Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please

Bottlenecks

I worked on a horrible project some time ago.  In theory I got "let go" when the budget got cut; in practice I got let go when the budget got cut and I'd made friends on the loosing side of the political divide.  I'm still not sure if I got shafted ... but it's water under the bridge now - there were a lot of people there fighting for their jobs and I wasn't so good at fighting.

I still feel bitter.  

Why?  Mostly because I failed to have any influence on the final solution and sometime soon there's going to be another big "agile" failure-story here in Scotland.  A big one.

The number two rule of agile, for me, is: deliver potentially shippable / working software.  

[It goes hand in hand with rule number three: if you need to change the software in the near future then ensure the code is easy to work with and change; I like the word malleable.  The number one rule is prioritize like a business person, not a technician.]

This project isn't producing working software.  It's producing increments of untested code.  Loads and loads of them. 

The project's got two problems:

First: if you look at the project with your TOC goggles on - as if it's a "flow system" - then the bottleneck is testing. They're producing code faster than they can test it.  So the code keeps piling up and none of it is tested.  None of it is usable or potentially shippable.  I doubt the project will ever find itself in a position where the code is potentially shippable.  They'll have to test then rework then entire thing.  It's not waterfall - but it's no better.

This is the fourth attempt to complete this project in 4 years.  It will be the 4th failure and Agile will be blamed.  TOC is the cure for this problem: figure out where the bottleneck is, pull work through the system at the speed of the bottleneck rather than pushing it through at the speed of ambition, figure out how to make the bottleneck run faster.

Second: there's a recession on and there's no incentive, financially, for anyone inside the project - especially those at the top - to finish early.  The project looks healthy because all the iterations are finishing on time.  It's just a shame that there are no phased releases - if there were then they'd find out far sooner that the iterations aren't  "potentially shippable".  As it is this well know secret won't be discovered by the folk paying the multi-million-pound-bill  for a log time.

This project has about 100 people working on it.  None of them particularly happy.  

I've seen the exact same problem on project after project after project - most of them far smaller.  

I really should finish my friggin book.

I got the job!

I found out yesterday that I got the job I really wanted.  I'm delighted.  For four reasons: first, work has been scarce and I hate living off our savings; second, it's a job I'm good at AND don't have to travel; third, it's with a great company, one I admire; fourth, it's gonna be a fun project.

I won't say the name of the company for now but I will tell you that I'm doing some training with one of their key competitors in a couple of weeks.  I think that kinda helped me get the job but it did mean that  I've had to delay starting the new gig until I finished the work.  It never crossed my mind until they raised it.  

Good day

I've had a good day today.

This morning I went for a hospital consultation and learnt that I don't have a particular gene mutation which would pretty much guarantee that I got early-dementia.  He said earlier that there was a 25% chance that I did.  My wife's an old-age-psychiatrist and she already knew that so we now have one less thing to worry about!  That's gotta be good.  

And ...  my Dr also told me that the new diabetic medication I'm on (which I'm already utterly wowed with) also helps reduce my triglycerides - the very same triglycerides which put me in hospital 2 years ago and very nearly killed me.  So that's even better!

And then this afternoon I had an interview for a job which has me salivating.  I hope I'm going to be offered the job, but I don't like to count my chickens.  I can't say the company's name but I put them up there with Zara and Toyota in terms of business-model innovation.  I really want this job ... Fingers crossed.

the queen

I wonder if the queen has ever used a whiteboard ...

Prince 2

I ran an "Agile Crash Course" for 10 managers last friday.  They were all "between jobs" due to this horrible economy so they had spare time on their hands and most of them figured their was no harm in spending a day - free - learning about agile.  

Early on in the day I asked everyone to imagine a continuum on the back wall with "already love agile" at one end and "very distrusting of agile" at the other, then I go them to point to where they'd place themselves.  Not very scientific, but I find it useful.  One person said they'd worked as a customer on an agile project and had enjoyed it even though it was a little awkward at times; one person said she knew so little that she had no opinion; the rest placed themselves in the distrusting half of the continuum.  

The big questions during the day were:

(a) I use and like Prince 2.  How's this work with Prince 2?  

I'm not a prince 2 user so I couldn't answer but I suggested that we tackle this at the end of the day.  The conclusion was Agile didn't conflict with prince 2.  [That said, I imagine some Agile folk may claim that prince 2 conflicts with Agile.]

(b) How do you measure the cost of an agile project?

I thought I gave a fairly convincing answer to this (variable scope, fixed cost calculated to safely cover the vaiable-minimum product, a few good, honest conversations with the customer before the project starts) but I failed with at least two of them.  That bothered me and I think (on reflection) that I should have asked the participants to figure the answer out (like I did with the prince 2 question) rather than giving an answer.  I'll try that next time.

(c) Why are you so cynical about Agile?

I think Agile suffers from "feature fatigue" - it's too complex, too big, too confusing.  Maybe I'm getting old, but I want something simple that I know will work, not something exciting.  I up-played the "most of this isn't knew" and "prioritization is key" and "just do smaller projects would be a good start" and "figure out how you'll test something as-and-before, rather than after,  you build it will save you a lot of work" angles.  I down-played the "the first thing you must do is change the furniture around and hide half the computers" angles.  

The end result is that when I asked them all to point to the continuum on the wall at the end of the day, all but 2 of the 10 had moved a good chunk towards the happier end of the scale.  

I count that as a success ... but I wish I could have moved the other 2!

Wild chocolate mint

Last weekend we discovered chocolate mint growing in someone's herb garden. It's a green minty looking plant with browny-red colour running through the leaves and - truth - it smells and tastes just like chocolate mint icecream. No kidding.

Today we've taken the kids to a local play area which is in the middle of a forest. While hunting for tadpoles my 6 year-old daughter discover what smells and looks just like the chocolate mint we saw growing in the garden.

I'm not brave enough to taste it.

It might be the same thing, it might not. It might kill me.

(I'm happy picking wild stuff - we use a lot of wild garlic in the spring, for instance, and I'm looking forward to when the wild blackberries and raspberries ripen. But I know what they are and I know they're safe.)

So ... Have you got any advice or experience with wild chocolate mint?

Please share!

Thanks Clarke Clarke Ching - www.clarkeching.com +44(0)7920114893 - Author of Rocks Into Gold - www.RocksIntoGold.com - and, coming soon, Rolling Rocks Downhill, a business novel.

Need a new laptop battery?

I recommend these guys: http://www.laptop-battery.org.uk/

They're based in Hong Kong and I would not normally have bought from them if they hadn't been recommended to me by a guy on a course I ran recently.  He had a sony laptop, like me, and the battery had failed so he bought a new one.  It has better battery life than the old one and it only cost £50.

Based on his recommendation I emailed them with my laptop details, they recommended a battery very quickly, I bought it, it arrived quickly, I've been using it fora couple of weeks and it's superb.

It cost £50.  They're £300 new.  This battery lasts much longer than the old one.

As a consequence: I've put my netbook away and I'm using my 2 year-old battered, but rejuvinated, laptop instead.  The keyboard is bigger and now the battery is too.

I really dispise Sony, btw, for "gouging" me. 

Muscle memory ...

1.  My Dad drives a truck.  He has driven the sam brand of truck - an Isuzu -  since I was 12.  He upgraded the truck ever 3 or 4 years.  

He used to drop us to school in the truck.  Every day I'd climb up into the truck, one-step, two-step, sit.  It wasn't the sort of thing I had to think about; it was just something I did.  My muscles just remembered how to climb into Dad's truck - just as they remembered how to walk and how to run.

But then five or six years ago I went home to New Zealand to visit my family.  We were taking our new born baby over to show her off.  I asked Dad if he'd mind if I went with him to work one day. He said he'd like that and the following day I joined him. 

Now here's the weird thing.  Even though it''d been 10 years since I'd been in his truck my legs remembered how to climb up into it - one-step, two-step, sit.

Only trouble is: some time during those 10 years Isuzu had added a 3rd step.  My legs - on autopilot - didn't know what to do.  I was okay for one-step and two-step, but sit got awfully uncomfortable.  

Muscle memory.

2.  About 10 or 12 years ago I had to do some COBOL coding.  I hadn't done it for a half dozen years and I hadn't used the IBM mainframe for just as long ... but the moment I opened up the editor my finger tips knew exactly where to go, including which function-keys to press.  

Muscle memory.

3.  When I want to do a google search I often alt-tab to gmail, type in the search term, press tab twice and do a "web search" rather than a gmail search.  It might sound daft, but it works for me.  My fingers remember what to do.

Muscle memory.

4.  Today, for some reason, Google has removed the web search button.  I am flummoxed.  My finger tips don't know what to do.

Muscle memory.

5.  A few weeks ago I attended a talk given by a sincere young person ... who thought the whole world should convert to DVORAK keyboards because they were more efficient.

He didn't understand muscle memory.

If you change software for a living ... don't' forget muscle memory.

Manager vs. Leader - or - Manager AND Leader?

Forgive my whinging but ... it really annoys me when I see blog posts which go on about the difference between leaders and managers then implies that leaders are better than managers.

Some people are leaders AND managers.

Some people are excellent leaders AND excellent managers.

Some people are excellent leaders but poor managers.  If they're excellent leaders then they probably delegate the management to an excellent manager.

Some people are poor leaders and poor managers, but they're good at doing other things ... and hopefully they avoid the management / leadership roles.

And so on ...

Beating the System - Ackoff and Rovin

I'm currently reading Beating the System by Russell Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin.  I'm not sure how I found the book but I managed to find a very cheap copy via Amazon so I bought it because I like Ackoff's thinking.  It's a sweet little book filled with little stories about how "David" beats bureaucratic "Goliath".

Here's one I particularly enjoyed:

Despite security classification of all documents coming out of the Pentagon during WWII, the Pentagon acquired evidence that the Germans gained access to the contents of the most highly classified documents quickly.  Clearly, those illicitly acquiring documents for the Germans knew which ones to select based on security classification.

Consequently, the Army Operations Research Group at Johns Hopkins University was asked to find a way of foiling the enemy.  The project was placed under the direction of a medieval historian.  He looked at the problems in humanistic rather than technological terms.  His conclusion was to terminate all classification of documents and send the Germans a copy of every document produced in the Pentagon.  he reasoned that by the time the Germans sorted through the mess and found the documents that were important, they no longer would be.

Lo and behold, this proposal was not accepted.

Fwd: [AgileScotland] When it just *has* to work: Agile Development in Safety-Critical Environments

Hi Everyone,

Nancy Van Schooenderwoert, a very experienced Agile coach with a very long name, is in Edinburgh next Friday afternoon, the 26th. She's presenting a one-off session, running from 3-5, about *Agile in Safety-Critical Environments* to the agile team at Toshiba Medical Visualizaton Systems(they're one of Scotland's agile success stories). You can see details of Nancy's talk, below.

The folk at Toshiba have very kindly set aside *a few spaces *for the general public. If you are interested then get back to me - clarke.ching@gmail.com and I'll let you know if you've got a spot early next week. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to turn some of you away. If you are particularly interested in safety-critical code then let me know and I'll prioritize you.

Clarke

*When it just *has* to work: Agile Development in Safety-Critical Environments*

Traditional thinking holds that the more critical the application, the more tightly its development must be planned, staged, and controlled. The truth is that a flexible culture is stronger, safer, and more robust. FDA regulatory standards are designed to support a learning organization – fully compatible with Agile! This session gives you practical tips for moving your customers and auditors to a flexible agile approach to planning, team interactions, and risk management. When the culture shifts, the result is not just that teams achieve their goals sooner, but safety is greatly enhanced. Process/Mechanics

Learning outcomes

* Get ammunition for conversations with managers, to show why incremental design is safer than up-front design
* See examples of how several medical device companies are already reaping increased ROI from using agile team discipline
* Understand how the traditional method of hazard analysis is more dangerous than the agile approach
* Be able to explain to your customers (internal and external) the benefit - to them - of working collaboratively with you
* Grasp how the regulatory requirement for separate reporting chains for development and QA need not prevent Agile collaboration

Who Should Attend Key attendees are described here as “Personas”

Patricia - a seasoned project manager. She prefers agile development to her old attempts to force teams to conform to an overly prescriptive plan. But, her stakeholders still ask for the same predictability and schedule commitments. And the regulatory documentation needs seem to force a “big design up front” approach so she ends up with a mix of agile and waterfall practices that is only marginally better than waterfall.

Don - the product Quality Assurance representative. Don is responsible for quality concerns of the overall product, only part of which is the embedded software. In particular, Don has to make sure all the requirements of the regulatory agencies (in his world, the FDA) have been fulfilled, and wants to be sure the Agile approach will result in the kind of information he needs to provide.

RocksIntoGold - the serialized version.

I'm rather pleased that stickyminds.com are serializing Rocks Into Gold.  

Here's part 1 of 4.

I keep getting lots of nice notes about the wee book and it's now been viewed over 8,000 times on slideshare and stickyminds will bring it to a much, much wider audience than I could ever achieve on my own.  I'm very pleased :)

Guidelines for writing and organising and designing Agile tests?

I need a little help for a course I'm preparing which introduces Agile to a group of experienced Testers.  I'd like to give them some "guidelines" for writing tests they have to live with.

• Way back in my 3rd year at university our software engineering gave us a list of 6 - 10 "rules" or guidelines about how to write good code.  I can't recall the list fully, but one of them was "no gotos", another "no downward passed control", and I'm sure it had something about low coupling and high cohesion.  
• The same lecturer - Matt Humphries was his name - also got us to read Strunk and White, to improve our writing.  Active voice rules ... 
•   There are different guidelines today such as DRY (Don't repeat yourself) and YAGNI (You ain't gonna need it).
•   In Database Design we have similiar rules of design - such as the normal forms used in transactional databases and the snowflake design used in datawarehousing.

But ... I'm interested if there are any similiar rules for writing tests automated tests usign tools like Cucumber or Fit.  The closest I've seen is Dave Peterson's excellent presentation on Readability.

Have you seen or written something similiar which you could share?

Just coz you've got nothing (paid for) to do, why do nothing?

I'm not sure if I've written about it on my blog yet, but lately I've been organising a lot of simple AgileScotland initiatives which are designed to help people and spread the word.  You can read about some of them on AgileScotland.com.  The main things are (a) agile clinics - where people who are doing agile can drop in for free and chat with an agile expert for up to an hour, no strings attached, and (b) very cheap, or free "Agile" training aimed at introducing people to Agile or reinforcing the fundamental agile practices to people who are already doing it.  

It's the training I want to mention because I think it could be a useful model for others during the recession.  I've found a few places where I can get a really expensive, but still good quality, training facilities;' I and my good friend Rob, had spare capacity; we wanted to "spread the Agile word" around Scotland; we know people want to know about Agile, but many of them don't want to pay for it right now.  So we booked a room, sent a few emails, made a few announcements and we ended up with 6 folk, who are in jobs, paying £30 each for a spot and 7 people who don't have work (due to the shite economy) coming along for free.  Fun was had by all; and they found it useful too.  We've had enough interest so far that we can do another 3 or 4 similiarly sized sessions.  We don't make money out of it but (a) we enjoy it and (b) people have long memories - if we help them today, maybe they'll be in a position to help us in the future, who knows, who cares?

So I've got this idea roaming around in my head and I can't get rid of it: wouldn't it be great if all the people who've lost work or are others "free" due to the economy - and, sadly, there are quite a few - got together and organised mutually beneficial training each other for when times are better.  What if they used the empy rooms in the universities (during the summer months)?  What if they managed to run a project that produced something useufl, perhaps for a charity, perhaps open sourse, perhaps even a useufl product?  What if they helped each other with interview practice or rewriting their CVs or preparing a business plan?  Wouldn't that be great?  

so this idea is going around in my head.  I'm happy to put my time into upskilling people in Agile for free (though we do limit the numbers to 2 or 3 per business) but I'm too busy to organise this.  

So tell me: do you think this is a daft idea?  (I have a lot of those - but this one's hard to shake).

First Santa, then God, then Elvis, and ... now Nemo

According to the latest, and very interesitng, QI (Quite Interesting) article in the Telegraph:

Nemo in the film Finding Nemo wasn’t a clownfish but a close relative, the False clownfish.

Short Stabucks cup

My friend Rob has just got back from Las Vegas. He had a fantastic break but the most interesting thing (from my pov) is that he saw someone buy a SHORT cup of starbucks coffee and be told it was the same price as the TALL.

Tell me my US friends: is this only true in Vegas where people - tourists - are less price conscious, or does it apply througout your country?

I've just checked and here in Scotland the SHORT cups are cheaper.
Sent using my BlackBerry Bold - the thinking man's iphone. www.clarkeching.com Author Rocks Into Gold - www.RocksIntoGold.com +44(0)7920114893 Clarke Ching - Author of "Rolling Rocks Downhill" ... a business novel about software development; coming soon from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Certification ...

There's a message being retweeted around twitter that goes a bit like this "be wary of people writing / talking about theory of constraints that aren't tocico.org certified".

To which I say: Blah!  

• I am not TOCICO certified.
• My TOC mentor, Jim, isn't TOCICO certified.  He's in his 70s now but a couple of decades ago he (and others) helped develop the TOC thinking processes.
• I run 3 TOC yahoo groups with around 4000 names (I think) on them and very few of the active participents are TOCICO certifed.
• My Agile friend's Rob and Kevin are both TOC experts, in my opinion, and they're not TOCICO certifed. 

Oh, and Eli Goldratt isn't TOCICO certified.

That said, I'd totally recommend you get TOCICO certified.  From what I know the tests are challenging enough and not likely to be a good filter for bluffers.

The Sprong Saga.

A couple of days ago I added a little detail to the wikipedia Pitchfork entry.  The detail was that in some parts of Ireland (the bits where my wife comes from, for example) a 4 pronged pitch fork is called a sprong.

I searched all over the internet but I couldn't find this (rivetting and useful) fact.  I turned to wikipedia and (strangely) sprong does not have it's own entry.  Pitchfork does and it specifically mentions that in some parts of England, Pitchforks are called Prongs.  This seemed like the approprite place to add this very interesting fact.  So i did.

My browser crashed the other day and when it reopened it reloaded the wikipedia page.  And LO AND BEHOLD someone has put a [citation needed] thingy next to it.  I understand why - it could look like I've just made up this fact.  In fact, I thought my wife made it up and that was why I first went looking on the internet.  To be honest I didn't trust my wife enough to believe that it's a real world - some times she takes the piss out of me - so I've also had this fact independantly verified from bonefide people whom I am not married to (nor related to by marriage).

So here was my problem: if I read the wikipedia rules correctly then my citation needs to reference a  webpage or a  book or a journal or similiar ... not my wife or her dodgy relative. 

Bugger.  I spoke to my wife and she said that if I was really that worried about it then she would ring her Mum and get her to look up the word sprong in the  old Irish dictionary they keep on top of the fridge behind the Irish farmer's journal.

I didn't want to do that unless it gave them more ammunition to mock me with .  They already mock me about my missing vowels (somewhere way back the people who migrated to New Zealand collectively had a vowel movement and every vowel except i sounds like i and i sounds like something else).

I was almost defeated but then I remembered google books!  Two minutes later, I found this snippet from English as we speak it in Ireland by Patrick Weston Joyce which, in case you are wondering, was published in 1920:

Halleluja.

What bothers me, though, is this: if it weren't for Google books then my fact may not be true.

Sprong

Did you know that in some parts of Ireland a 4 pronged pitchfork is called a "sprong"?

I know this to be true because my wife and her relatives tell me it is so.

I've just updated the wikipedia page to reflect this fact.

Bonnie as you've never heard her before ...

A literal interpretation of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse.  Very, very clever.

via http://the-screen-door.blogspot.com/2009/06/screen-door-links-you-should-read-6409.html