Agile Sanity

Accessing the iTunes Store through a firewall

dlf — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 23:18:00 +0000

On your Mac you need to enable Port 3689 TCP to get access… For our next trick we’ll be figuring out how to tell iTunes we’ve moved across the Atlantic and would very much like access to the US store rather than the UK one…

The Great Global Warming Swindle.

dlf — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 22:01:50 +0000

I watched with interest a program recently on Channel Four in the UK entitled ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, in contrast to Al Gore’s ‘An inconvenient truth’ its focus (as you’ll guess from the title), was strongly sided with those skeptical of human involvement in climate change.

As the program seemed one sided in its portrayal of the subject I set out to see if I could find something to balance the equation and came across this:

http://climatedenial.org/2007/03/09/the-great-channel-four-swindle/

Make your own mind up. But you better do it soon.

Name your top 5 pieces of innovative technology that support you as a parent.

dlf — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:12:23 +0000

As a parent you find that there’s thousands of things that you can buy to support you, some you need, most you don’t.

What are your top 5 pieces of technology innovation that you’ve found supportive in one way or another while raising your babies/kids?
Here’s my top 5.

1. Quinny Buzz stroller. A super light and compact baby stroller with detachable seat that doubles as a crash tested car seat for babies. Unlike the great big off road style strollers you see around, this one has smaller wheels and is far more manoeuvrable around the city, and is much easier to cope with if your travelling on a bus, tube or plane.

2. Bumbo seat. This has turned out to be one of our best kid/baby purchases ever, its basically a moulded rubberised seat whose structure means that your baby sits in a (in our experience) secure and upright position. Its brilliant for helping with posture and we’re pretty sure given her progress that its helped our little one build strength in her back and neck. Oh yeah, its also great at meal times too…

http://www.bumboseat.com/

3. Travelling with kids is tough. Most public transport in the UK (IMHO) only pays a cursory nod towards babies and toddlers. As for the airlines , they are an absolute joke – British Airways and Virgin Atlantic I mean you, have you any idea what its like sitting in Heathrow terminal 1 with a baby for 3 hours before a 10 hour flight? How exactly is a furry toy Jet and colouring book with 5 pages meant to entertain a 2 year old for a long haul flight? Your both so out of touch worrying about the next dime, religious artefacts and working time directives that it looks like you don’t give two s**** about travelling families – your business executives are all prissy in the Terminal 3 ‘Club House’ where’s the kid centre and crèche?

Anyway…

One small way we’ve found that helps lift some of the stress of travel is the ultra versatile portable DVD player. In our case we’ve got a pioneer version and while it tends to entertain for as long as a DVD lasts it works just fine whether its a 3 hour ride in the car or transatlantic flight. Make sure you get the extra battery and car charger.

4. Urban baby.com Urban baby is a blog, posted to by mothers and fathers living in cities around the world. I first came across it about a year ago, one of the Sunday papers gave it some air time, billing it as a fashion statement for the new century. Urban baby makes me feel connected. Their are hundreds of people sharing life experiences on that site which more than anything has made me realise that ‘its not just me’…

http://www.urbanbaby.com/

5. Tummy Tubs. In short trying to give a baby a bath in a full size bath is a nightmare, a sink isn’t much easier either. The Tummy tub is basically a bucket with a stable base into which your baby sits. Unlike a full bath you only need a fraction of the water…

Like my Mac, it just works.

http://www.babybathshop.co.uk/acatalog/Tummy_Tubs.html

IM

dlf — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 03:13:09 +0000

We’re all using Internet Messenger software more and more these days, what grew up as a fashion accessory for teenage kids is now a communication medium of choice for grown ups intoxicated by their always on adiction.

Addicted, I’ve been using IM a lot recently and have noticed that grown ups seem to use IM as a means to slow down conversation to half speed to give more time for thought in between responses. Those with skill even use… pauses… between responses to communicate certain emotions or feelings.
IM is still a poor substitute for conversation, especially across boundaries like culture or language. If your having an IM conversation with someone from the opposite side of the atlantic ocean (who apparenly talks English) be prepared.

I’m not the first to say it of course but we simply can’t expect to reproduce and translate via an emoticon every inflection or metaphor but maybe thats not the point. I find IM is most useful for simplification. Most of the really complicated stuff in English can be inferred by an emoticon or single sentance and while I generaly dislike the use of blunt instruments it has its uses.
Just don’t give up on talking.

Project names can be misleading.

dlf — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:14:17 +0000

Why do people name their projects before they’ve thought through what outcomes they want?

A Project name should be the simplest thing that can allow all concerned to get an idea about what a project is going to achieve.

So why then do people name projects before understanding and agreeing key outcomes?

Take this example.

A project get’s named: Team reporting.

However the key outcome of the project is to reduce the amount of time taken by those involved in gathering the information required to put into the report – thus freeing them up for other higher value activities.

The outcome isn’t really anything to do with the Team’s report, to all intents and purposes they stay exactly the same as they always did but more to do with efficency savings.

Understand outcomes and name your projects carefully.

Software development as an empirical process.

dlf — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:08:56 +0000

Of late I’ve been spending some time trying to get my head around complexity theory and how it might relate to modern day software engineering.

So what does empirical mean? Empirical is a definition of determining an outcome through observation, so an empirical process is therefore one that is in a perpetual cycle of continuous observation and modification as apposed to a process based on theory.

Empirical processes are inherently complex and are therefore imposible to plan for. Take todays British GrandPrix, Schumacher won again but how? Had he spent days mapping out in macro level detail his route, did he know that on lap 42, Jensen Button would cause him to veer 16.2cm off his racing line, or that a bug crashing into his visor would distract him just enough to over throttle the engine thus using up slightly more fuel than he had planned and thus affecting the weight distribution of his Ferrari?

Of course not (unless you beleive Schumacher’s a robot….).

Schumacher was using an empirical process – like we all do every day of our lives, based on continuous inspection, he adapted to make millions of slight adjustments every single second of the race, the outcome being his victory…

(So another question for later, how come he continues to win, why is his immplemention of an empirical process ‘better’ than the others?).

For years Software has been seen as a process that can be planned, the CMM infact took this ideology to new levels where the panacea of software engineering was repeatable processes that could be used unmodified over and over to achieve the same results.

No wonder so many software projects have failed, software is complicated enough by itself but in addition it is of course dependent upon the most complicated system in the entire world – humans and not only individual humans, humans interacting as groups of social heirachy and structure.

Trying to quantify a process that in itself is inherrantly unrepeatable will eventually be shown by history to be something that was removed from our collective phsyche via evolution.

So complexity theory through the context of an emperical process can bring us to a terrible (unsatisfactory?) outcome – we can’t build pert charts for software projects and expect them to last any longer than the first second of the first minute on the project.

Gulp.

So what do we do instead then? Observe and adapt and do so to the max. The theory behind the Agile movement is mainly based around transparency, if something is going pair-shaped then that’s OK as long as you have a system in place that can demonstrate it to you the instant it happens…and then its up to you to make the adaptation required before you get the next message…

So based on the theory of empirical process, we as software professionals should be exerting our energies into removing barriers to our observations about process, people and software and building tools and networks that we can utillize to adapt quickly to the circumstances that our observations will cause.

to do: the use of tools in empirical processes.

Why outcomes are more important than requirements.

dlf — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:07:35 +0000

Is it more important that your software project delivers what you’d like or is it more important that your software project delivers what you need?Outcomes are vital in all of the Agile methodologies as they allow everyone to move away from specific ‘requirements’ mode and into innovation/solution mode.

One of the biggest problems that faces us in the Agile world is convincing our customers that outcomes are more important than ‘requirements’.

If you want to see this principle in action and explore the concepts some more I recommend you enroll on one of Ken Schwabers Scrum training courses.

Agile Taxonomy 101 – Part One The Exec definition.

dlf — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:07:13 +0000

Those of you who’ve been working within the Agile community for a while will have no doubt noticed that the word ‘Agile’ is now being used to describe a whole bunch of different things…If we’re not careful Agile is going to end up as vague as the word ‘Architecture’ is today, but I digress…I’m going to have a go at defining some patterns that I’ve seen executives use when they talk about making their business more flexible and adaptable to change (Agile).

From an executive point of view the thing that our community generally calls ‘Agile software development’ is a mere speck in the complex ocean of things that have to be accounted for while running an organization.

Here’s my list of patterns, I’ll take define them some more later….

1. Outsource IT functions that your organization doesn’t absolutely have to own itself.
2.Ensure that the members of your IT organization fundamentally understand your business – What you do, Why you do it, How you do it and Who you do it for.
3.Standardize your IT infra structure and adopt homogeneous software platforms and standards based architectures, but be careful that you don’t get caught in a single vendor relationship trap.
4.Use ‘Agile’ software development and project management practices to deliver software projects iteratively, innovatively and inventively to your market.
5.Ensure your vendors have the level of flexibility that you require, use Service Level agreements and contracts to ensure clarity.
6.Decentralize financial authority as much as possible.
7.Ensure that your IT department is intrinsically linked with the business strategy, you want your IT department to become your ’solutions’ department.

Agile Taxonomy 101 – Part Two The Agile ‘System’

dlf — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:06:48 +0000

I’ll describe a few patterns here when I’ve got my head around them….In the meantime here are some people discussing Agile ‘Systems’.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/soa/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnmaj/html/aj2service.asp

I need to think about what this means: ‘Agility can also be improved not just by abstracting the service away from the underlying implementation but also by taking a more abstract view of the business concepts in the service so that they can be used in a broader context.’

http://www.cbdiforum.com/report_summary.php3?page=/secure/interact/2004-02/business_adaptability.php&area=silver

‘We are still a long way from any recognizable metric of adaptability, we don’t really know exactly how business adaptability is related to IT adaptability.’

Agile Taxonomy 101 – Part Three Agile software development.

dlf — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:06:17 +0000

The 3rd part of my Agile taxonomy concerns the area of managing requirements and building software for projects, Agile software development encompasses methods such as Extreme Programming(XP), SCRUM and DSDM.In comparison to ‘traditional’ methods Agile software development methods all promote incremental and iterative delivery aligned against business value and share a common philosophy that self organising teams are more effective…

Agile software development falls into 2 sub catagories. 1 – Planning processes and 2. Software development best practices.

SCRUM and DSDM fall very much into the planning catagory and concern themselves with organisation, planning and managing scope throughout a projects duration.

XP also devote’s much time to planning but it has also been used as a launch pad to encompass software development best practice such as test driven development, acceptance testing, acceptance test driven planning, refactoring, continuous integration etc. It is common to hear software developers refering to XP to mean software development best practice.

Reference material on these methods:

Extreme Programming expalined 2nd edition – Kent Beck.
Agile Project Management with SCRUM – Ken Schwaber.