Thursday, January 26, 2006

Grooks

By way of Tim Berners-Lee, I found this wonderful collection of Grooks by Piet Hein. They have a wonderfully whimsical character, like this one:
BUDGETING: THE FIRST LAW 

If you want to know
where your money went,
you must spend it quickly
before it's spent.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Great Quote

Darren Hobbs: Agile Answers
Developing incrementally does not (in my opinion) mean taking your brain out before starting.

Friday, January 20, 2006

What happens when you don't "get it"

PragDave
Without exception, these early attempts at imitation failed: the car companies replicated what they saw Toyota doing, but only on the surface. They didn't really understand what was behind these practices. It was like trying to become an artist by copying the angle and velocity of the brush held by a master.
You see this happen often with various "agile" practices, like test driven development, XP, or Scrum. If all of the participants don't grok the practice, then they blindly execute a series of steps, and say, "See. It didn't work!"

There are two possible resolutions to this problem.

You can tighten up the process. Unfortunately, if you didn't "get it" in the first place, you are likely to cause more harm than good. At its pathological extreme, your team works like the staff of a McDonald's, with each person following a carefully prescribed methodology. If you are building the software equivalent of a Big Mac, then this might be perfect for you.

You can invest in your people. The old saw about giving a man a fish versus teaching him to fish applies here. For even the most simple project, it is nearly impossible to prescribe everything. At some point, personal judgement has to kick in, therefore it makes sense to equip the team with the mental tools needed to make the right decisions.

I don't mean to "dis" process, but I think you reach a point of diminishing returns, with "process improvement" whereas "people improvement" will always pay off handsomely.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Design by Contract is trademarked!

I was reading this article called Contract Programming 101, when I ran into this little gem:
Note: the term Design By Contract was trademarked in 2003 by Dr. Meyer, so all the little free software pixies are dropping the term like a hot coal. The latest favoured term is Contract Programming, as suggested by Walter Bright in 2004 and used in the recent proposal by Thorsten Ottosen and Lawrence Crowl to the C++ standards body.
That is not cool!