I’m definitely not a morning person. I used to be a night person, but now I’m more of a nothing person. There’s no hour of the day or night that I wouldn’t rather close my eyes and sleep . . . and sleep . . .
You begin by stating that agile is basically three things: a set of engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, a project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, and a leadership philosophy that encourages team work and accountability.
You go on to say that success in today’s economy requires us to respond quickly to changing market conditions. Agile processes allow our teams to meet the changing demands of their customers while creating environments where top developers want to work.
The most common verb associated with requirements is “gather.” Yet most requirements that end up fulfilled in a system aren’t gathered. Yes, I know, there are always a few requirements that are so obvious in a new system that you can “gather” them from stakeholders, but gathering implies that the requirements are already out there, fully formed and fully understood, and ready for harvest. It just doesn’t work that way. No stakeholder ever says to an analyst, “Requirements? Why, yes, I have eleven requirements. Eight are functional, one is a usability requirement, and the other two are operational requirements. Are you collecting constraints now, as well? I have three of those. Please sit down, and I will elucidate perfectly clearly on each and every one in turn.” Most requirements are discovered–or invented. Many are transformed or compromised along the way.
Most stakeholders don’t consider the underlying requirements of their work; they do their work. They are not in the business of reinventing the work. The arrival of a new project is the point in time when the ideas for new possible ways of doing work force us to consider the underlying requirements. If you go to an experienced front-desk hotel employee and ask what requirements there are for the check-in process, you are most likely to hear in excruciating detail exactly how the check-in procedure works today. Indeed, you will probably hear more than just about check-in; you will hear about the reservation procedure and how it impacts the check-in procedure. It never crossed the mind of that employee to consider what information and material goods the hotel needs in order for a guest to do self check-in with a new automated system. And the idea of the guest selecting a room from all those available is a shock. It’s not done that way!
This is why we have folks with “analyst” in their titles. Analysis is never simply about recording requirements from clients and other stakeholders. Analysts are not waiters who take orders without comment. Analysts need to learn how to tease out the basic rules–the policies–of the system and liberate all stakeholders from thinking that the new system should be based on current procedures. It is invention that is at the heart of analysis, not gathering.
My son made the honor roll his first semester in high school. I’m very proud of him. He’s in a competitive (translation: high percentage of Asian kids) high school and he’s taking honors classes, where every kid thinks they should get an A but there aren’t enough A’s to go around.
An email went out to parents listing the Honor Roll kids. There are a lot of kids on the Honor Roll at this school.
They should send out a list of the kids who didn’t make the Honor Roll. It wouldn’t be much longer and it would teach the kids a good lesson: Work hard or be humiliated.
Another idea: Only kids taking honors classes would be eligible for the Honor Roll. All other kids would be eligible for the “Honor” (insert finger-quotes here) Roll.
Here's a really simple gliding tabs demo using glider.js, which is downloadable here.
As you can see from the really simple code below, you could do something pretty nice with this without too much extra effort.
Glider is dependent on the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries, both of which are included in the glider download, as is the required stylesheet.
"The breakfast was overheated," my son says to his mom.
The boy is 14 years old. I say, "Thanks, Mr. Old-Enough-To-Fix-His-Own-Breakfast-But-Still-Lets-Others-Do-It-Then-Criticizes-Them."
"It was constructive criticism," he says.
I walked into Starbucks at 5:30 this morning, ordered a drink . . . the Starbucks guy asked my name and wrote it on the cup, despite the fact that I was the only customer in the store.
Whether that would be considered a training success or failure depends on whether Starbucks trains its people to always ask for the customer's name, or to use situational judgment.
I was hoping the barista would call my name when the drink was ready so I could do a comical "who, me?" take, but she just set it on the counter . . .
According to a billboard I saw today, a child is diagnosed with autism every 20 minutes!
That goes to show how little I know about it. I would have thought that once would be enough.
Is he still autistic, doctor?
I'm afraid so, but I'll check him again in 20 minutes . . .
A thought exercise: "How long will it take you to get to work tomorrow? Can you guarantee it? To give us a guarantee, you'd probably put a buffer on your answer first. I guarantee a team working to put together software for the next two weeks is engaged in something a lot less well understood than a daily commute. We can put in a buffer - promise less - to give you a guarantee, or we can work from our estimates and do our best."
Have you seen this program? My son clicked it on last weekend. The host asked a woman if she knew what a right triangle was.
"Yes," she said. "The triangle on the right."
I had to leave the room immediately. I felt like I was losing IQ points just watching it . . .
Headline from OCFamily.com:
TEEN PREGNANCY: What Parents Can Do to Prevent It
Don't have sex with teenagers?
If you don’t have something that is overwhelmingly important to do, then you probably don’t have anything that you’d absolutely rather be doing than getting up and going to work every day. So just start doing that. In any field. And stop deluding yourself that you have so many interests that you can’t choose. Really what you have is no clear interest and only a bunch of things you would consider if you had nothing to do.
We may work more hours at our jobs without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.
Think of waterfall as being similar in concept to the old USSR central planning of the economy. Think of Scrum as similar to a market economy.
Great sequence of posts on the scrumdevelopment Yahoo group . . .
Person A says the number one rule of business is that the customer is always right.
Person B says the customer is NOT always right, like his customer who wants an auction system like eBay on a budget of $1,500.
Person A says Person B needs to shut up and listen to the customer.
I AM listening. They want something like Ebay for $1500. They want me to build a full Ebay clone this weekend and then tweak it until they're happy over the next two weeks. I have listened carefully and diligently and have confirmed multiple times. This is definitely what they want. They'd also like time travel, but they don't need that until April.
The point I'm making is that there are many reasons why just listening to your customer and giving them what they ask for is often not a good idea - for you or for the customer.
