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 ...

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...

The Committed Sardine By Ian Jukes  A blue whale is the largest mammal on earth. The adult blue whale is the length of 2½ Greyhound buses and weighs more than a fully loaded 737. A little known fact is that a blue whale is so large that when it decides to turnaround, it can take 3 to 5 minutes to turn 180 degrees in the opposite direction. As a result, some people have drawn a strong parallel between blue whales and our school system. It just seems to take forever to turn them around. There as some people who just don’t believe the public school system can be turned around. But compare the way a blue whale turns around (slowly) with how a school of. . . Sardines – which is the same or even greater mass than a blue whale. . . A school of sardines can almost turn instantly around – how do they do it? The answer is simple. If you take a careful look at a school of sardines you will notice that although all the fish appear to be swimming in the same direction, at any one ti...

Presented in OpenSpace at Agile Games 2018 for FUN and Feedback. This game design is not focused where you might assume - at training people how to "do" Scrum.  The inventors of the game, Tim Snyder and Derek Lane, are focused upon the experience of Scrumming, the group dynamics of being a scrum team.  The game has been designed, and is being refined with the objective of allowing groups of people that know how to do Scrum, to experience some of the Ah-HA moments that mature Scrum team learn after many, laborious retrospectives.  By compressing the group dynamic into a game with the glorious "happen-chance" cards causing random, yet all too common software development events, playing this game for a few hours can give you the deep insights that may only be achieved after months or years of real-life time developing products.  Learning doesn't require time... * Al Shalloway. One of the core questions Tim & Derek have been pondering:  How does one gai...

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...

What can you do to save the world with an Amazon Dash Button? Has a new era of enablement reached the hockey stick curve of exponential growth?  I think it has.  I've been picking up this vibe, and I may not be the first to sense things around me.  I've got some feedback that I very poor at it in the personal sphere.  However, on a larger scale, on an abstract level, in the field of tech phenomena I've got a bit of a streak going.  Mind you I'm not rich on a Zuckerberg level... and my general problem is actualizing the idea as apposed to just having the brilliant idea - or recognizing the opportunity. A colleague told me I would like this tinker's Dash Button  hack.  It uses the little hardware IoT button Amazon built to sell more laundry soap - a bit of imaginative thinking outside of the supply chain problem domain and a few hours of coding.  Repurposing the giant AWS Cloud Mainframe, that the Matrix Architect has designed to enslave y...

Learning tools are beginning to benefit from the exponential growth process of knowledge creation and transference.  Here is Seeing Theory an example of this.  Did you do well in Probability and Stats in school?  Funny enough I can predict with astonishing accuracy that a majority of you said "NO!"   I also struggled with those courses, may have repeated it a time or two.  But now with some age I find it much more fascination to study this subject. Seeing Theory Leaning Site "By 2030 students will be learning from robot teachers 10 times faster than today"  by World Economic Forum. This is what happens when humans debate ethics in front of a super intelligent learning AI. See Also: TED Radio Hour : NPR : Open Source World   Tim Berners-Lee tells the story of how Gopher killed it's user base progress and CERN declared their WWW open source in 1993 April 30th, insuring it would continue to prosper.  And was it's growth exp...

Derek "QuikDraw" Lane & I proposed this session (2 sessions actually) for the Agile2017 conference (it wasn't accepted - oh well next time maybe).  Wonder if you'd like to come play in the OK Corral with us? SlideShare Deck Here's how it might go down...   Agile2017 Submission # 5835 And if you're interested... comment on this slide deck...  it's not the final answer.  In fact we may be sneaking bigger guns in to the corral under our dusters... SlideShare deck Abstract: Leadership Style Shoot Out :: Which style best works for this context - how will you recognize it? Where do you Stand Let's survey the audience's Leadership styles/preferences - we will use a standard reference tool (or maybe just make it up on the fly). Getting the participants up and moving and interacting with each other and the sub-set of leadership styles described on the four flip charts in the corners of the room. We will play a few rounds of the gam...

I'm extremely concerned today for my country and this planet.  It appears that history is repeating.     January 27th -- International Holocaust Remembrance Day . President  Trump bars refugees and citizens of Muslim  nations entry into the U.S.A. The New York Times By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-N0827-318 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de Four score and four years ago a dictator brought forth on the European continent an evolving plan to rule the world and subjugate the masses. Now we are engaged in a great resistance , testing whether our nation, or any nations conceived from the learning of our mothers and fathers and so dedicated to liberty, can long endure.  We are met on a great social square of technologic creation .  We have come to dedicate a portion of our wealth, wisdom, and life to those in history that have offered their lives and wisdom so that we may learn and prosper.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should ...

An Exercise in Estimation:  How many times can you fold a piece of paper in half & half again... I do this exercise when beginning scrum teams start story estimation or task estimation.  While this exercise has a unique twist that is very different than task estimation or story estimation - very few people foresee this aspect of the exercise, so it adds to the ah-ha moment. Start by giving everyone a sheet of typical paper (8.5 x 11 in the USA - although the size just doesn't matter).  Then tell them the exercise but ask that no one do any thing yet.  First we will estimate.  The task is to estimate how many times you could fold the paper in half and then again in half and repeat... without doing it what's your estimate of the number of folds? Ask people to call out their estimate, write then on a board in no particular order or fashion. Typical groups come up with estimate in the range of 5 - 20 folds. If you want to do math... calcula...

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...

What do you think & feel about personality and behavioral assessments?  Are they useful to you?  Can you share them with others to help improve your relationships?  Do you have the courage to put your personality on display for your collaborators to inspect? Well I thought I'd try to open the kimono to see if it helps me... I've studied Psychometric assessments and some I find useful, some I feel are just a step to the left from astrology charting.  Yet might not be harmful for self reflection.  I've also found that it takes an expert to explain the tools and reports such that a layperson can understand and make positive use of the assessment and it's report.  And while I've been "certified" is some of these tools/technique I do not practice them enough to be competent - and my pitch is akin to a snake-oil salesman. One issue with these assessments was made clear to me when I heard the Invisibilia NPR show on The Personality Myth.  "We lik...