Craft is ..
I just stumbled on a note I made before Christmas on a tweet from
Brian Marick that provided a
definition for craft. I tweaked it ever so slightly.
Craft is ..
obsession with quality,
tamed by discipline,
attentive to technique,
with a gut feel for structure
and awareness of context.
Labels: craftsmanship, discipline, quality
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A thought on empowerment
For me being empowered is a property of 'the system' in which we play a part. It's constructed between people, by the actions they take individually in the environment they occupy.
Having the right environment is essential. When it's safe and fun people are motivated by trust. They begin to demonstrate the courage to be creative and they take risks and make mistakes. An environment that tolerates mistakes to cultivate learning helps people face their fears and act decisively. And when people are able to perform freely they become energized and create a buzz.
Empowerment is not something that can be assigned. I can't give you empowerment and you can't give it to me. So don't try to empower people. Concentrate on creating the right environment for people to construct their own empowerment and step back.
Labels: courage, empowerment, trust
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No excuses: Concept To Cash Every Week
I mentioned
before that we'd been invited to do a session at
London QCon 2009 in the track:
Turning on a sixpence: Technical skills for agile development. We finally got around to completing the
abstract. It's ok. We could've done better but we were running so late due to other work that we just went with what we had in the end. Here's the abstract:
This session takes an inside look at successfully delivering from concept to cash, showing the technical aspects of what's required to iteratively build a robust product that always performs, and the skill and discipline needed to deliver high-quality software to production every week. We'll talk about how we use practices everyday to codify quality through intensive collaboration and driving with story tests; to build in repeatability through automation, system administration and environment ownership; to grow the end-to-end system through iterative contextual optimization, figuring out what to optimize and when; to improve the bang-for-buck by eliminating and preventing waste while maintaining options.
We know this because we wrote one of the busiest entertainment Web sites in the UK - 6 million page views per day - from scratch. Every week we delivered high-quality revenue-generating features to users maintaining the level of technical craftsmanship required to sustain repeated delivery. Our success is born out of an effective working environment and a rigorous approach that enables us to rationalize stakeholders, minimize dependencies, operate all environments including production, focus on what's important and deliver greater value by helping the businesspeople follow the money. Over the past few years we've worked hard to improve our approach and we'll continue to do so. It's the most effective way to deliver that we've found to date and we work with clients who appreciate this and are prepared to invest in their software as corporate assets.
I hope you can come along.
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