malvasia bianca

I spent this morning hanging out in open space. The first discussion was a followup to last year’s talk by Arlo Belshee on promiscuous pairing. It turns out that a couple of experience reports were presented here on teams’ experiments with the practice. The good news: both teams saw similar productivity/quality/etc. boosts [...]

I spent this morning at a talk by Mary Poppendieck on lean. It was billed as a tutorial, but there were too many people for that, so it ended up as just a talk. As far as I can tell, the main thing that I missed from its not being hands-on was a [...]

The first session I went to this morning was on systems thinking / causal loop diagrams. They had us go through an exercise throwing balls around, talked about states of the system, and showed diagrams that explained the different states (why performance increased, then leveled off, then went down).
Pretty good; I’d seen the ideas [...]

And now day 2 is over. Better than day 1: I enjoyed all four talks that I went to, and hopefully got something out of them.
One of the problems that I have is figuring out which talks to go to. I have enough agile experience that I’ve been avoiding the beginners’ tutorials. [...]

The first day of Agile 2006 is now more or less over. It was just a half-day, really: only afternoon talks, and I don’t think quite everybody is here.
I went to a couple of presentations. The first wasn’t too good: it was billed as talking about how agile had changed since the manifesto, [...]

I’m off to Agile 2006 tomorrow. Should be interesting; many thanks to the powers that be at work for sending me there.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about this article on removing warning signs when I first saw it, and I’m equally confused by this one. On a basic level: does this really work? I’ve never driven in Europe, I’ve never been to Italy at all, so I don’t have much context for many [...]

We feel fine.
Ed Felten goes ski jumping.
Lean healthcare.
Trained to fear.
Visual complexity.
Files are not for sharing.

I’m in the middle of reading A New Theory of Urban Design. Not one of Alexander’s best (though it’s interesting enough); it’s hurt by problem that, as he comments, part of the theory that he’s discussing “remains unpublished. It will appear in a later volume of this series, “The Nature of Order”. [...]

In regards to my last post: the bibliography to the XP book doesn’t seem to mention The Production of Houses, but it has this to say about The Timeless Way of Building:
Outlines Christopher Alexander’s view of architecture and construction. The relationship described between designers/builders and the users of buildings is much the same as the [...]

Some quotes from the chapter on “The Architect Builder” in Christopher Alexander’s The Production of Houses:
This requires, then, that decisions about design can be made, individually, house by house, and that they can even be made while construction is under way. (p. 69)
It requires a system of communication in which the building is not [...]

One thing I wanted to learn when I started reading about lean: given that Toyota is supposed to be so great at everything, why is it that, when I last shopped for a car, fully intending to buy one of their models, the experience was so bad that it (or rather they, I tried two [...]

I wasn’t expecting to like How Buildings Learn nearly as much as I did. I learned about it from the XP book’s bibliography, and certainly you wouldn’t have to look very far in the book to find inspiration for your programming. But I was surprised at how interested I was in the actual [...]

Driven by my recent mania for all thing lean, I just finished Lean Software Development, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck; I wish I’d read it a few years ago. I’d been aware of it for some time, but I passed it over when doing my initial tour of the agile literature. I had assumed that [...]

I was thinking about ways in which production might be building up between stages of pipelines that I’m involved in, and I realized: I have forty or so books sitting on my “recently”-bought-but-not-yet-read shelf. That’s several months of inventory - probably well over half a year, actually, given my depressingly low current reading rate and [...]

I’ve been really curious about lean manufacturing (which basically means the way Toyota does things) for a couple of months now. I was aware that people had made some analogies between it and agile software development, but my interest got more concrete when I started reading Silk and Spinach: that’s a blog that spends [...]

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post: the reason why my boss was so concerned about integration testing was because of customer feedback. Which is a perfect example of why customer representatives should be involved in writing tests (instead of, say, just handing off requirements and leaving it up to the engineering [...]

We had a (very useful) meeting at work today which, at one point, turned to the extent to which our end-to-end tests should extend beyond the software that we are writing and actually invoke our software via our partners’ software. (As opposed to driving our external interfaces through test clients that we’ve written ourselves.)
My [...]

Cleaning out my list of saved links:

A visit to the Ghibli museum.
Lean manufacturing books are next up on my reading list.
I’m glad some Congresspeople are seeing the DRM light…
Because the bad guys aren’t about to let up.
I repeat: the bad guys aren’t about to let up.
Google’s hardly a saint, either.
Some random 37signals posts.
I’m curious, though [...]

A few months ago, I finally started appreciating the Customer role in XP: it made a real difference to us when we stopped doing our iteration planning ourselves (with advice from others, to be sure), and started having somebody else pick the stories for each release. (We still plan the work in our weekly [...]