Kerry Buckley

A slightly cynical post from Kevin Barnes today – bizarrely entitled Agile processes, are they killing our children? – contains the following line:

Managers like the waterfall model for the same reasons that tourists like real waterfalls, they are simple and powerful and beautiful to look at. They are much less fun when you go down one.

I didn’t think he’d be able to top that, until I read down a little and laughed out loud:

The one group that always had mixed feelings about the waterfall model was consultants. Consultants can’t afford to show up, work for months at a time and produce no real results (unless they’re Accenture).

It’s quite common these days for organisations to allow external access to their intranets using an SSL VPN, but it can be a bit of a pain if you’re trying to follow a ‘normal’ intranet hyperlink (eg from an e-mail) – you have to paste the URL into a box on the VPN homepage and have it converted.

To make it easier I’ve created a bookmarklet to do the conversion. It may not work for all sites, as I’m only constructing the new URI based on a simple inspection of a couple of pages.

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There’s an excellent article about the Toyota process on fastcompany.com. Most of the behaviours described are also desirable or necessary in teams or organisations trying to be[come] agile, but the key point is in the conclusion:

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Ever since I started work, people have had big blue (or more recently black and red) books that they wrote stuff in. I’ve always called them lab books, but that seems to cause amusement to some people, presumably because I don’t work in a lab.

Some of the things that were written were notes from meetings, to do lists, or rough design notes. The most important ones though, the ones that you kept referring back to (if you could find them), were the little snippets of secret knowledge that everyone accumulates as they learn the intricacies of their particular job, whether it’s useful unix commands or instructions for using a particular build system.

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Agile teams tend to favour whiteboards for instant collaboration when discussing design etc, but if you're working in a pair you might not always want to keep walking over to one on the wall. The answer? A4 whiteboards!

They only cost a couple of pounds each (including a pen), and at the risk of attracting 'XP isn't for grown-ups' comments, the best place to buy these seems to be primary school suppliers – for example Class Ideas or EasyTeach. At that price, you may as well have two or three each.

Technorati Tags: agile, tools

Jour Nal:

Of late, I only carry cards in my pocket to write on, and that's an entirely different thing. In particular, there's no continuity. That can be a good thing, or a bad thing.

The big advantage to the cards is that I read somewhere, many years ago, that you can recognize important people by the fact that they don't carry anything. They don't need to carry anything, because whatever they need, they just are, and because they have other people to carry their things for them. So I stopped carrying things, in hopes of being mistaken for someone of consequence. You have to start somewhere.

I too have taken lately to carrying a bunch of index cards around in my back pocket for occasional scribbling, and I rarely take a notebook to those meetings I fail to avoid (on the basis that someone's bound to hand out some kind of printed material that I can write on).

Of course, the main difference is that Ron is 'someone of consequence'!

1. Keep all my resolutions this year.
2. …

Actually number one is quite a big one, so perhaps I'll stop there.