Bob Marshall (@flowchainsensei):
“You really have no clue as to how much your business success depends on software, do you?” #neversaid

Ben Simo (@QualityFrog):
“Compliance with standards makes sense when & where interoperability is more important than innovation & improvement.”

Wil Harris (@wilharris)
“New Apple mouse proves not only does Steve think we are too dumb for two buttons, we can’t even handle one. A mouse with no buttons. Nice.”

Jared M. Spool (@jmspool):
“Remember, if you torture data long enough, you can get it to confess to anything you want.”

Jeff Patton (@jeffpatton)
“Requirements are the boundary between what I get to decide and what you get to decide. It’s a fuzzy discussion, or DMZ”

Esther Derby (@estherderby)
“ppl talk about commitment as if it is an act of will. commitment requires will AND time, resources, skill, authority”

Bob Marshall (@flowchainsensei):
“So you’re all far too busy politicking and CYA-ing to actually bother about delivering stuff to the paying customer?” #neversaid

37signals (@37signals)
“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” -Linus Pauling

Naresh Jain (@nashjain)
“Consistency is over-rated. Consistency is a big innovation killer. Let diversity & positive deviance help us explore better ways”

There was a workshop specifically for Visual Management at Agile 2009 and a subsequent write-up on the presenter’s Visual Management Blog. But don’t be fooled – while this may be gaining traction in more technical areas, this will work for anyone’s project. There are lots of great pictures of examples and is worth your time to browse the pictures even if you don’t read the whole post. I’d suggest starting here.

I’m amazed at how well a non-technical solution can communicate to everyone on (or off) the team.

“Plans aren’t sacrosanct — they’re meant to be flexible guides, not straightjackets. Agile project leaders focus on adapting to inevitable changes rather than opposing them. In this way, value and quality are the end goals and the plan becomes a means to achieve them, not the goal itself.”

I agree that sample time is the major difference between projects that succeed and projects that don’t. However I would also argue that the major difference between Waterfall and Agile is the sample time, and thus is fair to pit the two against each other.

When you get down to it, every practice and method is some variation of PDCA/DMAIC/etc. What differs from them is how quickly you close the loop between each iteration, how the speed impacts the style of communications, what you believe about the appropriateness of certain inter-team communications (can developers impose restrictions on the requirements? can developers talk to the customers?).

Agile likes it fast – you need to work hand-in-hand daily with everyone on the team because there isn’t time to do otherwise. It is believed that developers and business people need to talk together, because the developer may have a restriction that the designers didn’t know about.

Waterfall likes it slow – you write design docs, throw them over the wall to development, and again over the wall to testing, etc. You write a lot and try to be exceptionally clear, because waterfall folks believe that conversation about a project is basically a one-way street, slowly falling down each step of the waterfall till the product emerges at the bottom.

Each belief fits a different situation, and the real argument is: which one fits software development the best?

[via @jurgenappelo]

“The file cabinate is the wrong metaphors for your web site. The right one is a a telephone, because it is all about having a conversation.”

This really changes how you approach generating content for a site when you think of it this way, and is one I wish more big companies embraced. She has some rather remarkable credentials too, so you might want to listen. According to her site: ”In 1985, Ginny set up one of the first independent usability test laboratories in North America where she and her colleagues had users come to try out interfaces and documentation for clients including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SAP, and Sony.”

Nice.

“The correct tool is exponentially more productive.”

Whether you are talking about Netflix upending the rental business, cell phones killing the pay-phone business, new ways to  detect flu outbreaks, digitization of film, or more efficient ways to build web applications, the new isn’t just better. It’s radically better.

The radically better, or “exponentially” as Rands put it is really the important bit. We are not talking about small efficiencies that bring about incremental 20-30% gains, these are the big changes that happen over night and catch many people entirely off guard.

Take YouTube for example. There was more original content uploaded in the last 2 months to YouTube than ABC, CBS, and NBC created in the last 50 years… combined! Read that last sentence again, because even I was shocked the first time I ran across the statistic. That’s a lot of video, and makes these mammoth broadcasting networks look like peanuts. Say what you will about the quality of the content getting to YouTube, but YouTube didn’t exist 4 years ago, and with that kind of volume it isn’t hard to outpace the legacy broadcast networks with just a modicum of tweaking.

The same is happening in many other industries: Phone book companies have become irrelevant due to Google. The Apple’s iTunes Music Store is now the #1 music retailer making compact discs obsolete. Amazon is rapidly making many brick-and-mortar stores irrelevant (especially with their for foray into same-day-shipping). And with the Amazon’s Kindle and B&N’s Nook eBook readers coming of age, one doesn’t need a sharp imagination to see what is going to happen to the book industry. The thing about eBooks, is that for the last half-millennia, books have been largely unchanged. Until our generation.

I know people have a hard time wrapping their head around small changes, much less big ones, but these big changes are happening everywhere. Every. Single. Day. We need to adapt, or become as irrelevant as the pay phone has become.

My takeaway? What separates you and your business from your competition is your ability to rapidly change and adapt to these new realities. And then radically do it again in 18 months. And then again, and again, and again.

This seems to me to be good advise, and one that I’m going to work on. Apparently he has a whole book written about this type of thing.

“A survey by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy, found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%.”

The article puts the primary blame on the poor economy, but also suggests that micro-measuring employees (how many times did you smile at a customer today?) and mixed messages about company loyalty play a significant role.

Bob Sutton discusses the data further. Particularly, he is interested in how companies will fare when the economy returns.

There are many more stats, and some good stories in the interview, but the question I pose for you is this: has your world and your products changed that radically, that quickly, and with so few resources in the last three years? If not, why not? The tools are there, and freely available, to let you do it.

One more tidbit: The original site was built in less than 6 months using only nights and weekends.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

What do you think? Is this a nicely polished gimmick, or the future of computing?

“Until management recognizes its belief system, understands how these beliefs create dysfunctional behaviors and then embarks on a journey to develop new beliefs and behaviors based on the quality body of knowledge, it cannot extract itself from its quandary.”

The 7 root causes he identifies and discusses in more depth are:

1. Placing budgetary considerations ahead of quality.
2. Placing schedule considerations ahead of quality.
3. Placing political considerations ahead of quality.
4. Being arrogant.
5. Lacking fundamental knowledge, research or education.
6. Pervasively believing in entitlement.
7. Practicing autocratic behaviors, resulting in “endullment.”

This seems right to me. Are you making things perfect every time, or do you have a quality problem? Which of these most adversely affect the quality of the products you make?

Project Oriel believes in learning at all times in all subjects. Best wishes Joseph!

- Peter

Rewarding Firefighters not Fire Inspectors.

In other words, the people spotting the problems and fixing them before the “fire” do not get rewards. The “firefighters” who rush and put out fires in progress do get reward.

But which is better for the company?

Once the fire starts, damage is already being done. “Fires” are stressful and distracting – but never seen a company yet that actively makes sure that fires don’t happen. But seen lots of companies that reward the firefighters ( even when they were the “pyromaniacs” )

According to my notes from last year, they predicted trends two weeks earlier than the doctors. This year, they’re simply calling it “near real-time”.

… we have previously lived in a country [Taleb] calls Mediocristan, where cause and effect were closely connected because life was simpler and the range of possible events was small. Now, the global community lives in a place he has named Extremistan, in which we are both more interdependent, and at the mercy of “the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” The only thing any of us can know for certain is that life will continue to change at a rapid pace.

And:

Resisting change wears down our bodies, taxes our minds and deflates our spirits. We keep doing the things that have always worked before with depressingly diminishing results. We expend precious energy looking around for someone to blame—ourselves, another person, or the world. We worry obsessively. We get stuck in the past, lost in bitterness or anger. Or we fall into denial—everything’s fine, I don’t have to do anything different. Or magical thinking—something or someone will come along to rescue me from having to change. We don’t want to leave the cozy comfort of the known and familiar for the scary wilderness of that which we’ve never experienced. And so we rail against it and stay stuck.

Go check out the quick read at ChangeThis!

“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”

[via Signal vs. Noise]

“If you have to explain how your software works, you’ve failed.”

We could all extol the virtues of simplicity. And an intuitive user interface. And a “well designed” and “engaging” interface. But these are all hard to measure. The number of times people ask how to do <anything> in your software? Well, that’s easy to count, and the goal is a simple one: Zero questions.

Uncle Bob Martin

• “I’m not religious about TDD [Test Driven Development], I’m dogmatic; there’s no diety involved.”

Neil Ford

• “The problem with software is that there is no credit limit on technical debt”

Here’s the full video:

And here’s the older 2.0 version.

“Good ideas turn into good designs fairly quickly. If you catch yourself fiddling too much with colors, borders and treatments to bring a design together, chances are the problem lies somewhere deeper.”