Archive for June, 2006

The (Semi) Myth Of YAGNI

Saturday, June 10th, 2006

Welcome back to the “Only Part of the Story” show. In today’s episode, we are going to revisit one of the most common Agile statements, which seems to make a lot of sense. But as you can guess, it’s only part of the story.
We will do that with the help of this blog post […]

The Final Touch

Friday, June 9th, 2006

Yesterday I bought a new keyboard. The Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000. I will not bore you with a keyboard review, so please bear with me.
Any way, apart from being ergonomic, which is why I bought it, the keyboard has many shortcut keys and enhancements. The most noticeable one is the Zoom Slider placed at the middle […]

The Hijacking Of The Word Agile

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

Before you read this post let me assure you that Agile Development is great. It includes some common sense ideas and good practices which can help many projects succeed.
Now that we got this out of our way, let’s start.
The word “Agile” was first hijacked to describe a set of software development processes, methodologies, practices […]

Elements Of Communication: Lost In Translation

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

Imagine five bright people sitting around one table, speaking what seems to be the same language, using common words, which could be found in any dictionary, and correct grammar. And yet no one really understands the others.
No this is not one of those riddles that make your head hurt when you try to solve it. I believe […]

Does Optimization Limit Creativity?

Monday, June 5th, 2006

Every once in a while I am involved in a discussion about optimization vs. creativity in the software development process. Most of these discussions are very passionate.  They always start with a concrete idea for optimizing the development process in one way or another, and they usually end up with the all-time favorite “it will stand […]

King On Leadership

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006

It’s not my habit to regularly quote other authors just for the sake of quoting, but this is not the first time I’m quoting J. Timothy King (and probably not the last).
This great text is from his article Moving Chairs and Why It’s Cool. I found it to be so accurate, thought-provoking and well-written, […]

Hyper-Gemba

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

Gemba is Japanese term meaning the place where the truth can be found. It is only at the gemba that you learn “unknown unknowns”.
In quality management, gemba means the manufacturing floor and the idea is that if a problem occurs, the engineers must go there to understand the full impact of the problem using all […]