Agile Complexification Inverter

It ain't nothing - until I call it. - The Umpire  My brother was an intramural league referee at App State (that's Appalachian State in NC); that's the most important lesson they taught beginners. So if you were going to start to program a baseball game - where would you start?  At some point, you are going to come to the conclusion that on any given play... anything could happen... that is until the Ump calls the play.  So is this key person part of the object model? In November Lance Kind & I are going to start on a venture to program a baseball game - in Swift on the iOS Apple platform.  We are going to start with Test Driven Development - Red, Green, Refactor.  The end goal - to have an App to launch in the Apple Store. I'm not real sure what that App might do... but I trust it will emerge and we will learn quite a lot about the app as we build it.  We have set some other objectives:  to practice TDD, to learn Swift 5+, to use SwiftUI (a de...

Great artist sign their work. There is one part of the original Macintosh I'd like to frame on the wall. Apple part number 810-0374 - the case. It contains signatures of Macintosh design team in raised human font. Folklore about the Macintosh design team's signing party . Great artist sign their work Are you an artist? I was thinking about this story...  imagine telling it like this. Some years ago, when the computer industry was not yet launched, and might fold on any quarterly earning report on Wall Street, there was an SOB that drove many team members crazy.  This SOB parked a motorcycle along with a piano in the lobby to inspire the designers.  Some people believe this SOB didn't know how to build teams.  Yet he did know how to build products.  And he did build one of the most successful late 20th/21st Century organizations.  Compare it's operation to that of conglomerates it's revenue size and you will see a stark difference.  T...

Let's Invert the typically wrong headed view of Software Development project management as a construction project.  We can map it the other way just to see if it works... to have some fun, to explore the meaning of phrases we toss around quite frequently. Site Landing Page Normally Project Management terms come from a construction domain.  We are going to apply the lexicon of modern software to the construction of a home.  We will follow the construction project and meet some of the people doing the work. This is a very small (8 homes from $600,000 skyward) program in my 30-40 year old neighborhood. About 6 months ago I saw the programs landing page go up.  It gives casual observers and some of the stakeholders a general idea of the intent of the program.  And most importantly who to contact for additional information if you happen to be interested in their products. The Refuge program has 8 product projects and has them running independently. ...

Bees do a dance that bee keeper refer to as the Waggle dance... It is with great pleasure that you can watch and using the power of science have this dance translated into English. Bee Dance (Waggle Dance) by  Bienentanz GmbH What does this have to do with Scrum?  The power of a metaphor was well known to the creators of Extreme Programming (XP) - so much so, that it is one of only 12 "rules" that those really smart people decided to enshrine into their process.  It is also the most likely rule to not be mentioned in any survey of software development practices.  Unless you happen to be chatting with Eric Evens, and he may agree that he's captured the underlying principle in Domain-Driven Design, the Ubiquitous Language pattern . Have you ever observed a great scrum team using a classic tool of many innovative company environments - the physical visual management board (Scrum Task Board). The generic behavior for a small group of people (say around 7 p...

by   David Koontz 10 months ago Dialogue on Prerequisites for Collaboration A dialogue on Twitter platform for David's course in IDEO-University's Ideas to Action. An invation to join a Twitter dialogue on the aspects of collaboration. David A. Koontz @davidakoontz Who can help me this afternoon: I'm doing an IDEO-University course on Ideation and Action. 10 MONTHS AGO REPLY RETWEET FAVORITE David A. Koontz @davidakoontz Todays' assignment engage a group of people in brainstorming this activity: 10 MONTHS AGO David A. Koontz @davidakoontz Challenge - what has to happen before collaboration can occur in the workplace? What are some of the situational requirements, 10 MONTHS AGO David A. Koontz @davidakoontz Challenge - and some of the obvious warning signs that might show up when introducing a collaborative activity? 10 MONT...