Agile Complexification Inverter

Have you heard about the PO's new assistant?   It is quite the item of gossip - isn't it? Could you imagine if we were to outsource our development jobs to someone?  Someone in another country, a foreigner,  or an artificial life-form, an AI - oh the shame of it all! What would it require to craft an AI with the ability to write a Product Backlog?  Would we require special software, expensive specialist knowledge, and millions of dollars? Would we be able to trust that the user stories the AI wrote and placed in our backlog were the correct requirements for our unique product? It is the 21st Century - we have to be ready! That is a quote from Captian Jack Harkness , and he is in a Time to know. Let's run a test.  Let's try the AI out and see if it could write the basic product backlog for a travel app.  Phone apps have been around now for 15 years or more.  The best ones are targeted at just such a task.   We could then see if the AI generated us...

    We are the last Hominidae  standing...  Well, at this moment in time / history / as far as we can predict into a reasonable future (but Planet of the Apes starts in 2011 and the original story is set in 3978!)  By that time apes have started bipedal movement.  And are standing quite well.  I say this to point out that it is far too early (in evolutionary terms) to say H. sapiens is the last of the Hominidae (all apes - who knows why the gibbons were separated out?).  And our future is very questionable - given our terrible politics of division - our count down clock to nuclear ( doomsday clock -  100 seconds to midnight! ) annihilation,  our refusal to deal with human climate destabilization, and our inability to curb our desires.  Each of those species on the tree of life is at the pinnacle of evolution!  We H. sapiens are just one, and just happen to hold the cat-bird seat in the food pyramid.  That could change quit...

Door Security Protocol: Find the next number in the sequence 313, 331, 367, ...? This is a test... How long will it take you to work this out... Quite a while is my guess.  And only a few will actually try to figure it out.  Most will give up, a few will search online, and a few will have already seen the sequence recognize it and either remember the answer (the next number in the sequence) or derive it with the sparse knowledge they remember about the sequence. Spoiler Alert!  Let me give you the background knowledge. You know what a Prime Number is - do you recognize that all the numbers in the list are prime? Do you know what a Happy Number is?  Or it's inverse an Unhappy Number?  Well, this is a bit more obscure in the general knowledge.  So here is a spoiler...  all those numbers are happy!  They are Happy Primes! A number is happy when the repeated practice of replacing the number by the sum of the squares...

This tech is so exciting it scares me... tapping into human emotions.... the feedback loops that could be developed.... the opportunities to learn....  endless! Affectiva , a startup, is announcing the launch of its mobile software development kit (SDK) for tracking emotions. "The company says it can analyze a user’s emotions by tracking their facial expressions, and it uses that technology to measure the effectiveness of ads. With the new SDK, mobile developers will be able to add these capabilities to their apps as well." -- TechCrunch Anthony Ha "This means Affectiva’s technology could be embedded into consumer products — a spokesperson suggested via email that the possibilities include healthcare, education, and gaming apps."  -- TechCrunch Anthony Ha See  -- TechCrunch Anthony Ha article How could we use this tech (SDK) to nurture better teams?  Reinforce positive sharing and interaction behaviors for a group of people (geeks) that love to intera...

Some years ago Atlassian ran a contest to find the Ultimate Wallboard .  The winner Vodafone's board was awesome.  There are other nice boards there - if you are in need of inspiration to improve your task board. The Ultimate Wallboard - 2010 Ole Højriis Kristensen from the Vodafone Web Team in Denmark was voted the Ultimate Wallboard winner in Dec. 2010. An interview with Ole on the creation of their wallboard . It uses RFID to track the task on the board and projects on the board real time graphs of work in process and burn up rates.  This allows them to integrate with team members in remote locations.  Yet they do not lose the tactile sense, nor the spatial processing that the vision center of the brain do so effortlessly for us. While I'm expecting nice online version of wall boards to keep improving, I don't believe there is a better way to learn Scrum than with a physical low-fidelity wallboard. We don't learn to do arithmetic using ...

Key frequency infographic The ability of humans to make a change is very limited.  Even when we know the change is going to be for the best.  Even when we know the current method of working is based on a flawed understanding of our needs.  We resist changes. A case in point.  The common keyboard.  It is laid out in a some what random pattern of letters.  Yes it looks like your grandfather's keyboard, so you instantly recognize it.  But ask a 7 year old to describe the keyboard and you will see that there is no obvious logic to it's design.  You of course know that the design was purposeful.  It was a configuration that put the most used letters/keys away from the  powerful fingers, this was to slow down the best typist.  During the days of the early type writers the keys would jam. I recently watch a young lady switch the Wii keyboard from QWERTY to a 9-digit telephone keypad, because it was easier.  At least the letters...

If you haven't thought about the universe today - now would be a good time.  It may be the only time you really have.  However we tend to measure things, we humans tend to only think in terms of our personal scale.  We measure our lives in birthdays (an unassuming point where a crowded planet completes an almost circular orbit about a yellow star).  But what are the true delineating points in the history of the universe? One would most certainly have to be the Big Bang!  I mean - come-on, the point at which nothingness turns into somethingness - that's the start of something.  But measuring from that point 13.7 billion years ago, what's the next important event? 13.7 billion years ago:  Big Bang! Just 380,000 years later the atoms of Hyrdogen & Helium start to form. Just 200 million years later stars begin to form. These are just the first 3 Thresholds of Increasing Complexity (David Christian, Big History Project ).  They have happen...