Simon's voice
My old friend Simon Voice at Connections Recruitment now has a voice of his own.
Posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
Friday, December 19, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
Energized Christmas Pirating
Last weekend our Christmas bash went off with a "Heave Ho, me hearteys". And that was from the Lock Keeper, over the tannoy, as we sailed free of the lock on the estuary in Ipswich. Srsly!We hired the The Old Neptune in Ipswich from Friday to Sunday. You have to look at all the pictures on the site. This place is truly awesome. It's called an Inn, and maybe it was once, but basically it's a huge old house with abundant character. And we had it all to ourselves. The courtyard alone is so lovely that I'm thinking we have to experience it again during Summer.
Programme of events:
- Friday night: Arrive. Nom and drinks in front of the fire.
- Saturday: Gokarting. Pirating aboard The Black Thistle (Ok it's really just The Thistle) and drinking until loaded to the gunwales. Banquet.
- Sunday: Chill for the day. Eat the leftovers. Drink the leftovers. Head back.
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Bro at XPDay
Finally, we got along to XPDay today, albeit only for a few hours. We went specifically to see my brother, Marc Baker, and Dan Jones from the Lean Enterprise Academy do their keynote. It was great to meet Dan and talk with him over lunch.Dan talked about the evolution of Lean. Marc talked about Lean thinking and how they're conducting 'experiments' in various industries, particularly healthcare, to compress value streams, eliminate unnecessary waste and increase throughput. It was a good talk. Refreshingly different, I thought, but still pertinent. The anecdotes were amusing and the metrics were both shocking and impressive, in terms of what was going on before the experiments and what the experiments achieved. And I'm actually glad they didn't talk about Lean in the context of software.
The slides are here.
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Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Pomodoro-powered promiscuous pair-programming
At Agile2008, Gus attended a session about the Pomodoro Technique by Stefan Noteberg and has been using it since.He's running a session on the technique internally at Energized Work next week. Then we plan to experiment by combining it with pair-programming to see if we can achieve even more effective pairing sessions and greater promiscuity. I'm imagining a pairing session being multiples of 2 Pomodoros, lasting about an hour with a 5-minute break after each Pomodoro. Potentially we could then achieve swap pairs every hour.
I'm looking forward to seeing what the hurdles will be, e.g. synchronizing the Pomodoros while allowing for 15 or 30-minute breaks every 4 Pomodoros and fitting lunch in.
Labels: pairprogramming, pomodoro
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Quality, relativism and a fetish
Sooner or later the manager says: "We've got to ship this thing". And, whether it's a conscious decision or a consequence of the ensuing pressure, corners are cut; defects get introduced and quality drops. The response is habitual and simply makes the situation worse.Anxious people working alone introduce the most defects. Efficiency leads to breakages. Quality goes down and technical debt increases with every corner cut. When prioritized against the next feature promising to deliver business value, debt never gets repaid. There's no common language for talking about quality. The business-value-fetishists pay little attention to technical debt. They just assume quality is being delivered regardless of the decisions they make. They do, however, understand the cost of goods returned, the cost of rework, and the loss of customers but they choose to remain ignorant of the fact that these are typically the consequences of not valuing quality.
We believe that quality is the result of:
- Good behaviors and practices that are mutually reinforcing, where the practices are applied with discipline and rigor, and
- having the right attitude towards quality throughout the entire company.
We were going to use the above blurbage as a preamble in our session at London QCon 2009 in the track: Turning on a sixpence: Technical skills for agile development. You've probably heard people say: "It's good enough". Or "investing in more quality will provide diminishing returns". We wanted to talk about why we think the real obstacle to achieving high quality is the prevalence of relativism and to discuss who's really qualified to make these calls on quality.
Unfortunately, this isn't consistent with Steve's plan for the track with us representing the "extreme position" on technical practices. So, instead, we'll do some talking about our way of working, which is full-on Extreme Programming surrounded by a shit-load of lessons learned through compromise (yeah, well, everybody starts somewhere) and experimentation, and the continuous investment we make to keep quality high.
Labels: extremeprogramming, quality, relativisim
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