The Mindset

When I started reading Steve Yegge’s latest article I was optimistic. The title sounded promising. The quote from Wikipedia was great. And the arguments against the Agilism religion were well articulated. The first couple of pages were really a great read.
Then, as I began to read Steve’s description of “the Google experience”, my enthusiasm started […]

Here’s a pop-quiz: what do [take a long breath] Agile, Peer Reviews, JUnit, Pair Programming, SCRUM, velocity charts, burn-down charts, Bugzilla, Subversion, lint, ClearCase®, RequisitePro®, ClearQuest®, RUP, UML, MDA, TDD, BDD, XP, ISO, CMM, and (my personal all-time favorite) Refactoring have in common?
OK now, let’s see. If you found it easy to come up with […]

In a recent article, Timothy Johnson describes a great technique for voting on ideas that came up in a brainstorming session. His article made me think about recent brainstorming sessions I was part of. Each of them had a different nature, but there was one thing common to all of them. The people who took […]

In a recent article, James Shore describes the dynamics in the CardMeeting project.

“All of these things would have been good things to fix. In particular, implementing tests would actually have made us faster, and it would have only taken a week or two at most to figure out how to use TDD in our UI- […]

I have a confession: I am not the kind of person who wanders around the house looking for things to fix. Let me rephrase that: I am not the kind of person who fixes things around the house as soon as something breaks. OK, you’re on to me — I hate fixing things around the […]

When I was a child, one of my favorite TV shows was The Time Tunnel. The concept of being able to go back in time and try to fix the things that went wrong fascinated me. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone from the future could come back and fix whatever it is we did wrong?
Maybe […]

A couple of weeks ago I heard a developmental psychologist say that children learn by emotional experience. When you’re trying to explain to a child that something is forbidden, for example, he may understand your words, but unless you can somehow reach him at an emotional level, chances are he will repeat the same behavior […]

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”                                 George Bernard Shaw
Here’s a fictional scenario. It takes place in a project postmortem session. The product manager looks in his papers or dashboards and says something like “We had too many defects in this project”. The developers […]