Software Team Sociology

Smoothing the rough edges from life

2011-10-04T07:48:00.001+11:00

f you are like me, if you are like most people; you are plagued by a slew of irritations, annoyances and frustrations throughout your day.

You ignore the frustration as you find workarounds and coping mechanism to overcome the road blocks placed in your way, in order to achieve your immediate goals.

Instead of ignoring these irritations I urge you to treat them as important signals that show where you can improve your life: that you isolate each of these annoyances and, remove them permanently from your life by applying a complete solution to the root cause of the problem, instead of engineering temporary workarounds to alleviate the symptoms. In this way your life is gradually improving as some of those repetitive issues stop reoccurring.

One technique that I have found personally useful is asking why five times. It has been made famous by Toyota which introduced it in the 1970's. Toyota credits the 5 why's technique with accelerating their process improvements.

As an example of how this can be used, many years ago I found that I was constantly tired, pushed to the point of exhaustion. I asked myself,

1st Why "Why was I tired?"

1st answer "I was stressed"

2nd Why "Why was I stressed?"

2nd answer "I was not sleeping well"

3rd Why "Why was I not sleeping well?"

3rd answer "I was stressed, also I was exercising less than I used to"

4th Why "Why was I was exercising less than I used to?"

4th answer "I had fallen out of the habit"

5th Why "Why had I fallen out of the habit of exercising"

5th answer "I did not have I regular time scheduled time for exercise"

If you ask the 5 whys at a different time you often come up with different answers. Some people think this is a weakness, personally I think it is a strength.
Let's ask the 5 whys a couple more times.

1st Why "Why was I tired?"

1st answer "I was stressed"

2nd Why "Why was I stressed?"

2nd answer ""I had too much to do"

3rd Why "Why did I have too much to do?"

3rd answer "I was not prioritizing my task enough"

4th Why "Why was I not prioritizing my task enough?"

4th answer "Too many the tasks were rated as important"

5th Why "Why were too many the tasks were rated as important "

5th answer ""I had trouble letting go and accepting that some tasks would have to be done latter"

And again.

1st Why "Why was I tired?"

1st answer "I was stressed"

2nd Why "Why was I stressed?"

2nd answer ""I had too much to do"

3rd Why "Why did I have too much to do?"

3rd answer "I said yes too often when I should have said no"

4th Why "Why was I not saying no?

4th answer "I did not want to disappoint people"

5th Why "Why did I not want to disappoint other people"

5th answer "I needed to tell myself that it was better to disappoint them now rather that rise their expectations then disappoint them latter.

I turned these why's into solutions. I started seeing improvement after I

started exercising at the same time every morning

made sure that only limited number of tasks were highest priority and

I only accept new tasks when I had either completed old tasks or downgraded old tasks in priority.

You do not have to be Toyota to benefit from root cause analysis. Anyone can do it. When faced with a repeated annoyance, just ask why five times.

Online Resources for Software Developers

2011-08-11T20:17:00.041+10:00

facilitated a brown bag lunch for the company's developers today. The topic for the brown bag was online resources that are useful for software developer in their work. We came up with a list of which I have recorded in the following section. It is far from a comprehensive list, however it contains some interesting and useful resources.

Code Katas and Koan

These are exercises to help you to learn elements and features of programming languages.
Examples as follows

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical / computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve.
DotNet Koans The goal of the project is to eventually have a guide for C#, F#, and VB.NET
Pragmatic Dave's 21 Code Katas
Kata Catalogue

Podcasts

These are Internet radio shows often in either a interview style or a panel discussion style
Examples as follows>

.Net Rocks twice weekly discussion of what is happening in the .Net world
Software Engineering Radio more academic and theoretical
Hanselminutes very much like .Net Rocks
Herding Code concentrates on web development
Deep Fried Bytes Technology Podcast .Net Rocks from the South
This Developer's Life - Stories About Developers and Their Lives the people / soft skills side of being a software developer

Screencasts

These are screen capture videos of people demonstrating technology.
Examples as follows

Dime Casts.Net; Inform and Educate in 10 Minutes or Less 198 video and counting
.Net Rocks TV 204 videos and counting
Code 4 Fun Microsofties having fun
jQuery for Designers has text articles as well as screencast tutorials.

Vodcasts

These are Internet TV shows often in a interview style
Examples as follows

FLOSS Weekly about open source software
InfoQ Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

Forums

These are thread based discussion groups often centred around a particular technology
Often better for answering questions if the technology is niche.

Examples as follows

Question and Answer Sites

The members of these sites help each other by asking and answering questions

Often better for answering questions if the technology is common.

Examples as follows

StackOverflowis a programming Q&A site that’s free.
Anyone can ask, answer, or edit questions on Quora
ServerFault is a Q&A site for system administrators and desktop support professionals that’s free.

Blogs

Rants, tips and tricks from those in the know.
Examples as follows

Ayende @ Rahien creator of nHibernate, Rhino Mock and RavenDB
Scott Hanselman compiler of the Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
Jeff Atwood co-founder of StackOverflow

Events and Meetups

These sites help you find out what is happening in Melbourne

Melbourne User Groups
Melbourne Events calendar of events
Eventbrite events made easy
Meetup with people with common interests in real life. Home to a lot of user groups.

Sample Code and Code Projects

These sites give a more in depth treatment of problems
Examples as follows

Miscellaneous

The Wayback Machine. Have a broken link? An important resource that has disappeared? Go back in time and find it.

Does anyone have some useful online resource that they would like to through into the mix?

Two Scrum Events this April

2011-04-13T11:28:00.009+10:00

Yesterdays Scrum Event went very well with a record 70 people turning up. Craig did a splendid job of adjusting this planned talk on the fly to cope with the large number of Scrum beginners in the audience.

Wednesday 13th April 2011

Topic: Understanding and working with the uncertainty at the beginning of a project.

Craig will be using the use the backlog of concerns, problems and topics that the Scrum SIG members have constructed in previous meeting as an example of a project startup.

He will also facilitate a series of small work-group discussions that will highlight the difficulties and possible solutions of understanding and working with the uncertainty at the beginning of a project.

more info

Wednesday 27th April 2011

Topic: Agile Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing by Ralph Hughes

While Agile approaches for the development of transaction- and data capture-applications have been around since before the publication of the Agile Manifesto 10 years ago, employing Agile methods such as Scrum and XP to build large, data-driven systems such as data warehouses is new. New, but luckily just as effective. This briefing will provide an overview of how agile concepts can be applied to data warehousing and business intelligence projects to significantly shorten the development cycle from traditional waterfall-based methods.

More Info

Update: Related Information

Mob SIG Event on Mon 25th October

2010-10-22T12:18:00.008+11:00

indows Phone 7 - has Microsoft got mobile right this time?
This is Microsoft's latest approach at the mobile phone market. It is a drastic shift away from their previous attempts at trying to bring Windows XP feel into the palm of your hand.

The entire WP7 experience has been standardised to follow the "Metro" theme which embraces concepts such as discoverability, content over chrome, and touch as the primary input (without the fiddly stylus).

Join David Burela and Jarred Sargent as they give an overview of what the Windows Phone 7 platform is and how to get started with it.
David will take us through a demonstration of the phone platform and how it differs from previous Windows Mobile phones. He will also talk about the UI design considerations of the "Metro" theme that permeates through the entire phone.
Jarred Sargent will give an overview of what it takes to easily build applications for the phone and will demonstrate some easy hello world applications and his experiences as a developer.
For more details

Endless Iterations

2010-09-29T22:04:00.008+10:00

ome time ago I sat in on two iteration meetings for an adjacent team. There was a possibility that I would join the team on a part time basis, a possibility that never eventuated.

The project they were working on was fairly far along. They claimed they were using extreme programming, they claimed that they were agile, they claimed that they were using two week iterations. However

The team were not asked to commit to completing the tasks scheduled the iteration planning meeting.
The instead of scheduling based on the historical progress of the team in previous iterations the capacity of the iteration is simply assumed to be 80 hours times the number of developers.
Deflects arising from tasks failing acceptance tests were saved for the end of the release, leading to a final test and fix phase.
Instead of using rolling wave planning and progressive elaboration all stories were assigned to an iteration during the release planning phase.
There was no ceremony or activity to close the iteration (no demonstration of completed functionality, no interim retrospective), the uncompleted tasks were just moved to the next iteration and the new iteration planning meeting commenced.

There was no learning in this process. Any mistakes made during one iteration were repeated during the next. Any lessons learned forgotten in the mad dash to grind out tasks.

The point of time boxing is to

provide risk management
limit the amount of time consumed by a task.
habituate the team to meet deadlines.
prevent endless chasing of sunk costs.

None of these objectives were being met.

They were continually starting but never finishing

Sticky Code

2010-09-27T22:08:00.003+10:00

was working with though some legacy code when I discovered that the original coder had

avoided magic numbers by using Macros which was good
defined the Macros in multiple places which was bad

The Root Cause

I started asking myself "why" questions in order to discover the reasons behind this failure.

Question: Why has this duplication occurred?
Answer: The original location of the definition was poorly chosen and subsequent coders where reluctant to move the definition.

Question: Why were coders reluctant to move the definition?
Answer: Because to move code you need to delete it from its original location.

Question: Why are coders reluctant to delete code?
Answer: Either :-

they do not have source control
their source control software does not clean up after itself (files deleted in the repository are not delete in the workspace)
or they do not have decent code coverage.

The importance of moving definitions and implementation between different modules and libraries.
If code sticks to its original location and is not moved then over time you will find that you will get duplications or circular dependencies. Usually both.

The Art of the Question

2010-07-26T07:31:00.025+10:00

hat would you do if any question you could ask you would get an answer to?

Today we are closer that ever.

Any knowledge worker will admit how indispensable internet search is to their work. I have a suspicion that search is still under utilized.

As a programmer I have relied on search engines for a long time. In each project I work on their are new technologies, or API’s that I need to work with or neglected corners of old technologies that need to be used in different ways.

Lately the number of searches I do has risen dramatically. There is simply no excuse anymore to guess or remain ignorant about any information that is important to your decision making process.

Obviously it is still possible to spiral into analysis paralysis if you take this too far. However the length of time it takes to find an answer has shrunk so dramatically that it can not help change the rules of the game.

Asking the right question has long been recognized as important in the fields of critical thinking, skepticism and root cause analysis.

The last few years I have been relying increasing on e-books. Having your technical library on your USB thumbnail drive, Kindle or iPad makes a big difference to your workflow. Information becomes much more accessible. Our very relationship with information is changing.

This is what the information age and the internet has been promising and partially delivering for two decades. Back in the early days of the internet it seemed as if we had access to an enormous amount of information however when I compare what we could do with this information then with what we can do now, there is no comparison.

Melbourne User Groups

2010-03-11T04:40:00.059+11:00

here is a lot going on in Melbourne at the moment with as many as seven different completing ICT related events on some nights.

A few years ago I started keeping a list of IT related events that I regularly attended on my team wiki as a way of encouraging coworkers to do more professional development.

Eventually I moved the list to my Google Calendar and this blog. People started emailing me details of events and groups, and the list rapidly expanded. You will find upcoming events and a list of user groups on the right hand side of the blog. The list of groups has become unwieldy, therefore I have sorted them into rough categories below.

Computer Clubs for Specific Platforms

Database User Groups

Entrepreneurs

How to Improve your IT Job Search

Young IT try one of their workshops

17th Oct 2011 Workshop Communication Skills

IT Pro Groups

Professional Societies

Misc

Mobile Computing

Social Media and Networking

Software Design, Graphics Design and User Experience

Software Development Platforms and Vendor Specific Technology

Google Technology User Group (Rebooted)

News (Google Plus)

.Net and other Microsoft Technologies

Software Development Non-Vendor Specific

Software Testing

Web Design and Implementation

Content Management Systems

Frameworks and Scripting Languages

Cold Fusion

Women in IT

Coding to Spec

2009-10-16T06:56:00.235+11:00

eading "Dreaming in Code" at the moment. The book portrays programmers as extremely literal and needing to work off detailed specifications.

That has not been my experience at all. When I receive a specification I treat it as a starting point.

I go through the UI design and alter it to make it more consistent both internally and with any pre-existing parts of the program. User experience is improved by predictability and simplicity.
I look for common anti-patterns like 20 question syndrome.
I start asking questions.

Is the requested functionality already in program? Was it originally in the program but then removed because of negative customer feedback? Is part of the functionality already in the program if so can this be re-used in a natural way?
If the program is asking the user to make a decision is the information needed to make the decision visible at that point in the program or does the user need flip through several screens to get what they need?
Is the program asking the user make a decision that they should not be making? It is amazing how often software will throw up a dialog with Yes/No button when it is unrealistic to expect the user to make an informed decision.

"Error 1234. Press Okay to continue"
"Foo is changing something important. Do you wish to continue Yes/No"

How easy to undo a decision? People make mistakes. People are also more productive when they can explore different options. Filling the program with "Are you sure Yes/No" messages is not an adequate solution. People become conditioned to hit the "Yes" button automatically without thinking. The brain is every good at filtering out noise.
Are the terms in the specification ambiguous or have different meanings to different groups?. e.g

in the pharmacy industry depending on the context a generic can be either a "set of active ingredients" or a "non-premium brand of drug"
preferred suppliers are actually manufacturers and not suppliers.

Does program work with or against the natural workflow of the task?
Are there non-functional requirements? e.g. security or response time.

After I have gone through some preliminary analysis I will have some hooks to start conversions with the various stakeholders in order to fill in some of the details missing from the "complete" specification. Taking time to go beyond superficial understanding of the people involved pays great dividends and there are always more stakeholders involved than you first think. After this it is time to start talking to the business about trade offs, options and consequences that they probably have not thought of.

simplicity, predictability and consistency versus adapting program behavior to context.
ease of use versus power and flexibility.

I do not always follow this process but when I do I have far better results and when I do not I usually regret it.

If your programmers are complaining about incomplete specifications perhaps you should ask your some questions.

Do you have a blame culture? If everyone is busy diverting blame for problems away from themselves no-one is busy finding solutions to those problems.
Is there to much time pressure? If programmers start asking more questions they are going to get more requirements, which are going to take more time to implement.
Have you got the right programmers?

I have never seen a complete specification for any project that was not trivial and yet the specification and the project takes life and substance as I communicate with the stakeholders and craft and design code.

Software Development Book List

2009-10-15T00:26:00.044+11:00

ere is my top ten must read books for anyone serious about software development.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, (2nd Ed) by Frederick Brooks
The Design Of Everyday Things by Donald A Norman
The Fifth Discipline : The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge
Design Patterns : Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by GoF (also known as Eric Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides )
Refactoring : Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
Quality Software Management volumes 1, 2, 3, 4: by Jerry Weinberg
Getting To Yes - Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher & William Ury
Fearless Change : patterns for introducing new ideas by Mary Lynn Mann & Linda Rising
The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen
Agile Retrospectives : Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby & Diana Larsen

With the following being close runners up.

Agile And Iterative Development : A Manager's Guide by Craig Larman
Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team : A leadership fable by Patrick Lencioni
Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation by James P Womack & Daniel T Jones
Out Of The Crisis by William Edwards Deming
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary & Tom Poppendieck
Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders by Jean Tabaka
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt
The Effective Executive by Peter F Drucker
Influence : Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini
The Toyota Way : 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer by Jeffrey Liker
The World Is Flat : A Brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century by Thomas Friedman

You may have noticed that not all of these books are technical books or books that are generally associated with software development. That is because the most difficult problems in software development are not technical problems but communication, process, organizational and people problems.

Personal Mission Statement

2009-10-14T21:39:00.010+11:00

ecently I was asked to create a value statement for a professional organization. Which is strange thing to do when you think about it, as ultimately you can only declare your own values, not the values of others. However hopefully my thoughts will prompt discussion and lead people to truly assess what their own values are.

I found that by changing the word "we" for "I" in the document I was putting together, and making some other small changes; that it fairly well covered my own personal beliefs. This hardly surprising. What follows is my own personal mission statement.

Value Statement

I give value to customers, employers, co-workers, stakeholders, and employees by following these principles and being true to these values.

Respect

As a team member, I value respect for others time, money and opinions. I value the trust that this respect helps to build. I believe trust is essential to the ability to work effectively with others.

Transparency and Openness

As a knowledge worker, I value the courage to raise visibility and awareness of problems and opportunities in a timely manner. We value the integrity to say what others may not wish to hear, if this information will genuinely assist them (as opposed to merely making us feel better). I believe that like respect, transparency is necessary in order to build confidence through honesty and reliability; and build trust through integrity and professional conduct.

Professional Development

As a thought leader, I value commitment to continual improvement. I value keeping informed of trends and changes in society, industry, and the competitive environment. I value building the ability and flexibility to take advantage of these changes. I value preparing for the future by succession planning and developing young and upcoming talent. I believe in the power of the words of William Edwards Demming "It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."

Collaboration

As a professional charged with providing business value, I value consulting widely to obtain information from people with a diverse background that will form a solid basis for decisions. I value inclusivity in the decision making process. I value the engagement that inclusivity promotes. I believe that together we are smarter than the individuals that we are comprised of. I believe that by being inclusive and welcoming in terms of race, gender and age we create an environment worth participating in.

Inaugural ACS Mobility Meeting

2009-10-13T22:11:00.005+11:00

his was a great first meeting for the Mobility SIG.

Topic: Open Mobile Miner (OMM) - A System for Real Time Mobile
Data Analysis

The growth and proliferation of mobile and embedded devices presents
an exciting new opportunity for intelligent data analysis.

This talk will present our pioneering contributions in the area of
Mobile and Ubiquitous Data Mining in terms of developing the first
suite of resource-adaptive and energy-efficient data analysis and
visualisation techniques.

The talk outlined the system architecture and demonstrate Monash's
software tool for real-time mobile data analysis. The OMM system is
operational on the Google Android and Symbian platforms.
The talk also included application case studies for mobile data
analysis in the areas of mobile healthcare, emergency / disaster
management, Intelligent Transportation Systems and smart energy
management.

Finally, the seminar included a discussion on the experience and
issues with respect to software development on the Android platform. >

The next meeting is planned for the 7th December in the CBD.

Related Information

Jean Tabaka talk on Agile, Lean, and the PMO

2009-10-08T22:02:00.003+11:00

Jean Tabaka agile coach and author of Collaboration Explained spoke at the Melbourne Scrum User Group meeting.

Jean presented on two topics

Learning to Lean
Agile, Lean, and the Project Management Office

more details

Jean gave a good introductory talk on lean and explained how lean needed to be applied to a organization as a whole. She made a case for the PMO to act as facilitators instead of the common scenario of enforcers of static standards.

She expounded on the lead concept of standards as a baseline to be improved upon rather than something to be adhered to. Jean emphasized that actual behavior needed to be tracked rather than the process that people gave lip service to in order to give a true sense progress.

She also recounted some of her experiences in applying these idea in practice.

Update: Related Information

Inaugural Melbourne Google Technology User Group Meeting

2009-10-08T07:30:00.006+11:00

reat first meeting

There was a lot of buzz about wave and a lot of complaints about slow invites.

Check out the Google I/O Wave keynote video

Nick Burton, the convener of the Android Australia user group did a Introduction to Android presentation which went over well.

Alternatives to the 45 minute Presentation

2009-10-07T07:20:00.021+11:00

f your user group has used the same meeting format forever why not change the pace. There are some alternatives to the one or two speakers with long presentations.

An Expert Panel
One of the most common formats after standard long presentation.
Variations include debates (both serious & comic) , Question & Answer sessions or some combination of both.
Example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format.

ACS Branch Forum

Small Workgroup Discussions
After an initial presentation the facilitator divides the room into groups of five and has them discuss an issue or topic related to the presentation. After a predetermined time the groups report on there conclusions to the room as a whole.
Examples of events in Melbourne that have used this format

Many Short Presentations
These short presentation formats are quite popular with many groups in Melbourne and around the world.
There are several different short presentation formats, as well as being distinguished by different durations some format such as Ignite and Pecha Kucha Nights have different restrictions on the use of presentation slides.

Lightning Talks - 5 minute talks
examples of events in Melbourne that have used this format

Rails Or Ruby Oceania
X User Group (4 x 15min + 6 x 5mins)
Python User Group (2 x 15min + 1 x 5mins)

Ignite - 5 minutes talks - 20 slides x 15 seconds
example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format

Ignite Web

Pecha Kucha Nights 6:40 minute talks - 20 slides x 20 seconds
Popular in design and creative fields
example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format

Melbourne Pecha Kucha Nights (PKNM)

Grok Talks - 10 minute talks
Popular at TechEd

15 minute Talks
Examples of events in Melbourne that have used this format

ACS-W Meeting
Mobile Mondays (MoMo)
X User Group (4 x 15min + 6 x 5mins)
Python User Group (2 x 15min + 1 x 5mins)

Why Would You Want to Hear a Lightning Talk?
People will come to a lightning talk when they wouldn't come to a long talk on the same subject. The risk for the attendees is smaller: If the talk turns out to be dull, or if the person giving the talk turns out to be a really bad speaker, well, at least it's over in five minutes. With lightning talks, you're never stuck in some boring lecture for forty-five minutes.

Learning Games
Has broad appeal. Can be used in

Teaching value of communication e.g. The drawing specification game ( I have played this one a couple of times)
Teaching value of setting priorities and cost / benefit analysis e.g. the XP game
Teaching value of thinking outside the box Exploratory Testing with Playing Cards , Exploratory Testing with Dice

and many other learning games
Example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format

Melbourne XP Enthusiasts Group (MXPEG)

Problems and Exercises
Popular with technical audiences.
Small groups collaboratively work through a series of exercises designed to increase their skill level.
These problems can not only be used to increase technical skills but also with process skills such as e.g. Test Driven Development or Pair Programming.

Examples of these types of problems.

Example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format.

Melbourne Scala User Group

Study Group
Attendees help each other with projects and problem faced outside the group.
Example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format.

CocoaHeads

Book Club
Presented review combined with group discussion and analysis of a different book each month
Example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format.

UX Bookclub

Live Demonstration
Demonstration of a technology or technique often adapted on the fly using suggestion from the attendees.
Popular with technical audiences.
Examples of events in Melbourne that have used this format.

The most radical format I have heard of is Speed Geeking
Once proceedings start, the audience splits up into groups and each group goes to one of the presenters. Presenters have a short duration, usually 5 minutes, to give their presentation and answer questions. At the end of the five minutes, the facilitator rings a bell. At this point, each group moves over to the presenter to their right and the timer starts once more. The session ends when every group has attended all the presentations.

I have never seen it applied in Melbourne.

Hackathon
When programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming often as either a community project or as part of a competition.
Example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format.

Installfests
Gathering for mass installations of computer operating systems or software. Often this is either part of open source advocacy or a vendor using the community / express versions of newly release to help drive awareness of there product.
Example of an event in Melbourne that has used this format.

Linux Users of Victoria

Unconference
Facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. Many of the techniques used in these events were developed by Harrison Owen under the name of Open Space Technology in the mid 1980's.

Examples of events in Melbourne that have used this format.

Quiz Night
Generally a fun activity.

Managing Email

2009-10-02T22:02:00.001+10:00

or a while now I have had some strategies in place to manage the constant flow of emails.

I have separate emails for personal mail and bacn

the bacn address is for all those e-newsletters, online group updates and social media notifications that you would like to read but are only going to get around to reading a tiny faction of them.
while I check my personal several times a day I only check the bacn account a couple of times a week.

I use email filters to automatically file email into predetermined categories.
I use spamgourmet to limit the amount of email certain entities can send me.

Business Analysis SIG Event on 14th July

2009-07-15T22:02:00.002+10:00

The event was well attended with 40-50 people showing up. The topic was the BABOK 2.0 (a Body of Knowledge guide for the Business Analysis profession). It was released this March by IIBA. The speaker Dr. Paul Nash characterized the new BABOK as simpler and more general than the previous version (BABOK 1.6).

Dr Nash gave a broad summary of the changes in a structured and intelligible manner.

According to Dr. Nash it is a framework not a methodology; it describes which areas a Business Analysis Methodology should cover in order to be considered a complete process. He also emphasized that because of BABOK’s general and abstract nature it requires adaption to any particular context, and only an experienced Business Analyst would be equipped to do this adaption.

The smaller Telstra venue was not as impressive as Cliftons but it was serviceable for the purpose.

Mashups and ACS Events

2009-05-07T21:55:00.000+10:00

ecently I have been playing around with free online mash-up tools like dapper, Yahoo pipes, twitter feed etc.

I used them to create a rss feed for upcoming Australian Computer Society events and Young IT Events.

Using the tools was remarkability easy. I created a extraction engine in dapper by clicking on elements of the ACS Website while it was loaded into the dapper webapp and entering descriptions of the selected elements. I reused the engine by pointing it at several similar webpages. I then used Y! Pipes to join the information together into one feed.

The ACS is revamping its website with a improved look in July 2009 with a total replacement of the website in coming in 2010.

Also ACS has come out with a twitter news feed.

RSS Feeds mentioned:

ACS Events

Young IT Events

ACS News

Update August 2009

Event RSS feeds and news RSS were suppose to be added in the July 2009 website upgrade. I thought that these feeds will probably not be useful after that. However they still work fine. Since this was first published I have used this technique with the AIIA, AIPM and Churchill Club websites as well.

There have also been some new ACS twitter accounts set up.

ACS Foundation

ACS SA Branch

ACS Queensland

ACS Queensland (Young IT)

Young IT

Young IT (NSW)

New RSS Feeds

ACS Conference

2009-04-15T22:51:00.001+10:00

ust got back from the ACS Victorian Branch Conference.

This years theme was Green IT.

There were talks on

Energy Efficiency and Innovation through Eco Technology
Emissions Trading Scheme
Carbon Trading and the impact on the ICT Industry
Cloud Computing,
Sustainable Business
How ICT is contributing to solving issues with Water Management.

more details

New Software Testing SIG

2009-03-22T20:26:00.015+11:00

The inaugural Software Testing Special Interest Group Meeting pulled a crowd of 50 attendees.

The speaker Dr Mark Pedersen discussed various strategies for obtaining support from the business for software testing initiatives. After his presentation there was a lively group discussion where the attendees shared their experiences in this area.

The discussion ended with a call for a volunteer speaker for the next meeting from the software testing community.

Food was served and the group broke for networking and pizza.

This event was sponsored by K. J. Ross & Associates and they have agreed to sponsor future meetings at the same venue, Cliftons.

Cliftons is a great venue and is well suited to this type of event.

Unfortunately the next meeting is not scheduled until the 4th of June which, I find disappointing.

New Business Analysis SIG

2009-03-03T20:40:00.013+11:00

The inaugural Business Analysis Special Interest Group Meeting gathered quite a bit of interest. The tea house was packed and another roomful people were turned away.

The BA SIG is obviously fulfilling a unmet need.

Keith Majoos laid out a introduction and summary of the topics he intends the SIG to cover during the next 9 months complete with many anecdotes from his 30+ years in the industry.

This first talk was well received. The second talk held on the 2nd April on Business Process had a turn out of 62 people.

The next talk is on the 5th May on Modelling Data. Description as follows.

We will focus on the perhaps forgotten yet extremely important aspect of BUSINESS DATA MODELLING.
In this session we will explore:
When and why we need to document data
The role of the data model in our BA assignment
How do we document data?
Is it only the IT system analyst/database designer who should develop a data model?
This will be an interactive session with some presentation, and some group discussions.

Looks like the BA SIG meetings will be held at Cliftons in the future, a venue that this SIG shares with the Software Testing SIG.

Sympathy considered harmful

2008-07-30T23:55:00.018+10:00

ou start chatting with Adam by the water-cooler. He starts complaining about Brett. Your first instinct is to sympathize. And if Brett is Adams significant other that is absolutely what you should do.

If on the other hand they are two co-workers and it is important to you that they work together well, perhaps you should consider stating the obvious. The obvious being that the best way for Adam to resolve his communication problem with Brett is to actually talk to Brett (If you dig deep enough you usually find a communication problem at the bottom of it).

It is amazing how often people try to resolve a lack of communication by talking to everybody except the person involved.

Sometimes using a roundabout method is justified. Sometimes if you run into a roadblock with someone, and you are making no progress, by making your case to some one you both trust, you can create a bridge between the difficult person and yourself. But usually this is not what is happening, Adam is usually seeking sympathy not a bridge.

Worse they could be trying to form an alliance against Brett. Teamwork and co-operation is rarely improved by creating a “them” and an “us” within the team.

If you ask Adam whether they have talked to Brett about the behaviour they are complaining to you about, they might say that they have, but when you dig deeper you find they have given hints, rather than approaching the subject directly. The word "should" starts to appear frequently in the conversation. "Should have realized". "Should Understand". The word "should" can be quite a dangerous word. People should do many things but usually do not.

My preference is to concentrate on people’s actual behaviour and how I can encourage behaviour that results in better outcomes, rather than indulging in righteous indignation.

Next time this happens to you, perhaps you could consider becoming an active part of the solution, rather than a passive part of the problem. I know that this can be a difficult thing to keep in mind when you are lending a sympathetic ear to a friend, but the benefits can be a more peaceful environment.

Dear Reader,
What is your opinion? Would you leave well enough alone and just sympathize, or would you encourage Adam to talk further with Brett to try to resolve the problem?

Blogs for Marketing purposes

2008-06-04T11:08:00.014+10:00

or a while I have been advocating making companies' Internet presences more interactive by the use of blogs, wiki and forums. Marketing staff are always receptive but management are often resistant. The topic has come up so often that I now have a standard spiel.
Web sites that publish reader’s comments increase customer engagement. As do sites that communicate in a more personal style (e.g. in the form of a blog).These more interactive sites can be used to

Gather customer preferences and needs

Rehabilitate a reputation of arrogance and ignoring customer’s preferences

Create a more personal two way dialog with customers instead of a breakdown into impersonal gathering and disseminating information.

Build community

Create customer buy in

Customer’s criticisms will be more constructive and their attitude more positive if they believe they are part of the process

There is often resistance to these ideas usually centered on losing control of the process. But losing control of the process is not the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing is to be totally ignored.

There is a misconception about where the power is in a conversation. The power is with the listener not the speaker. If the listener is thinking about the shopping list or what they are going to say next then the speaker is raising the air temperature of the room and little more. It follows that trying to keep control of the situation by keeping an iron grip on what is said is a foolhardy exercise. You increase your comfort as you speed your way to disaster. Your ears are soothed by the sound of your own voice as it echoes in an empty room.

The company that has a one way presence on the net has no user comments on their blog (because they have no blog). No user additions to their FAQ (because it is not Wikified). No discussion threads in their forum (because their customers are too busy talking behind their backs where they can not hear them). If someone posts some vitriol in a comment on their blog at least they have the commenter's attention and the beginnings of a discussion. This is better than the 'chirp chirp' sound of silence.

The Dangers of Heroism

2007-09-17T08:28:00.001+10:00

f you have been in software development for any length of time you have been there.

The Crisis

A crisis arises. The management announces that the crisis threatens the very existence of the team / department / business.

The team works overtime. The team guru comes up with a ingenious workaround. A patch is rushed through QA. The crisis is resolved and the team celebrates.

But should they be celebrating?

While everyone is rushing around putting out fires and inventing workarounds for the suddenly realized risk,

No-one is thinking strategically.
No-one taking advantage of opportunities for process and productivity improvement.
No-one is developing their skills.
Compromises are made that damage the long term viability of the project, program or business in crisis in order to resolve the short term crisis.
Quality, maintainability, automated tests, and manual testing are usually the first things to go.
Effort and energy that could be used to drive the project forward is instead being used to prevent the project from going backwards.

The Root Cause

The crisis happened for a reason. Unless root cause analysis is undertaken and follow up action designed to resolve the underlying issue is completed the crisis will reoccur. Chances are it already has occurred several times under different guises.

The standard response that is heard time after time to a suggestion of root cause analysis and a permanent resolution to the problem is "We do not have time". Of course the reason they do not have time is that they do not do root cause analysis therefore have to solve the same problems over and over again.

The trouble is that the players involved in this little drama may not be especially motivated to resolve the underlying causes. Though the business has suffered losses many of the actors involved may perceive gains.

Managers are seduced by the illusion of rapid progress. Team members get to be heroes.

The Manager

On the management side there is even a term for this pursuit of illusionary progress (management by crisis).

Unfortunately the possible outcomes from this strategy are

the employees run around in mindless panic undertaking counterproductive activities
the employees start ignoring management as they have lost all credibility (like the boy who cried wolf)

neither situation is conducive to long term business survival.

The Heroic Team Member

If a team member indulges in an all nighter not only can he/she receive praise but the resulting functionality guaranties future employment as other developers will have difficulty in fixing, extending or even comprehending that area of the code.

Conceived in a flash of creativity and brilliance by a mind suffering from an excess of caffeine and a deficit of sleep this solution is likely to be

overly complicated,
inconsistent both internally and
inconsistent with the rest of the project and
is unlikely to have unit tests.

Further more mesmerized by memory of the feeling of power and genius that was imprinted by the surge of adrenaline that accompanied the birth of this monstrosity this hero will resist the idea of replacing it with something

simpler,
more reliable,
more maintainable, and
that has unit tests

The Confession

Now for a confession. I was once a hero, indulging in many of the counter-productive behaviors described above.

However I became tired of the fact that after saving the company, the company would get itself right back in trouble again. Convinced that there had to be a better way, I started thinking more long term.

I found by fixing things permanently instead of a quick fix half solution every month or so
I had more time to develop reusable utilities which meant
I no longer had to spend time with repetitive infrastructure, which meant
I had time to learn techniques like test driven development, which meant
I spent less time debugging and
so on in a virtuous circle.

The more time I spent on self improvement and process improvement the more time I had to invest in further improvements.

Over time I found that I had to save the company less frequently.

I have experience with both ways of doing things and I can tell you resisting panicking over a short term a crisis and taking a longer view is better for your health and better for your employers long term prospects.

A Tale of an Under-Resourced Project

2007-02-07T13:06:00.006+11:00

Myrmidon Inc Part 1

Adam was feeling the pressure. 12 months ago he was given a large project (Project Beowulf) and it was still no where near being complete. Carla his manager once removed had made a nasty remark about the time taken making it sound like Project Beowulf was the only project he was working on. Adam had repeatedly been pulled off Beowulf to work on higher priority projects.

In response to pressure from Carla (the product manager) , David (Adam's manager) assigned Ethan (a more experienced programmer) to help him. Ethan was told to complete some of the features that were part of Project Beowulf. Ethan reviewed Adam's work and made some design suggestions that he thought if implemented would make it easier for Adam to complete the project. He also identified several sections of duplicate code that if extracted into their own classes could be used for some of the uncompleted features.

Then Ethan found the real problem. Beowulf was supposed to work with Module Grendel. Grendel not have a well designed API. In fact it did not have a API at all. You just found a section of code that did something simular and copied that. Grendel was written by David under intense time pressure and David was considered a Hero for finishing Grendel.

Even though the Interface with Grendel was only a small part of the project, 90% of Beowulf related problems identified by QA where from Beowulf related additions to Grendel. Written with no thought to extensibility or maintainability anyone was going to have a hard time working with Grendel. Worse Grendel had no Unit Tests. Only some of the members of the team used Unit Tests and David was not one of them.

With pressure to complete the features that he had been explicitly assigned to and struggling with Grendel, Ethan gave less help and time to Adam. Adam started to fall behind again. David started to question Adam lack of progress. Adam exploded claiming it was unfair that he was singled out. He started attacking Ethan claiming that Ethan's Project Icarus also overran its budget. He did this in Ethan's hearing and in the hearing of the rest of the team.

Ethan stopped helping Adam. He wrapped up the Beowulf features he was assigned to and they passed QA. Beowulf continued to ping pong between QA and Adams desk.

If you were interested in honesty there was plenty of blame to go around. However people interested in assigning blame are rarely interested in being honest. Adam was blamed for the overrun.

Adam was not a new employee, his strengths and weaknesses were well known. Project Beowulf was an order of magnitude larger than anything he had been asked to do before.

Shouldn't responsibility given to :-

Carla and David for assigning a weak programmer to a task that was obviously beyond his abilities.
David for the poor design of Grendel.
Carla for demanding speed of completion of Grendel above all else.
Carla and David for continually pulling Adam on and off the project.
Ethan for not giving the help Adam needed.
Adam for attacking a team member that was trying to help him.

This team had died and no one had noticed. Somewhere allong the line they had become only a group of people who worked together.

Feedback given badly

2007-02-06T18:49:00.000+11:00

ptimally feedback should be

given frequently,
should be balanced between affirmative feedback and adjusting feedback,
and feedback should be about specific behaviour that you want changed or continued.

Is this what usually happens in the average work place?

No.

However the price of getting feedback wrong can be expensive. Looking back at the long list of incidents that I have observed were feedback was saved up over a long period to be delivered on batch or targeted the recipient’s character, intent or I.Q. I can discern a pattern.

Productivity always decreases dramatically
The recipient never thinks they deserve it (even when they do)
It creates hostility and ill feelings.
The recipient often redirect their energies into non-work related activities where they can receive the praise that they do not receive at work.

People react to such negative appraisals in different ways. They always react badly but badly in unique ways. Some reactions I have seen are :-

spending a lot time at work talking on the phone with other potential employers.
a nervous breakdown.
skipping work without calling in.
writing insults directed at their supervisor into the source code.
start a computer hardware business on company time.

In one company I am familiar with the ill feeling caused by unproductive negative feedback was so bad that the project manager told the out of favor programmers to have a day off so that they would not 'contaminate' a new employee.

In another company I am familiar with management decided to offer permanent positions to two probationary programmers even though they were unhappy with their performance. They did so because they thought that they did not have time to find and train new programmers. There was an important release coming up. There is always an important release coming up. Do I need to tell you that it did not turn out well?

My advice is to address any problems as soon as they come up. Do not wait for an annual review. Address the problematic behaviour not the person. Encourage them to overcome the problem giving appropriate assistance if needed. Do not insult them or try to scare them. If it is clear that coaching with appropriate feedback is not helping, and their behaviour is not acceptable you need to terminate them.

Once the working relationship has broken down the situation can become uncomfortable even for bystanders. Mediating between warring co-workers becomes a series of temporary patches that resolve nothing. The situation often drags on and on negatively impacting the team.

Sashimi

2007-02-06T06:41:00.000+11:00

he book Agile Project Management with Scrum discusses the concept of Sashimi where software functionality is implemented as tiny packets of micro-features. This struck a cord with me.

The idea is that each small chunk of functionality is completely implemented end to end, including

tests,
documentation,
data migration,
and deployment mechanism.

Done, done, done in agile terms. Each micro-feature needs to be completed before moving on to the next sashimi slice.

In the bad old days I used to concentrate on getting the mechanics working and leaving cosmetic issues and documentation until later. By the time I finished the mechanics of a cluster of features I would have a long list of lower priority tasks I would have to work through.

Often I would be pulled off in the middle of a project to deal with a high priority task which in turn was interrupted by even higher priority task.

The backlog of partially finished work often became unmanageable. I tried to resolve these issues by breaking tasks into smaller pieces and limiting the dependences between the new functionality and the old so I could switch in the new feature seamlessly.

After reading Lean Software Development's comparison of partially finished work to inventory, I started reducing the number of tasks I had open at the same time and reducing the size of tasks even further. After reading the extreme programming material on Ward's Wiki I redefined my definition of 'Done' and my definition of what was important, to include everything that was necessary to deploy to the end-user.

This did not happen overnight but was an evolution driven by hard won experience and encouraged by exposure to ideas that resonated with that experience.

With the concept of sashimi I have another idea that resonates with my experience, and that helps me bring into sharper focus the direction in which I wish to improve my software development processes.

Random Quotes

2007-02-05T15:10:00.000+11:00

have this habit of jotting down quotes that strike my fancy in my teams wiki. No-one else seems to pay much attention to them however I find it useful to re-read them every now and again.

Quotes and Concepts

25-to-1 productivity ratio: the observation that there is a 25-to-1 productivity ratio between the best and worst developers. Some sources insist it is 64 to 1 or higher. Fred Brooks?
6 degrees of Separation
the idea that everyone on earth is connected to everyone else by a few intermediary relationships from an experiment by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the late 1960's involving a chain letter passed from Omaha, Nebraska to Boston, Massachusetts
Chasm between Early Adopters and the Early Majority
Geoffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm
Code Smell
a hint that something has gone wrong somewhere in your code More
Conway's Law: - commonly stated as ``If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler''. The original statement was more general: ``Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.'' We might put it more succinctly as ``The means determine the ends'', or even ``Process becomes product''. More
Cost of Variety - Industrial cost goes down by about 15% to 25% per unit every time volume doubles, but goes up by 20% to 35% when variety doubles.
George Stalk
Empirical vs. defined processes
Consider making cookies. You have a recipe, and you follow it. If you make another batch, with the same ingredients, in the same proportion, in the same oven, you expect to get the same result. This is an example of a defined process.
Consider instead the process of creating a cookie recipe. The value comes from its originality. You might try a number of variations, to get just the right result. Iteration is inherently part of the process; this is an empirical process.
See Methods and Tools Winter 2002 page 10
Estimates
- estimates prepared by those who will do the work are better than estimates prepared by anyone else
  Nine Management Guidelines For Better Cost Estimating. Communications Of The ACM 35:2 (Lederer 1992)
- the people most competent in solving the task should estimate it
  (Jørgensen 1991)
- Studies have shown that we are best at estimating when comparing things that fall within one order of magnitude
  - Improving Subjective Estimates Using Paired Comparisons. IEEE Software, 18:1 (Miranda 2001)
  - Multi-criteria Decision Making: The Analytic Hierarchy Process (Saaty 1996)
- There is evidence that an estimate based on a developer's intuition is more accurate than other, more analytical approaches.
  Empirically Guided Software Effort Estimation. IEEE Software 17:6 (Johnson et al. 2000)
- Popular method of agile estimating is by playing planning poker Planning Poker (Grenning 2002)
- averaging individual estimates leads to better results (Höst and Wohlin 1998)
- group discussions of estimates leads to better results
  A Review of Studies on Expert Estimation of Software Development Effort (Jørgensen and Moløkken 2002)
- we are better at estimating “this is like that” than we are at estimating the absolute size of things
  (Lederer 1998; Vicinanza 1991)
Form follows function - Louis Sullivan
Form follows failure: "the form of made the is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly" Henry Petroski - The Evolution of Useful Things
Freezing Design As soon as one freezes a design, it becomes obsolete
Fred Brooks
Fundamental Attribution Error
human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimation the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.
Interruptions
managers are able to work an average of only five minutes between interruptions
Time Power (Hobbs 1987)
Parkinson's Law
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion (1957)
Planning
- Planning is everything. Plans are nothing.
  Dwight D. Eisenhower
- No plan survives contact with the enemy.
  Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke
- A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
- If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you’ll be amazed at the results.
  General George S. Patton
Queuing Theory
- Little's Law
  states that in a stable system, the average amount of time it takes something to get through a process is equal to the number of things in the process divided by their average completion rate
Reaction to a new methodology
three-step sequence of reactions that meets the introduction of a new methodological principle: (1) “it’s trivial”; (2) “it cannot work”; (3) “that’s how I did it all along anyway”. The order may vary from Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer
Rule of 150
150 is the maximum number of individual with whom human beings can have a genuinely social relationship. Groups work together more effectively when they are kept under the 150 member limit. From the theories of anthropologist Robin Dunbar
SNAFU Principle: ``True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth.'' More
Transactive Memory
Close knit groups develop joint memory where each member is responsible for remembering a different portion of the joint memory - Daniel Wegner
Triumph of Truth A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Plank
User Stories

Aspects

alliteration - Card, Conversation, and Confirmation - by Ron Jeffries

Attributes

acronym INVEST -Independent, Negotiable, Valuable to users or customers, Estimatable, Small, Testable - by Bill Wake (Extreme Programming Explored)

Zero One Infinity
Beware of arbitrary constants or limitations. The maximum size of a collection should be either Zero, One or Infinity - Professor van der Poel

Talk on Design Patterns in Melbourne

2006-12-07T12:38:00.000+11:00

elbourne Patterns Group Meeting
Went to the design patterns talk yesterday.

Steve Hayes turned up. He had just come back from India.

The test patterns talk ended up being a group discussion of the relationship between TDD and good O-O Design. We talked about what made good tests and what made good design.

Steve raised the concept of habitability which comes from the book Patterns of Software by Richard Gabriel.

"Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers, coders, bug-fixers, and people coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently. Either there is more to habitability than clarity or the two characteristics are different."

This struck a cord with me and I talked about treating your team members (both present and future) as first class customers who are entitled to find the components you write both easy to use and easy to maintain.

Related Information

Talk on Project Management (Agile and others) in Melbourne

2006-12-04T21:30:00.000+11:00

rganized by the Content Management Professional Australian Community

The panel consisted of six project managers only one of which was using agile and he seamed to think that agile was a watered down version of XP. The panelists had very different backgrounds and could not seam to agree on much of anything.

There was agreement that communicating and building relationship with people was one of the key aspects of project management. Plus the rapid changes in technology within the IT industry makes yesterday's solutions obsolete very quickly and inflexible long range plans foolish.

One of the panelist highlighted the need to keep on asking 'Why?' in order to uncover the root cause of problem. This reminded me of the Toyota Way's practice of asking 'Why?' five times.

Update: Related Information

Upcoming Talk on Design Patterns in Melbourne

2006-12-04T15:19:00.000+11:00

PG Melbourne Patterns Group on 6th December

Part 1 - Prototype Pattern by Dave Cameron

Specify the kinds of objects to create using a prototypical instance, and create new objects by copying this prototype. [Design Patterns, Gamma et al]

Part 2 - Unit Testing Patterns, by Khali Young

TDD is not about testing, it's about using tests to create software in a simple, incremental way. Not only does this improve the quality and design of the software, but it also simplifies the development process.
More Info - Home Page and Forum

Update: Related Information

Melbourne User Groups

Road to Serfdom

2006-12-03T13:48:00.000+11:00

The Road to Serfdom Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

Just finished this book. Insists that centralized planning inevitably leads to corruption of the original intention of planning, destruction of freedom and moral decay of the individual and hence of society of as a whole. Friedrich Hayek would totally agree with Ken Schwaber about the need to align responsibility and authority. He would totally be in favor of the people responsible for implementing work being the ones to plan it.

Finished Reading Extreme Programming Explained

2006-12-03T12:58:00.000+11:00

I have finished reading Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained 2ed.

He seems to have backed away from one of the most controversial aspects of extreme programming, the On Site Customer. The first edition practice of On Site Customer has changed to Whole Team which sounds much more like scrum's concept of cross-functional teams. He adds corollary practices which he says are difficult or dangerous to implement before completing the preliminary work of the primary practices of XP. Real Customer Involvement is a corollary practice that seems to be intended to partially offset the effect of ditching On Site Customer for Whole Team as a primary practice. It seams a lot weaker and Beck admits that most teams have real trouble getting adequate access to real customers.

He also is quite candid about the fact XP will not work unless the organizations real values as opposed to it's professed values are aligned with XPs values.

Reviews: BookShelved, WikiWiki

Agile Project Management With Scrum

2006-11-29T06:37:00.000+11:00

Agile Project Management with Scrum

Ken Schwaber gives lots of case studies in this. He is not afraid to use his own mistakes as examples to highlight the fact that scrum is a learning process.

I liked the 'Scrum is art of the possible' sound bite.

He uses case studies grouped by theme to illustrate proper use of scrum practices topped off with a series of lessons learned sections to nail his points down.

Reviews: Bookshelved, WikiWiki

Update: Related Information

Started Reading Extreme Programming Explained

2006-11-28T06:16:00.000+11:00

With all the detailed information about Extreme Programming on Ward Cunningham's WikiWiki and other sources reading Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained never seemed urgent. However I decided that it was about time I went to the primary source.

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (2nd Edition) (The XP Series)

So far it is quite different from what I have read from other sources (many of which seem to have been based on the first edition). It has a loose style sometimes wandering off topic. However the first sentence grabs your attention. "Extreme Programming is about social change". After more than 10 years experience in the industry I can tell you that it is hard to underestimate the importance of the human factor in software development.

The neglect of this human factor in traditional approaches and the emphasis of it in agile approaches is what attracted me to agile in the first place.

Reviews: BookShelved, WikiWiki

Talk on DotNetNuke on the 28 Nov

2006-11-24T10:29:00.000+11:00

ICTORIA . NET DEV SIG - 28th November

Enterprise Development of Dot Net Nuke Modules Part 2 by Philip Beadle

How to use TFS Source Control with DNN Web Application Modules
Using Team Build to create installable DNN Modules
Unit Testing DNN Modules
Using nDoc (for ASP 2.0) to create your documentation
Writing a Test Script for your module

VICTORIA . NET's mission for members in the Middle East - a great business opportunity by Peter Halliday & Maria Papadopoulos

GITEX highlights
MMV support
Business leads

Related Information

Benefits of Courage

2006-11-24T07:07:00.000+11:00

Developer face many challenges in the work place. Fear can get in the way of doing what needs to be done.

Fear that making a necessary change will break something else in the system.

Agile practices such as automated tests (unit and functional tests) and continuous integration help provide a safety net that is going help overcome this fear.

Fear of admitting you need help when you hit a roadblock.

Agile practices such as pair programming and/or the daily scrum or the daily stand up meeting can help. Providing a safe environment is also important.

Fear of bucking the system,

of saying to your boss that what they are suggesting did not work last time and is unlikely to work this time. Getting agile practices adopted can require a little courage and some managing upwards.

Fear of saying no,

of saying that if you move the deadline forward by a month we will miss the deadline by a month unless you reduce the scope.

Other fears,

perhaps the readers can suggest other times where courage is needed.

Benefits of TDD

2006-11-23T21:39:00.000+11:00

fter the e-Commerce SIG talk I started chatting with a fellow attendee. We talked about what was not covered by the presentation.

The discussion drifted to Test Driven Development and the benefits. To my mind there are so many benefits that it is hard to pick a winner.

If TDD is too extreme for you or you are faced with non-unit tested legacy code, do not let the ideal of test first prevent you from adding unit tests.

Some of benefits of unit testing are

Provides a safety net that promotes confidence about making changes to code.

Instills a appreciation of the need to break dependencies.

Promotes good Object Oriented design

(bad design is hard to test)

Allows you to see your component from the outside.

(This helps increase ease of use from a callers perspective)

Ramp it up to test first development and these benefits intensify plus you get

It helps you focus on what you are try achieve instead of how you are going achieve it

There are times where some or all of what you need to achieve is already there in the code

(if this is the case the test will pass without you doing anything.)

(The number of times I have deleted large sections of legacy code because the sections did not do anything useful is depressing)

It encourages you to stick to what is needed immediately instead of adding what might be needed later.

A powerful benefit is a change of mindset.
The above list is in part a manifestation of the change in mindset and in part a cause of the change.

Can the readers think of any other benefits.

Agile Development Talk

2006-11-23T21:01:00.000+11:00

just arrived back from the Agile Development Talk that the ACS e-Commerce SIG put on in Melbourne.

The presenter was Martin Bauer who has been managing projects using FDD (Feature Driven Development) for 6 years.

He talked about XP and Scrum as well as FDD. Unfortunately he did not know much about either XP or Scrum. He was on much firmer ground with FDD.

He did not cover many of what I considered the greatest benefits of agile practices. He did cover the reduced risk of failure and he did emphasize the importance of the human element.

The organizer suggested getting detailed requirements up front and an IID (Incremental and Iterative Development ) version of Waterfall.

I told him that requirements were like pornography, the client knows what he wants [the requirements] when he sees it.

It got a laugh.

I not sure were I stole that from. Perhaps a kind reader could tell me who originally said it.

Update: Related Information

Melbourne User Groups I Attend

2006-11-16T15:49:00.000+11:00

list of user groups I find useful.

Update: A more comprehensive list of Melbourne user groups.

Agile Estimating And Planning

2006-11-15T15:40:00.001+11:00

The speaker at last nights MXPEG Meeting reviewed Agile Estimating And Planning by Mike Cohn.

Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series)

He attended a course run by the author. The speaker showed everyone planning poker cards that Mike Cohn gives out. They were a big hit.

Melbourne XP

2006-11-15T15:17:00.001+11:00

ttended the Melbourne eXtreme Programming Enthusiasts Group (MXPEG) last night. The topic discussed was Estimating XP stories.

The conversation was driven by a newcomer to the group. She managed to get a lot out of the group by focusing on the groups collective experience of XP.

Update: Related Information

Software Team Sociology

Smoothing the rough edges from life

Online Resources for Software Developers

Code Katas and Koan

Podcasts

Screencasts

Vodcasts

Forums

Question and Answer Sites

Blogs

Events and Meetups

Sample Code and Code Projects

Miscellaneous

Two Scrum Events this April

Mob SIG Event on Mon 25th October

Endless Iterations

Sticky Code

The Art of the Question

Melbourne User Groups

ExpressionEngine Meetup Group

Coding to Spec

Software Development Book List

Personal Mission Statement

Inaugural ACS Mobility Meeting

Jean Tabaka talk on Agile, Lean, and the PMO

Inaugural Melbourne Google Technology User Group Meeting

Alternatives to the 45 minute Presentation

Managing Email

Business Analysis SIG Event on 14th July

Mashups and ACS Events

ACS Conference

New Software Testing SIG

New Business Analysis SIG

Sympathy considered harmful

Blogs for Marketing purposes

The Dangers of Heroism

A Tale of an Under-Resourced Project

Feedback given badly

Sashimi

Random Quotes

Quotes and Concepts

Talk on Design Patterns in Melbourne

Talk on Project Management (Agile and others) in Melbourne

rganized by the Content Management Professional Australian Community

Upcoming Talk on Design Patterns in Melbourne

Part 1 - Prototype Pattern by Dave Cameron

Part 2 - Unit Testing Patterns, by Khali Young

Road to Serfdom

Finished Reading Extreme Programming Explained

Agile Project Management With Scrum

Started Reading Extreme Programming Explained

Talk on DotNetNuke on the 28 Nov

ICTORIA . NET DEV SIG - 28th November

Enterprise Development of Dot Net Nuke Modules Part 2 by Philip Beadle

VICTORIA . NET's mission for members in the Middle East - a great business opportunity by Peter Halliday & Maria Papadopoulos

Benefits of Courage

Benefits of TDD

Agile Development Talk

just arrived back from the Agile Development Talk that the ACS e-Commerce SIG put on in Melbourne.

Melbourne User Groups I Attend

Agile Estimating And Planning

Melbourne XP