Agile Complexification Inverter

 ... no shit, here I am... taking a break from the redundantly recursive link sifting that is iOS development in the 21st Century.  I can not count the stack pushes I've had since about 11 AM and it's only 6:37 PM still time for a beer and a pondering session... A great story allways starts... no shit, there we were... So at my Day Job <euphemism for what I get PAID to do... but I'm unemployeed> I'm writing a little easy App for a colleague - it's a learning chance for me... and it might provide some value.  I'm busily rewiring my brain (there is some question to its inherent plasticity) at my age - so ONE valuable technique is to get drunk enough not to care so damn much and bang out some crap one night - then in the morning come back and fix the hell out of it.  There may be other valuable techniques... Well, last night I decided that the easy array data structure was just going to have to go... that was simple at first and went a long way - but I'd ...

I live in Texas, it comes with a unique flavor of people - my neighbors.  I was walking Malibu (my golden retriever) and stopped to chat with a neighbor mowing his yard.  I asked about his mower - an 80volt Kobalt electric push mower .  He liked it a lot, was glad he didn't have to store dangerous liquids in his home (gas & oil) and enjoyed the exercise.  I commented that the pollution from small engines was a significant source and that the internal combustion engine used in these tools was still based upon 19th Century technology.  I knew that he was a tech guy with a very large database company.  I was proud of his choice.  Like a true Texican, he remarked that was not his concern - that moving to electric was just moving the source of pollution from one place to another (his lawn to the power plant).  I suggested that that was true AND that the power plant was designed to deal with the pollution.  He ignored that info, I assume he was...

Have you had that conversation with the struggling team that wants to switch to Kanban?  They don't really know why - but they've heard that Kanban will be easier.  So why don't they switch processes? We are failing at Scrum, so let's switch to Kanban! Does that sentence make sense in your world?  I hear it quite a lot.  Well not stated that emphatically.  In fact, most teams don't know that they are failing at Scrum - but they are... it is such an easy process to follow - how could you fail? More Prescriptive -to- More Adaptive Cutting to the gist of the problem - a team that cannot complete stories in a sprint.... well they are failing.  You could ask why they cannot complete stories in the sprint.  There may be several legitimate reasons, typically it is an impediment beyond their control.  Something like getting "sign-off" from some stakeholders that the feature desired works as expected and doesn't break anything else.  When yo...

After several sprints of FAILURE, the team decides to cut in half the stories it takes into the sprint. I have worked with enough teams that are beginning with Scrum to estimate their beginning velocity fairly accurately.  Most believe I am full of IT when I suggest this.  So instead of taking my advice, they plan to fail. Start with Velocity/2 RECURSIVELY How would you define success and failure at the sprint level for a brand new (to Scrum) team/group.  I try to make it very simple - we are successful if we achieve the sprint goal.  Typically with new teams, the only goal is to accomplish the stories we've put into the sprint.  So it's easy to define success - 6 stories put into the sprint, 6 stories done at the end of the sprint, and we have a success! Invariably the team does NOT finish all 6 stories and so the result is NOT success or failure.  That's so simple.  Now if we keep track of this for a few sprints, and the product owner starts...

I'm from the Carolina's where legend has it that our family commonly just hunkered down in the home on the coast and waterways than to head for inland shelter. Now that's from the old school days of barely improved (read paved) roads. They counted a storms severity by how high on the back porch steps (about 15 - top to ground) the water reached.  I don't recommend this action in todays world of long range forecast and transportation options. I do recommend a drink or two in a hotel bar, far far away. This is the week that Harvey came ashore in Texas.  I live on a hill in the little old town of Grapevine outside Dallas and Fort Worth.  And thank you all for letting me know that a storm is coming... I didn't get out and walk Malibu before the rain hit, so I grabbed a hat and we went anyway.  Much nicer walk with the drizzle, I'd say. I'll raise a glass to you - if you were not smart enough to do the responsible thing, at the last responsible moment. ...

Mayhem Just last month I receive a congratulatory letter from REI MasterCard - 10 years of a mutually beneficial business relationship ....  until .... chaos ensued (thank you Mr. Mayhem).  So I accepted the opportunity to communicate with my business lender on an incident that made me very dissatisfied with their policies. Subject: Re: Congratulations on your REI World MasterCard anniversary!  Thank you Robert,      Just to let you know - I’m sure this will interest you - I will shortly be canceling my 10 year relationship with REI MasterCard, because of the quality of service you have just required me to deal with. I’ve got a great payment history and have been using our card to pay bills on line and automagically for years. Recently through my oversight, I forgot to pay my bill on time. So in response to this great customer who always pays his bills and once in 10 years paid late, your organization saw fit to block all payments, causing fu...

I learned this technique from the facilitators of Language Hunting  and Where Are Your Keys , they term the technique How Fascinating   and practice it quite a few times each game. The purpose of the technique is to invert the physiology of failure into a learning moment to reflect upon what just went wrong and instead of cringing and curling up into a safe ball, we open up the body and the mind to learning and the experience of reflecting and allowing the universe to teach us something. Try it a few times... See Also: The Failure bow -DeepFUN by Matt Smith Go Ahead, Take a Failure Bow by  Beth Kanter  at HBR TED Talk:   The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure "Great dreams aren't just visions," says Astro Teller, "They're visions coupled to strategies for making them real." The head of X (formerly Google X), Teller takes us inside the "moonshot factory," as it's called, where his team seeks to solve the world...

Apple and IBM joining forces - oh really?  Will George Orwell be rolling over in his grave - will his 1984 become truth in 2014? Well, one must follow the news to make sense of that gibberish... and the 1984 reference.... it goes back to the famous Superbowl Apple commercial introducing the Mac . An IBM/Apple partnership to tunnel into the enterprise walled garden for devices is a great idea.  As a consumer it works for me.  I don't know of any enterprises that can pass the Starbucks Test (test for the ubiquity of access for the digital native). In 2005 (years before the iPhone) Apple joined forces with Motorola to launch the ROKR, a cell phone and iTunes connected music player. It took the world a few years to recognize that the Wright brothers had flown the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC (first flight in Dec. 1903 to 1908 public demonstrations). -- The Wright Brothers by  David McCullough   "Jointly developed with Motorola and made available ...

Software nightmare stories are very common - but one thing I've learned by listening to these stories over the years is the technologist must be optimist at heart.  Why - because they deal constantly with tons of failure.  And out of those failures they create innovative disruptive new sectors of the world economy (sometimes, case in point the Apple Newton and then the iPod and iPhone). Let's look at a few case studies. Time has just published a look at the Obama Healthcare rescue team.  Code Red by Steven Brill "What were the tech problems?  Where they beyond repair? Nothing I saw was beyond repair.  Yes, it was messed up.  Software wasn't built to talk to other software, stuff like that.  A lot of that,"  Abbott continues, "was because they had made the most basic mistake you can ever make.  The government is not used to shipping products to consumers.  You never open a service like this to everyone at once.  You open i...

I really should go to Dublin to attend this event: Fail Better - Dublin Science Gallery " The goal of   FAIL BETTER   is to open up a public conversation about failure, particularly the instructive role of failure, as it relates to very different areas of human endeavour. Rather than simply celebrating failure, which can come at great human, environmental and economic cost, we want to open up a debate on the role of failure in stimulating creativity: in learning, in science, engineering and design. "

Watch this video ( Can You Solve This? by Veritasium ) to see the scientific process in action (well it takes a while for the people to become scientific... but they do).  My guess is that you - like me - will fall into the fallacy of confirmation bias at the first opportunity.  A phenomena referred to as the black swan fallacy. So scientific processes have a little trick up their sleeves called the Null Hypothesis .  The null hypothesis, or default answer, is generally assumed true until evidence indicates otherwise.  How often do you use this process to mutate your software development process?  How do you protect yourself from the confirmation bias during your process improvement experiments?  Do you see this null hypothesis at work in the TDD process of proving a unit test fails before the implementation code creates evidence to indicate otherwise? France is Bacon Since this scientific process is not very natural for us humans; it leaves ...

A typical impediment sticky annotating the blocked task. Just making an impediment list is not good enough.  Yes, it is a start.  But only the start.  Raising impediments at the daily stand-up meeting shows that a team is mature enough to recognize that all problems are better solved in the light of day.  Problems are easier to solve when more than one person is working on the issue.  One of the first steps to getting multiple people working on an impediment is to make it known to the team. Yet this is the start, not the end of the process.  Yes many newbie teams believe that the Scrum Master's job is to resolve these impediments.  That is a wonderful misconception and will work for a while as the newbie team learns the power of an agile mindset.  But only the maturing teams learn that it is their job to remove these impediments. So what are 7 aspects on a great impediment card living on the top of your impediment list? Title - th...

There is an interesting discussion of the Standish Groups 2012 report on Mike Cohn's blog .  Go read the article ( Agile Succeeds Three Times More Ofter Than Waterfall ) and the comments. Here's the summary graphic.

There is a good dialogue on the topic of Scrum's Sprint Zero going on at  Scrumdevelopment@yahoogroups.com .  If you follow the group you will surely learn something about Agility.  It will just seep into your pores.  Go right ahead - click the link and join up... I'll wait here. The "raging" debate in the Scrum world for years is - should a Scrum team have a Sprint Zero?  A sprint in which they get setup for doing real work.  A sprint for installing all that infrastructure (DB, Version Control System, App Server, build a few [sarcasm] frameworks). [Hint: when a developer says they just need to build a framework - it is geek-code for I don't have any idea how to use The Google to find a tool to do that job - so I will have to forge my own special handmade tool - check back with me after I reinvent the wheel.] I think perhaps the wise and wonderful man behind the curtain - Ron Jeffries - captures the best thinking on the topic: I do, however, obj...

WOW - what a fun week at Agile 2011 (Salt Lake City, Aug. 8 - 12). In the sudo-pattern language of " Language Hunting " I'm full! When I got home, and after sleeping for 15 hours, I pulled out one of my favorite gifts from the conference - a TDD glass from James Grenning .  Poured some milk into it for breakfast and got this surprising response.

It would appear that humans have innate ability to do empirical process control within a very difficult domain (language) right from birth. At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world. I'm a typical American, I only know one language.  I also have a bit of a impediment in hearing some sounds.  I was born and raised in the south (North Carolina) so according to the dialect maps I pronounce the words: pin, and pen the same.  I also pronounce the words: hill, heal, heel the same.  May be it's just me and not my dialect from Stanley County, NC.  I also had a speech impediment as a child and with the help of parents and teachers I over came the impediment - I normalized. I did t...

I was just sent a link to a good article on smart phone security and safety.  It got me thinking about the mistakes I had made in my iPhone info security strategy.  Why had I made these simple mistakes? Common Sense Security for Your iPhone This article is about the basic.  Since I've had my iPhone stolen on a trip to Europe I'm an expert.  My iPhone had at the time: Find My iPhone installed and active.  But it didn't work, as the iPhone was in Airplane mode (being in Europe and off the home AT&T network).  Since the iPhone would not connect to the network, the Wipe Commands from Apple would never reach the iPhone (in Airplane mode).  A severe limitation to the security while traveling out of country (and an opportunity for a global service provider). My iPhone had Passcode turned on, it had SplashID - a safe for sensitive info like credit card numbers, etc.  I had all my credit card info, banking account numbers, driver's license, passp...

Columbus Coat of Arms Christopher Columbus' purpose was to find a faster, safer route to the silk , spices , and opiates of Asia (a total system rewrite for the failing legacy system - Silk Road). "Columbus map", drawn ca. 1490 in the Lisbon workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus [1] Was his problem that he didn't know his location and the location of his destination?  No.  Those were knowns to him.  He had maps of these locations. Was his problem that he didn't know how to navigate?  No.  He was an accomplished ship's captain and in those days you had to navigate via dead reconing and he was adopting the new technology of celestial navigation .  I'm practicing a bit of historical speculation but in his day, figuring out Latitude was hard but a known problem with lots of calculations requiring a computer (person good with figures & lookup tables).  Guessing at Longitude was an unknown problem. It would be centuries before t...