Tuesday, November 06, 2007

 

Managing Agile Software Development

A manager at the clients asked me: "How do I manage 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: , , ,


Monday, November 05, 2007

 

An unexpected failure has occured

Stumbling around a clients website and up pops a page with curt text in the top left corner: "An unexpected failure has occurred".

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: , , , , ,


Thursday, October 18, 2007

 

Jagtvej 69 Politics

Jagtvej 69 Politics is a little video we made as part of a team building exercise.



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: , , , , , , ,


Thursday, September 13, 2007

 

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

A Google shows this quote "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." as coming from J. K. Rowling. I think the sentiment is older, and came from another, science fiction author, whose name currently escapes me.

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: ,


Monday, April 30, 2007

 

What are they all doing?

Most of the servers have failed, (including the license servers,) the local network has faults and one can only access the internet. Yet all my co-workers seem to be hard at work. What are they all doing? Are they all, like me, updating their blogs? ;-)

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:


Wednesday, January 03, 2007

 

Coffee machine update

The firmware in the machine nearest the managers desk has been updated.

Whew! My co-workers were getting to look a little scarey.

Labels:


Tuesday, January 02, 2007

 

Caffine withdrawl

With the new year comes a new problem: the clients office coffee machines have all crashed.

Labels:


Tuesday, December 19, 2006

 

And so another towel goes missing.

Yes, the towel I left in the drier has gone. I wonder if it will return? If it does return I wonder what size and colour might it be?

Labels: ,


Monday, December 18, 2006

 

Badminton

My co-worker beat the best American at Badminton at the weekend.

The best Americans homesite.

Unfortunately my co-worker doesn't have a website, or won't tell me.

Labels:


Monday, December 11, 2006

 

Another missing towel reappears

This time a towel that went walkabout from the towel drier at the client site reappeared dyed a light brownish colour and only slightly shrunk.

I've put them another towel I want to get rid of to see what the nissemand can do with this one.

Labels: ,


Saturday, December 09, 2006

 

Overheard in the office

"We are now half an hour behind our worst case scenario."

Looks like it's going to be a looooong weekend.

Labels:


Thursday, November 30, 2006

 

Overheard in the office

"... Can I get back to you in a couple of minutes? I just have to crash this server."

Labels:


Wednesday, November 29, 2006

 

The guards are just following orders.

Let me set the scene: I'm in the bicycle shed putting my lights, bags, and various other bits of thief bait back on my bicycle for the commute home when the lights go out with a click. It being after 5 pm it is now pitch black.

"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.

Labels: ,


Wednesday, November 08, 2006

 

A missing towel reappears

A towel of mine that went missing from the drier at the clients has reappeared after about 3 months; shrunk and dyed pink. Jamen dog.

Labels: ,


Tuesday, September 26, 2006

 

You know you've worked in IT for too long when ...

You know you've worked in IT for far too long when you tell a joke about rewinding the paper-tapes from data-prep, notice the blank looks, and have to explain "data-prep", "paper-tapes" and "rewinding".

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:


Thursday, May 04, 2006

 

No hot water!

There's no hot water in the shower at work. So I had to make do with the stuff pumped, it felt, direct from the artic. Reminds me of boarding school. It may take all day to get over this, yet I guess it'll make it easier working with all these lovely Danish ladies.

Also reminds me that in the papers they are discussing John Prescotts manhood, apparently a chipolata was used as measurement, and won.

Labels: ,


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Subscribe to Posts [Atom]