Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Managing Agile Software Development
I immediately thought what a silly question, but on thinking about it, it struck me that I haven't read anywhere in the voluminous verbiage written about Agile Software Development the simple basic inner concept of it all: managers are out of the loop.
That's what it's all about, no managers.
Why has no one said it this way? They all talk about empowering the team, give the developers the tools they want, everything but the central point: remove the managers to prevent them messing up the stuff they don't understand.
The managers are still there, they just do a different job to those in the heavyweight methodologies, viz:
* increase return on investment by -- making continuous flow of value our focus.
* deliver reliable results by -- engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.
* expect uncertainty and manage for it through -- iterations, anticipation and adaptation.
* unleash creativity and innovation by -- recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.
* boost performance through -- group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.
* improve effectiveness and reliability through -- situationally specific strategies, processes and practices.
So I shuffled that steaming pile of on an email. That'll keep them busy and out of my hair for this iteration at least.
Labels: fun, joke, politics, work
Monday, November 05, 2007
An unexpected failure has occured
It strikes me though, that if someone wrote a page to say that, then they expected this occurrence to happen.
Did they write pages for all the expected failures as well?
Or are the programmers just lazy: writing this one page as they wistfully expect the system to always be working, at all times, and when it doesn't it is a mysterious unexpected event?
Maybe they weren't lazy, and worked really hard to build a working system, but ran out of budget for this page to tell the customers that the back end was going belly up.
One asks: what does it mean to say, "An unexpected failure has occurred", and what will the readers of the page be left to ponder...
Labels: bizarre, buddhism, joke, purple, work, zen buddhism
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Jagtvej 69 Politics
Essentially it is a little video using a Surrealist and Existential techniques about the politics surrounding Ungdomshuset
There are other teams that have produced videos and there is a little competition between them. Not quite sure how it is going to be scored, but do watch and give us a high rating, as I don't think it can harm the outcome...
Labels: bizarre, Jagtvej 69, joke, Pavlovs dog, purple, recycling, Ungdomshuset, work
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
Anyways, the wibble I have today: in performance testing a rather complex system I noticed that some sets of tests ran quicker than expected. After a thorough inspection I discerned that there are various levels of cache and that several caches exist distributed throughout this distributed system, and the combination appeared to be learning the sequence of the tests.
Spooky!
Occam's Rasor: "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", initially had me looking for Charlie co-worker mucking me about.
Labels: programming, work
Monday, April 30, 2007
What are they all doing?
Went over to one guy who was typing furiously, but with one hand on his head. It looked and sounded a triffle bizarre, to say the least, and rather hoped he wasn't suffering withdrawl symptoms. Apparently, so he tells me, he's trying to see how quickly he can type "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." one hundred times, one handed.
Labels: work
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Coffee machine update
Whew! My co-workers were getting to look a little scarey.
Labels: work
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Caffine withdrawl
Labels: work
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
And so another towel goes missing.
Monday, December 18, 2006
Badminton
The best Americans homesite.
Unfortunately my co-worker doesn't have a website, or won't tell me.
Labels: work
Monday, December 11, 2006
Another missing towel reappears
I've put them another towel I want to get rid of to see what the nissemand can do with this one.
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Overheard in the office
Looks like it's going to be a looooong weekend.
Labels: work
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Overheard in the office
Labels: work
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
The guards are just following orders.
"Oy, git, put the light back on!"
"Sorry, no can do, I've been told to switch the lights out on my tour", answers the security guard.
"Well, I'm telling you to switch this one back on."
Said guard ponders this. I'd swear you could hear the gears grinding as the concept was processed. 'Click' the light goes back on.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
A missing towel reappears
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
You know you've worked in IT for too long when ...
Data-prep, short for "data preparation", serried ranks of, usually, ladies typing away copying information from, example, cheques, i.e. the account numbers, amount, bank etc. and creating paper-tapes with all this information.
Paper-tapes, are a largely obsolete form of data storage, consisting of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data.
Rewinding, as the paper is punched the beginning of the tape ends up on the inside of the reel, so to get the tape into the correct order for feeding into the computer it has to be rewound, such that the end, ends up on the inside.
And the joke was: Talking about penny-pinching: I worked at a firm once that was so budget-concious they would not buy a paper-tape rewinder for the data-prep department. We resorted to grabbing the centre and throwing the rest out of the window. OK as long as it wasn't raining...
Labels: work
Thursday, May 04, 2006
No hot water!
Also reminds me that in the papers they are discussing John Prescotts manhood, apparently a chipolata was used as measurement, and won.
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