It's often a situation problem

In a previous blog post I commented on a recurring theme in several software classics - the idea that it's always a people problem. I was reminded of that sound-byte today while reading Switch - How to change things when change is hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Their surprising-thing-about-change number 1 (of 3) is

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

I prefer this version, partly because it uses the word often rather than always and so it follows Bill Bailey's Law. But mostly I prefer it because saying "it's always a people problem" feels demotivating because we are all people and you get drawn into thinking you're the problem. As Deming made clear, the root cause of most problems is not the people but the system. But the word "situation" is simpler and somehow easier to grasp than "system". It's clear your always in the situation that you're in.

A related quote from Switch is

to change someone's behavior you've got to change their situation.

I like this a lot and it reminds me of the various quotes about acting your way into thinking differently being easier than thinking your way into acting differently...

Sometimes it’s easier to act your self into a new way of thinking, than it is to think your self into a new way of acting. (Jo Berry)

You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool, the use of which leads them to think differently. (R. Buckminster Fuller - quoted in The Fifth Discpline by Peter Senge)

Adults are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting. (Richard Pascale's in Surfing the Edge of Chaos)

Or, to say it in reverse

Knowledge does not change behavior.

So instead of saying "it's always a people problem" perhaps it is better to say "it's rarely a people problem"

Gandhi an autobiography

is an excellent book (isbn 978-0-141-03273-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

All his life he held to two fundamental principles, a belief in Ahimsa, or non-violence, and the concept of Satya, or truth; as he said: 'My uniform experience has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth.'

Renunciation of objects, without the renunciation of desires, is short-lived, however hard you may try.

Jealousy does not wait for reasons.

I had been advised to collect certificates of my having abstained from meat, and I asked the English friend to give me one. He gladly gave it and I treasured it for some time. But when I saw later that one could get such a certificate in spite of being a meat-eater, it lost all its charm for me.

Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth.

Great men never look at a person's exterior. They think of his heart.

Rest assured it takes no unusual skill to be an ordinary lawyer. Common honesty and industry are enough to enable him to make a living. All cases are not complicated.

I scrupulously avoided hurting their feelings.

It went against the grain with me to do a thing in secret that I would not do in public.

The heart's earnest and pure desire is always fulfilled.

Service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it.

Long Walk to Freedom

is an excellent book (isbn 978-0-349-10653-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

I maintain that nurture, rather than nature, is the primary moulder of personality.

I did well in school not so much through cleverness as through doggedness.

These [meetings] were not scheduled, but were called as needed... Everyone who wanted to speak did so... People spoke without interruption...

Majority rule was a foreign notion. A minority was not to be crushed by a majority.

This metal wire, he said, pointing above, is an example of Western manufacturing, which is skilful but cold, clever but soulless.

I could compensate for lack of natural aptitude with diligence and discipline. I applied this to everything I did.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have changed.

Gaur believed in finding solutions rather than spouting theory.

I was far more certain in those days of what I was against than what I was for.

If fine bodies and impressive physiques were essential to being a leader, I saw that few among us would have qualified.

If you wait for textbook conditions, they will never occur.

Class, Nyerere always insisted, was alien to Africa; socialism indigenous.

I did not think this view [always rejecting bail] should be universally applied and believed we should examine the issue on a case-by-case basis.

Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure.

cyber-dojo server is up

The first cyber-dojo server is up, at http://www.cyber-dojo.org Please note the hyphen - the url without the hyphen was not available. The infrastructure is very very very rudimentary, but it's a start. Something to learn from and build on. Any feedback always welcome.

Have you got any strawberries?

I was driving along the A303 towards Gatwick last week and passed several stalls selling strawberries. It reminded me of an incident many years ago, before the kids were born, on the same road when Natalie and I stopped to buy some. We approached the stall. The only thing it sold was strawberries. It was a strawberry stall. Everywhere you looked here were open punnets of strawberries. With a twinkle in my eye I looked at the two young lads manning the stall and watched their puzzled faces as I asked "Have you got any strawberries?"

The World's Least Favourite Airline?

I had a great family cruise on NCL's Norwegian Gem visiting Venice, Dubrovnik, Izmir, Athens, and Nafplion. I particularly liked Dubrovnik and the ruins at Ephesus are truly spectacular and were well worth the long taxi ride from Izmir. NCL was faultless in all respects and I have no hesitation wholeheartedly recommending NCL, it's cruises and its staff.

But not British Airways…the BA flight home from Venice to Gatwick was a joke. There were numerous check in desks at the airport and the only one with a sizeable queue was BA's. In fact the BA queue was so long it blocked one side of the building from the other. I looked (and asked) for some self-service check-in desks and found quite a few from many airline companies but none from BA. The day's first flight from Venice to Gatwick was so late we got to see the end of that fiasco too. It was over-booked and several people queued for two and half hours in sweltering heat only to fail to get a boarding pass. These people naturally joined the queue for the next flight so that flight was overbooked too. But did anyone walk along the queue offering cash to anyone willing to take a later flight? No. So once again some people at the end of the queue were going to fail to get a ticket after queuing for several hours. While the first flight's queue was queueing security had to be called because everything was so badly organised. As usual one of the check-in desks was reserved for Club-something-or-other and so sat mostly idle while the queue lengthened and people grew more and more irate.

We were on the second BA flight out. Having seen the problems from earlier in the day we joined the queue very early. It was a wise move as the queueing was just as badly organised. Eventually we got to the check-in desk and just after we had got our boarding passes I happened to see a not-so-easy-to-see note offering €250 if you took a flight the next day. And just after we had got our boarding passes the check-in lady told us the flight was delayed for an hour - which of course meant it would be delayed for more than one hour - why do they always underestimate the delay? If we had been told the flight had been delayed before we started checking in we might well have taken the offer. We certainly would have given it some serious consideration. And why if they know it's an hour late don't they show that information on the departure boards?

It would have been so easy for BA to do the little things that showed they cared about their customers. Something as simple as providing some kind of cool drink for people while they queued in the heat. It wouldn't be much, but it would be something and it would change the situation so completely. But no.

Over and over you felt BA simply didn't care about you.

I fly quite a lot and from now on if I have a choice - and on several routes I do - I'm not going to fly BA.

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

is an excellent book (isbn 0-451-53038-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

In an incautious moment my parents had promised that I should never be sent to school until I asked leave to go. This promise I afterward learned began to give them considerable uneasiness because as I grew up I showed no disposition to ask.

He is a bold man who calls anything a trifle.

The fundamental advantage of a library is that it gives you nothing for nothing. Youths must acquire knowledge themselves.

The celebrated maxim of Confucius: To perform the duties of this life well, troubling not about another, is prime wisdom.

Whenever one learns to do anything he has never to wait long for an opportunity of putting his knowledge to use.

How reserved the Scot is! Where he feels most he expresses least. Silence is more eloquent than words.

Slight attention or a kind word to the humble often bring back reward as great as it is unlooked for. No kind action is ever lost.

Even in these days of the fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality.

No sound judgement can remain with the man whose mind is disturbed by the mercurial changes of the Stock Exchange. It places him under an influence akin to intoxication. What is not, he sees, and what he sees, is not.

Mr Pullman replied: "Yes, my friends, all that you say is true. I have had a long, long life full of troubles, but there is one curious fact about them - nine tenths of them never happened."

Trondheim XP Agile cyber-dojo

Anders Hammervold and Jonas Follesø organized a cyber-dojo for the Trondheim XP Agile group yesterday. Anders tells me great fun was had by all.

Managing the design factory

is an excellent book by Don Reinertsen (isbn 0-684-83991-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Best practices are only "best" in certain contexts and to achieve certain objectives. A change in either the context or the objective can quickly transform a "best practice" into a stupid approach.

We must constantly remember that the simplification [of the abstraction] is a veil between us and the reality of the process.

Manufacturing is an inherently repetitive process and therefore more likely to produce learning than a non-repetitive process, like product development.

In the design process we can only add value when we do something differently. If we change nothing, then we add no value.

We will see much more variability in the design process than we see in repetitive manufacturing process. This variability is an indicator that we are doing something new in the design process, and thus that we are adding value.

Risk and the variability associated with it, are inherent and desirable characteristics of design processes. They are at the heart of a design process's capacity to generate information.

The design factory needs variability, so it needs tools that allow us to coexist with variability.

When you dig below the surface you discover that most change programs are motivated by two forces: imitation and obedience.

Events that are less probable contain more information.

Our testing processes need to have an adequate failure rate to generate sufficient information.

Each iteration starts on the base of the quality of the previous pass.

A process is a way of preserving learning that occurs when doing an activity.

A whirlwind at Reading station in 1840

As well as the super statue of the World War I soldier at Paddington by my namesake I also spotted this at Reading station last week. It's on platform 4 but you have to look quite hard to find it.

Faulty LiveScribe pen

I bought a 4GB LiveScribe pen from Amazon uk on May 11th. The first time I used it worked but repeatedly refused to allow me to register online. The second time I tried to use it refused to record audio and it continues to refuse. I phoned the LiveScribe support number on June 22nd and after navigating my way through several "press 1 for this, press 2 for that" menus I spoke to a human being. I was asked to send details of the pen, my computer (a bog standard MacBook Pro), and a log file. I did this immediately.

It's now June 29th, seven days later and I have heard nothing. Not even an email acknowledging receipt of the details I sent. So I rang again today. I spoke to the same lady in technical support. She explained that she had forwarded the information I sent to technical support but that they were backed up with work which was why no one had got back to me yet. This doesn't sound promising - John Seddon would call that Failure Demand.

She said she would escalate the case and promised someone would contact me tomorrow. We will see. Stay tuned!

Thinking ahead - I'm wondering how long should I give them to fix it. And if they can't whether I'll ask for a replacement or a refund...

Update. They called back as promised. They talked me through doing a firmware upgrade (which I had already tried to run and fortunately still had in my download cache). Part way through I got a message saying "your pen is not recognised". Despite appearances I was told this was not a message from the firmware upgrade, but from livescribe desktop which was also open. And on a manual firmware upgrade the livescribe desktop can apparently interfere with the firmware upgrade (which is no doubt what happened to me the first time). So I closed livescribe desktop and restarted the firmware upgrade. And this time it worked! Hoorah. I have audio recording back. So less than top marks for it not working first time, but nearly top marks for helpful support.

Charles Sargeant Jagger

I was at Paddington station a few days ago and I stopped to look at this superb statue (it's at the edge of platform 1). I noticed it was by Charles Sargeant Jagger!

The Hávamál

translated from the original by Björn Jónasson ISBN 9979-9070-0-2. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The ethics of the Hávamál are above all rooted in the belief in the value of the individual.

Attending a feast: No man should call himself clever but manage his mind. A sage visitor is a silent guest. The cautious evades evil. Never a friend more faithful, nor greater wealth, than wisdom.

Happiness: He is unhappy and ill-tempered who meets all with mockery. What he doesn't know, but needs to, are his own familiar faults.

Financial sense: Become not a beggar to the money you make. What's saved for a friend a foe may take. Good plans often go awry.

Moderation and prosperity: Moderately wise a man should be not too crafty or clever. The best of lives is led by those who know the measure of many things.

Shyness: A log's flame leaps to another fire kindles fire. A man listens thus he learns. The shy stays shallow.

Foresight: A man should know how many logs stubs and strips of bark to collect in summer to keep in stock wood for his winter fires.

The use of power: A prudent man wields power in modest measure. With brave men he finds that none is foremost or excels in all things.

Everyone has his use: The lame rides a horse the maimed drives the herd the deaf is brave in battle. A man is better blind than buried. A dead man is deft at nothing.

Winner or loser?

As well as running an evening CyberDojo at the NDC 2010 conference in Oslo last week I also attended an excellent morning workshop run by Matthias Skarin. He used several experiential exercises one of which was a simple rally-car driving simulation. In the game everyone stands in a circle and has to choose "Hi" or "Lo". Then you find out what the person to your left and to your right chose and look up your score. For example, Left=Hi, Me=Lo, Right=Lo, check the sheet, Hi-Lo-Lo = 2 points. Then repeat 15 times, each time adding your points to your running total, and rearranging the circle lowest-score to highest-score, slowest driver to fastest driver.

The points table was cleverly structured so there was a tension between working for yourself or for the whole circle. After a few rounds I had an idea. I decided to play the game by trying to maximise the score of the person to my left even if it meant coming last. I have to admit part of the reason for this was I was only half awake, (I hadn't had enough coffee), and figured I wasn't going to do very well anyway. Each round I simply explained what I was doing to the person to my left and asked whether they would like me to pick a Hi or a Lo.. The effect was dramatic - I rapidly became the slowest car as people overtook me. And because we were standing in a circle, in no time at all, the person to my left was the fastest car. Then there was another dramatic effect - since the person to my left was gaining a significant advantage from me each round they rapidly accelerated ahead of the second placed car. At the end of the game two cars had noticeable scores; mine because it was so low, and Paul's (the person to my left) because it was so high.

Afterwards someone pointed out that I had been the driver of the slowest car. I explained how I had played the game and suggested that maybe I had been the navigator in the fastest car!?

The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears and other native american proverbs

is an excellent book by Guy A Zona (isbn 0-671-79730-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

I seek strength no to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy - myself. [Tribe unknown]

The more you give, the more good things come to you. [Crow]

The song is very short because we understand so much. [Navajo]

If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies in yourself. [Minquass]

You are never justified in arguing. [Hopi]

No answer is also an answer. [Hopi]

Every fire is the same size when it starts. [Seneca]

The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives. [Sioux]

Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future. [Lumbee]

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance. [Lakota]

Everything has a beginning. [Kiowa]

God teaches the birds to make nests, yet the nests of all birds are not alike. [Duwamish]

Macbook plug design flaw? No

I was on a train recently and I tried to plug my macbook plug into the socket. Nope. The depth of the plug was too great. As it happened I had a 4 way adapter in my backpack so I was able to get power anyway!

Update! Thanks to Phil's suggestion I checked my cable drawer and found the other cable :-) I popped it into my laptop bag and found myself on a GWR train again yesterday. No need for a 4 way adapter this time (which I didn't have anyway - I only carry that when I'm running a CyberDojo).

What Did You Say?

is an excellent book (subtitled The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback) by Charles and Edith Seashore and Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-924771-33-X). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

If you're not absolutely sure they want your feedback it's best not to offer it.

When the data and their model don't match, most people discard the data.

We structure our world so we will not receive feedback that threatens our view.

We don't even wait to ignore feedback, but actively take steps to prevent such feedback from ever happening in the first place.

We tend to learn only in new situations. In new contexts.

The more we try to control, the less influence we are likely to have.

Don't concentrate on giving feedback; concentrate on being congruent - responding to the other person, to yourself, and to the here-and-now situation.

The less investment you have in changing the other person, the greater the likelihood that each of you may grow.

Improving a relationship doesn't always mean making it closer.

Viking Ship Museum

I went to the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo a few weeks ago. As I arrived a group arrived on a bus. They were led round the museum by a man who talked about the exhibits and viking life in general. I quietly attached myself to the group and listened to what he had to say. It was really fascinating stuff. For example, at one point he mentioned that Norway has the highest incidence of multiple sclerosis in the world. And that the countries with very high incidence seem to be the countries the Vikings invaded!

Implementing Lean Software Development

is an excellent book by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

If you focus on driving utilization up, things will slow down.

We've watched CMM and ISO 9000 as their focus changed from quality improvement to certification.

Toyota believes that consistent excellence in product development starts with "towering technical competence in all engineers". At Toyota "Developing people is fundamental to the managers job."

If you expect teams to meet aggressive deadlines you must limit work to capacity.

The behaviours that ranking systems encourage are competition, hiding information so as to look good, and hiding problems so as not to look bad.

There is at least as much knowledge created by experiments that fail as is created by finding a solution to the problem.

Western companies think of knowledge as something that is written down. Japanese companies think of written knowledge as only the tip of the iceberg; most knowledge is contained in subjective insights, intuitions, hunches, and mental models. This tacit knowledge does not come from studying, it comes from experience.

Probably the biggest mistake we can make is to regard refactoring as a failure to "Do it right the first time".

The mark of an excellent organization is not that they are without problems; it is that they are without systemic problems.

In The Living Company, Arie de Geus points out that the average life expectancy of a multinational corporation is between 40 and 50 years. People live for an average of 75 years, so they can expect to outlast perhaps three quarters of the companies that existed when they were born.

If the learner hasn't learned the teacher hasn't taught.

The hole isn't in my part of the boat

After the XP2010 conference in Trondheim its nice to back home and walking Patrick to school each morning. I collect rubbish on the walk back. A whole carrier bag full after one week away. It's a four minute walk. And I live in the country. People must actually be winding their car windows down just to throw out rubbish! :(

XP 2010 cyber-dojos

I had a great time at XP 2010. I ran one cyber-dojo (on the left) with Jeremy Lightsmith and another (on the right) with Olve Maudal. Both went very well and had up to 18 players at a time.

Every time I run a cyber-dojo I learn new things. And new ways to make it simpler. For example in Olve's cyber-dojo one player had to leave early and one of the laptops was their laptop. In a normal code-dojo that would be a problem. But in a cyber-dojo it's not an issue. You just fire up another laptop and carry on where it left off.

Olve also invented a much simpler way to do the musical chairs. Instead of having one timer to rotate the keyboard driver within each group and another timer to shuffle the groups we now have just one timer. When it dings the keyboard drivers in each group have to get up and find a new group - which they then join in a non-driver role. Much simpler!

Writing software is writing

In his book Patterns of Software Richard Gabriel devotes a whole chapter (Writing Broadside) to writing about writing. Writing software is an act of writing so to get better at writing software he suggests it is a good idea to get better at writing in general. I was reminded of the chapter when I listened to Kevlin Henney's Skillsmatter podcast Rethinking unit testing in C++.

In his talk Kevlin discusses identifiers. Names. Names are funny things. When developers choose names they have a difficult task. They have to balance two forces that are very definitely competing against each other. On the one hand longer names give more room to express intention - to create intention revealing names. A declaration is a declaration of intent, an expression is an expression of intent, a statement is a statement of intent. But on the other hand the names of our classes, our functions and our objects also participate as sub expressions in larger and larger expressions. In the context of use the pull of brevity is very powerful.

Kevlin reminds us that some names are never intended to be used at all! They never participate in expressions that we write! Brevity should not be a concern for such names. In a language that supports reflection your test framework will call the test method for you. The only time you write the name of the test method is when you define it.

Developers typically have a lot less practice at writing names when they are freed from the shackles of brevity so it's not really surprising test method names often smell so bad. They smell bad because they are too concise! Loosen up! Give yourself some space. Instead of writing a test method called test_index think about the intention deep inside your head and try to express that as a whole sentence. That's a difficult practice to develop. If I'm pair programming and as the navigator I see the driver struggling with a test method name I sometimes ask them to "put the mouse down and step away from the keyboard". We discuss, face to face, what the intention is. Freed from the code-silo mentality of the keyboard we can usually move quite rapidly from test_index to test_indexing to test_out_of_range_indexing to test_out_of_range_indexing_throws_exception.

The last additional suffix ...throws_exception is an important one. A good test name should express an expectation. This is a transformational name change. It transforms the idea of testing so that it becomes not-testing. The name becomes a proposition. And the tests inches closer towards being an executable specification.

Another example of the context of test/proposition names having a different meta-context from regular code is naming style. Kevlin suggests that even in a language with a strong camelCase or PascalCase naming convention there is a strong argument for naming test methods with underscores_as_separators. You aren't calling these methods. They aren't participating in larger expressions. The only time they appear is in a diagnostic. Experiments have shown there is a small but definite cognitive delay in reading camelCase or PascalCase identifiers once they get beyond around 30 characters.

bureaucracy

Back to quotes table-of-contents

From The Right Stuff

The esprit throughout NASA was tremendous... Bureaucratic lines no longer meant anything. Anyone in Project Mercury could immediately get to see anybody else about any problem that came up.

From Beyond Culture

By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind.

From Jerry Weinberg (in person)

Bureaucracy can be measured by how much people don't know why they're doing what they're doing.

From Good to Great

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline. Avoid bureaucracy and instead create a culture of discipline.

From It's Your Ship

More often than not, bureaucracies create rules and then forget why they were needed in the first place, or fail to see that the reasons for them no longer exist.

From Quality Software Management: Vol 2. First Order Measurement

Bureaucracy is each thing in control, but everything is out of control.

From John Boyd - the fighter pilot who changed the art of war

Anything new and different is feared by a bureaucracy.

From A Little Book of f-Laws

A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say 'no' but none to say 'yes'.

From Beating the System

Bureaucrats are usually empowered to say no to even reasonable requests, but they cannot say yes to them. This requires passing requests to a higher authority. Saying no inflates bureaucrats' self-images.

From the Mind of War

he was always testing the limits - of airplanes, people, science, the military, and, most especially, bureaucracies.

From Ackoff's Best

The most variety-decreasing type of social system is one we call a bureaucracy.

If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't. [Admiral Hyman G. Rickover]

From Are Your Lights On?

Bureauracies always begin with some process of selection - a process which is never quite "natural" selection.

From Quality Software Management: Vol 2. First order measurement

Bureaucracy: people doing things whose purpose they don't understand.

From the DevOps Handbook

Bureaucracies are incredibly resilient and are designed to survive adverse conditions - one can remove half the bureaucrats, and the process will still survive.

The Buffalo Bridle

One of my favourite Laws from Jerry Weinberg's The Secrets of Consulting is The Buffalo Bridle, which is all about motivation.

You can make a buffalo go anywhere just as long as they want to go there.

The velocity/wip game

While I was at Jerry Weinberg's Problem Solving Leadership workshop last week (which was truly fantastic) I showed a group of fellow attendees a very simple velocity/wip game I've invented. You simply create some cards and arrange them into columns. Each card has a number written on it which is it's estimate. The photo shows the setup for our game; the left column (eg Analysis) contained the numbers 1,8,2; the middle column (eg Design) contained the numbers 1,1,5; the right column (eg Testing) contained the numbers 8,1,2. We put one person on each column; Darrin on analysis, Ted on Design, and Tim on Testing. Play proceeds as follows:

• each player gets N (eg 3) dice which they each roll over and over again
• if a player rolls a 1 they add one to their running tally (which starts at zero)
• if their tally reaches a number on a card in their column they can move that card one column to the right and reduce their tally by that number
• that's it! (you can also add wip limits to the columns if you like)

Paul was on the timer and gave us one minute. After the minute was up we added up the...

• work-in-progress: the total of the cards still in the three columns
• velocity: the total of the cards that got moved out of the rightmost column (into an extra rightmost column called Done)

The first minute

The wip was 25 and the velocity was 11. This makes a total of 36 which is greater than the total we started with. This is because there is also an extra left-most column called Backlog which contains more numbered cards. Darrin was on the left Analysis column and after moving all three of his cards into Ted's middle Design column he pulled some more work into his column from the Backlog. Despite this Ted was starved of work for part of the minute.

The second minute

We reset the board back to it's initial position and decided to try and increase the velocity by smoothing the work. We split the high cards into multiple smaller cards. For example, the 8 was split into 3,3,2. Then we did another minute's worth of work. This time the wip was 18 and the velocity was 18. Once again this makes a total of 36 and once again Darrin pulled in more work from the Backlog after emptying his Analysis column. Because the work was less lumpy Ted wasn't starved and the velocity went up.

The third minute

We reset the board back to it's initial position from the second minute. This time we decided to try and lower the work-in-progress left over at the end. After all, if the project got canceled that wip would be waste. To do this we agreed not to introduce any new work from the backlog, and also that anyone's dice could contribute to the tally on anyone's column. Then we did another minute's worth of work. This time the wip was 9 and the velocity was 20.

Summary

Simply by smoothing the work and working together we increased velocity by a factor of ~2 (11 to 20) and reduced the wip by a factor of ~3 (25 to 9). Simple!

The way to weath

is an excellent book by Benjamin Franklin. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.

A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two different things.

The eye of the master will do more work than both his hands.

Buy what you do not need and soon you will sell your necessities.

It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.

Experience keeps an expensive school, but fools will learn in no other.

If you want to be wealthy, think of saving as well as of earning.

What maintains one vice would bring up two children.

How to win friends and influence people

is a great book by Dale Carnegie. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. (quoting William James)

Good manners, said Emerson, are made up of petty sacrifices.

I made it a rule, said [Benjamin] Franklin, to forbear all direct contradiction of the sentiment of others, and all positive assertion of my own.

I judge people by their own principles, not by my own. (quoting Martin Luther King)

Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes - and most fools do.

If there is any one secret of success, said Henry Ford, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.

Einstein on conventional schooling

At Jerry Weinberg's Problem Solving Leadership workshop one of the handouts contains this quote from Einstein which spoke to me:

I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside everything else, from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.

The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect upon me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle, that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry.

The Book - On the taboo against knowing who you are

is a great book by Alan Watts. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages.

Attention is narrowed perception.

We need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed.

The human individual is not built as a car is built.

Differentiation is not separation.

To say that certain events are causally connected is only a clumsy way of saying that they are features of the same event, like the head and tail of the cat.

In the Nootka language a church is "housing religiously," a shop is "housing tradingly," and a home is "housing homely."

It is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects.

We have scrubbed the earth clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms.

No work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

The goal of action is always contemplation - knowing and being rather than seeking and becoming.

Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what the represent.

I Ching

I do I Ching some mornings. It's part of a deliberate effort to try and improve my subconscious! Today the dice chose 1,2,1,1 which means tetragram ten.

Inner Harmony
In managing your instincts and embracing Oneness,
  Can you be undivided?
In focusing your Influence,
  Can you yield as a newborn child?
In clearing your insight,
  Can you become free of error?
In loving people and leading the organization,
  Can you take no action?
In opening and closing the gateway to nature,
  Can you not weaken?
In seeing clearly in all directions,
  Can you be without knowledge?

Produce things, cultivate things;
Produce but do not possess.
Act without expectation.
Advance without dominating.
These are called the Subtle Powers.

5 inch buttons

I spent a great morning with my friend Mark, an ace wood and metal craftsman. He made some 5 inch oversize wooden buttons (for a panto costume I think). I took loads of notes and photos and plan to write the morning up in an extended blog entry. But just for now here are some photos of his workshop. You don't go into his workshop so much as put it on! Like a old jacket that fits perfectly.

Its always a people problem

There seems to be a common underlying theme running through many software development classics (who have I missed?):

In The Secrets of Consulting Jerry Weinberg writes:

It's always a people problem.

In Peopleware Tim Lister and Tom DeMarco write:

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there."

In The Mythical Man Month Fred Brooks writes:

The Mythical Man Month is only incidentally about software but primarily about how people in teams make things.

In Patterns of Software Richard Gabriel writes:

My overall bias is that technology science, engineering and company organization are all secondary to the people and human concerns in the endeavor.

Notice that none of them say it's a person problem.

Craig Larman's Scrum Master course

I've just spent a thoroughly enjoyable 2 days attending Craig Larman's 2 day Scrum Master course at the invitation of Olve Maudal. If you're looking for a really superb Scrum Master course I don't think you'll find a better course or a better person to hold it for you than Craig.

The photo is of a game we (team 3) created in one of the many hands on exercises. We called it the Scrum Board Game. I played the role of Product Owner and I learned that I tend to interfere too much. Sorry team 3!

Zen Soup

is the title of an excellent book by Laurence G. Boldt. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The words of truth are always paradoxical [Lao Tzu]

Water becomes clear through stillness.

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat. [Lily Tomlin]

Self-confidence is nothing special. It is the absence of self-consciousness, nothing more, nothing less.

The do, or art, of work is a matter of bringing awareness, grace, and excellence to the way we work.

The work will teach you how to do it. [Estonian Proverb]

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem. [G. K. Chesterton]

Discipline is simply a matter of doing what we must, without wasting time or energy worrying whether or not we feel like it.

The word art comes from a Latin root meaning "to arrange". We can think of an artist in any field as a master arranger.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. [Epictetus]

The four XP values

Quite by chance I've notice several recent blog entry quotes mention the four XP values:

• Communication: Community has to do with communication.
• Simplicity: The art of maximizing the amount of work not done.
• Feedback: Practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level.
• Courage: One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how relatively few people understand what courage is. The absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is some kind of brain damage. Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of fear.

The Way of Zen

is an excellent book by Alan Watts. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

For things made are separate parts put together, like machines, or things fashioned from without inwards, like sculptures. Whereas things grown divide themselves into parts, from within outwards.

...as soon as a boundary is defined it has two sides.

Man is involved in karma when he interferes with the world in such a way that he is compelled to go on interfering, when the solution of a problem creates still more problems to be solved.

Form is precisely emptiness; emptiness is precisely form.

When reading a difficult book it is of no help to think, 'I should concentrate,' for one thinks about concentration instead of what the book has to say.

Hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal.

A good haiku is a pebble thrown into the pool of the listener's mind.

If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.

An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg. Like many of Jerry's books it also has a repeat snippet page here. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

As Leonardo observed, "the boundary of one thing is the beginning of another."

...systems thinkers use the term "interface" to describe the part of the world that, like the two-faced god Janus, looks both inside and outside at the same time.

...for everything has a fringe of involvement with its surroundings (quoting P.W. Bridgman)

Systems, on the average, are more tightly connected than the average.

...it is better to analyze in terms of doings or happenings than in terms of objects or static abstractions (quoting P.W. Bridgman)

And with this shift in time there occurs a shift in the entity of concern - from an object, a pattern of matter in space, to a behavior, a pattern of events in time. [R.W.Gerard]

Why do things stay the same?

How can we know the dancer from the dance? [William Butler Yeats]

Although we may identify the system by its functions, this is only a convenience, for the "real" identity lies in "the permanence of the relations among the component parts" - the "structure". (quoting Herbert Spencer).

The more sure we are, the more likely we are to suffer an illusion.

To be a successful generalist, one must study the art of ignoring data and of seeing only the "mere outlines" of things.

If something explains everything, it explains nothing.

Safer C

is an excellent book by Les Hatton. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

A central and hard-earned engineering principle in older engineering areas such as mechanical engineering and civil engineering is that simplicity rules.

The way to improve seems to be to master one thing at a time by doing a lot of it until quality naturally emerges.

Quality is not a flag in the company car park.

This book will argue forcibly that there is a property of software which experienced programmers can identify with quality without knowing the function of the software.

The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free. [Igot Stravinksy]

Early versions of a number of Beethoven's pieces exist and give strong evidence of being written by a mere mortal; indeed, some are extraordinarily naive. Greatness emerged only after considerable refinement.

a profoundly important step in the maturity of a discipline is the enforcement of hard-learned previous experience and the recognition that complexity must be strictly controlled to that which necessary and no more.

A human programmer reads a programming language just as a compiler does. Therefore, languages that are difficult to write compilers for are likely to be difficult to read if those features that cause difficulty are used.

the content is more important than the style.

The author has always believed, however, that if something is statically detectable and therefore easily removeable, but likely to fail only once in the lifetime of the galaxy, it should be removed, because that occurrence might be next week and might kill someone. If its presence is known and its implications understood, it may well be negligent in the eyes of the law to leave it.

You can't test quality into software.

The psychology of computer programming

is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Programming is, among other things, a kind of writing. One way to learn writing is to write, but in all other forms of writing, one also reads. We read examples - both good and bad - to facilitate learning. But how many programmers learn to write programs by reading programs?

Ultimately, what the management want is kept promises.

The amateur, then, is learning about his problem...The professional, conversely, is learning about his profession.

To learn we must be willing to make mistakes.

If a programmer is going to make something of his experience, he must learn how to learn.

Schedule is similarly limiting - we need only cite the apocryphal experiment which tries to make a baby in one month by putting nine women to work on the job as a team.

The Swiss elect a general to head their armies when war threatens. When there is no war, there is no general - but there are other leaders chosen according to what needs there are for leadership.

A programmer would not really be a programmer who did not at some time consider his program as an aesthetic object.

Programming is a unique form of communication in which human beings take an active role and machines often a passive one.

It's not so much the solutions we need, anyway; but the experiences in trying to get them.

Rabbit debugging

My bedroom looks out over the pictured field. Rabbits live along the far hedge so Natalie and I decided to borrow a pair of binoculars to get some close up views. The first time I tried them I just could not get a clear image. I fiddled for a while with no joy. Then I decided the binoculars were just fine and the problem was elsewhere. Thinking about it, I suddenly realized where - the house was built in 1897 and the bedroom still has the original sash window. The glass in the window is quite "curvy"! When I lifted the sash and looked at the rabbits directly everything came into focus nicely.

Push-bike pump adapter pattern

Bicycle inner tubes have two kinds of valves; the bronze kind on the left and the silver kind next to it. Rather than supplying each valve with its own flexible tube (to connect to the pump) this one cleverly uses only one - the silver valve also doubles as an adapter for its bronze partner. Neat.

The road less travelled and beyond

Is an excellent book by Scott Peck. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Community has to do with communication.

The word "diabolic" comes from the Greek diaballein, which means to throw apart or to separate, to compartmentalize. It is the opposite of "symbolic" which comes from the word symballein, meaning to throw together, to unify.

Virtually all truth is paradoxical.

Consciousness is inevitably associated with pain.

Perhaps the best measure of a person's greatness is the capacity for suffering.

The essence of this discipline of balancing is unlearning and "giving up" something in ourselves in order to consider new information.

Through the learning of emptiness, we experience a temporary state of consciousness in which the mind is utterly open and receptive and therefore totally alert.

There is no formula. All such decisions must be made out of the "agony of not knowing".

There is something far more important than inner peace: integrity. Integrity requires, among other things, the willingness to endure discomfort for the sake of truth.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how relatively few people understand what courage is. The absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is some kind of brain damage. Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of fear, or in spite of pain.

All discipline is a form of submission.

Speaking the truth - particularly when it requires some risk to do so - is an act of love.

The development of consciousness is thus, among other things, a process of the conscious mind opening itself to the unconscious in order to be congruent.

The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind.

The basic tenet of systems theory (which is actually not a theory but a fact) is that everything is a system.

Contingency theory (which, like systems theory, is not a theory but a fact) simply states that there is no one best type of organization.

Systems inherently resist change.

Jay Miller - circus scrum master

I took Patrick to Jay Miller's circus last Sunday. We absolutely loved it. A thought struck me while I was watching - a circus is lot like a high-productivity software team - a group of highly expert, highly professional, highly motivated individuals, with a variety of different talents, coming together for a specific purpose. Hours and hours of deliberate practice behind the scenes. Clowns providing plenty of fun. A ring mistress lightly controlling the whole show. Out of sight back-room staff doing all the lighting, sound, and fake smoke wizardry...
My best moment of the whole show was a failure. Henrik (not Kniberg) the extreme juggler bounced balls off the ground rather than throwing them up into the air. It was just amazing. A complete blur of motion. Then he tried some extra balls. And then some more. And then he dropped two. He turned to the audience with his arms out as if to say "this is hard you know". And the audience gave a big cheer. It was a great failure. If you want to do something spectacular you have to be prepared to fail.

Contact cards

A while ago I decided my old business cards were rubbish and I threw them out. They were boring, and like many software applications, full of stuff that rarely, if ever, got used. Who cares what my business is called? Who cares what my "title" is. I think part of the problem is the phrase "business card" and in particular "business". The card does not get you any business! It's simply for making contact. So now I have Contact Cards. I read Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind a while back and in it he recommends drawing yourself in 5 lines. I found my attempt and used that. My friend Richard at Express Print in Taunton did all the rest.