Agile Otter Blog

Within my company, we're talking about agreements and expectations a lot. Safety in decision-making and action-taking is all caught up in expectations and working agreements, and many of ours have been unspoken, unwritten, and un-negotiated. As a result, it is easy to drop things, expecting others to pick them up when they don't know to do it. It's also to do things that seem to step on your colleague's toes or which work at cross-purposes.  I was doing some work for a very dear client of ours, and I needed to revisit the Debian New Package Maintainer's guide . What appears on page one? A set of working agreements. We all are volunteers. You cannot impose on others what to do. You should be motivated to do things by yourself. Friendly cooperation is the driving force. Your contribution should not overstrain others. Your contribution is valuable only when others appreciate it. Debian is not your school where you get automatic attention of...

We talk about failures a lot. Fail Fast! Safe to Fail! Learn from Failure! One would think that  people hire us to screw things up. Why the fascination with failures? Why not talk about successes? Admittedly, the dialog is off-base a bit. We're not really keen on failure at all. We don't like to be wrong, and would hesitate to ship a product if we knew it was the wrong thing to build, or it was built in the wrong way. There are problems that can be solved without error by one person who thinks about them for a little while and types in the code that solves the problem.  The term for this kind of problem is  uninteresting problems.  These problems are smaller than one brain, or else the solution is already well-known. We tend to either shuffle this problems off on the noobies, or else we scribble down the answer and move on without any real sense of accomplishment. Any problem that is interesting will involve experimentation and learning. Those problems cy...

It's been quiet on the blog lately, but not at home. My nine-year-old nephew has come to spend a year with us, to take advantage of Libby's skill as a home schooler. He's also getting a crash course in family dynamics and nutrition. This new project is just barely "off the ground" right now, as this was our first week together. It takes a fair amount of our attention as a group. I'm always split between professional and personal goings-on here, and Libby is 100% committed to helping James get oriented and to internalize the way things work here. He's a good kid. Very outgoing, very talkative and very creative. He's further along academically than we were led to believe, and really likes adventures. He's a little less keen on adventures in nutrition, responsibility, and endurance in chores and projects. Sometimes the innerspace is harder to experience and explore than the external experiences. He is looking forward to his first snowfall. We ...