometimes better ten firing employees
5. Strategy first, cost-cutting after: think more as an entrepreneur, you need to reach small term results AND you want to reach even long term results. So have a strategy!
6. Costs may be saved where the budget isn’t: ‘My dad used to tell the tale of a guy in the chemistry lab whose major responsibility was to make sure that all the glassware was clean and ready for use. In a cost-cutting spree, that job was eliminated. And guess what happened? Yup. High-priced Ph.D. chemists spent their time hunting for clean glassware, doing the job themselves or not doing certain activities because they couldn’t find the right supplies’

Which are your strategies / tactics? How are you approaching the cost cutting problem? Share them with us!

PierG

How To Make Better Presentations

 
Courtesy of laurenmanning, Some Rights Reserved

First, please put in your RSS feeds reader the slide:ology blog: a must have if you have to make presentations even once on a while.

Second, watch at TED presentations, all of them, great content and great delivery techniques: this stuff rocks!

And now put the two stuff together and you’ll have a great post: Lessons from TED: 5 Simple Tweaks. 5 suggestions from the slide:ology team on how they made presentations with the TED constraints: limited budget, no template, 18 minutes. As these are quite common constraints in corporations, I thought to suggest the post to my readers.

Here are the suggestions (even if of course you need to read the whole post ):

1. use a custom background
2. choose your fonts wisely
3. use animations and transitions appropriately
4. one idea per slide
5. take care of your images

What are your personal suggestions?

PierG

The Ideal (Agile) Workspace

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Very good post in Milke Cohn’s Blog (Succeeding With Agile): The Ideal Agile Workspace about what should be visible within the ideal agile workspace.

I think there are very good ideas for any kind of team to improve overall performance!

Here are the main points:

>> Big Visible Charts: having visual (updated) info for your main project info / metrics
>> Additional feedback devices: “it is common for an agile team to use additional visual feedback devices in their workspace”
>> Everyone on your team: the team has to sit together!
>> The sprint backlog: make visible to the team what has to be completed in that unit of time (sprint)
>> The product backlog: help the team to have the view over the complete project
>> At least one big white board: for promoting help among team members
>> Someplace quiet and private: sometimes a private place is useful
>> Food and drink: nothing fancy but .. it helps!
>> A window: a touch of ‘nature’ (at least the light )

What’s your experience?

PierG