malvasia bianca

I am currently awash in confusion about how we (my team, but also everybody working on the same product) should improve. Tough stuff; I hope I’ll have something more coherent to say here soon. Fortunately, the good folks on the leandevelopment mailing list are helping me sort through my difficulties. The fact that I’m so […]

Today’s book: It’s Not Luck, the second of Eliyahu Goldratt’s business novels. Which I actually read after the third; cleared up a few issues, but the reading order didn’t matter too much. (I would recommend starting with The Goal, though.) This book presents some thinking tools for analyzing situations that confuse you, where you’re stuck […]

As I mentioned at the time, one of my fellow managers gave notice two and a half weeks ago, with the result that his team got combined with mine. Interesting couple of weeks. I had some ideas about how I might handle the transition, but they mostly got blown out of the water, for two […]

I just finished another one of Eliyahu Goldratt’s business novels on the Theory of Constraints. I didn’t lose sleep over it the way I did with The Goal, but it was quite good. And useful to see ToC applied to product development situations, instead of just manufacturing situations. One thing that caught my eye: not […]

One thing that I never got around to blogging about when I first became lean-obsessed: Toyota never fires anybody. Or something like that; at any rate, one thing that lean bloggers claim is that, for lean manufacturers, employees are a fixed cost instead of a variable cost. Which has interesting ramifications. In general, it’s a […]

I’ve read a couple of business novels recently, and I confess that I hadn’t properly appreciated the genre before. I’m not going to stop reading nonfiction or anything, but it seems like a quite decent way to learn something about an area that I don’t want to currently pursue in depth. Which is the case […]

When I first saw Brian Marick’s complaint about the prevalence of the term “leadership” at Agile 2006, my first reaction was “hmm, that doesn’t sound so good, and here I am being part of the problem.” After thinking about it a bit more, though, the Christopher Avery talk that I blogged about doesn’t sound like […]

As previously threatened, I asked my team members if any of them would like to take charge of retrospectives. To which I got the response “but that’s not the way to do things: we try to share knowledge and skills wherever possible.” Oh, right – I’m glad somebody remembers that sort of thing, since obviously […]

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 to the team […]

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 chance to […]

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 main […]

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, but […]

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 of the […]

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”. Which turned into […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]