Agile Otter Blog

Did you watch Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life ?  There is a great scene that takes place in the Very Big Corporation of America, excerpted here: CHAIRMAN: ...Item six on the agenda: the meaning of life. Now, uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this. HARRY:  That's right. Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and, uh, what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One:  people are not wearing enough hats.  Two: matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia. [pause] BERT: What was that about hats, again? T...

Today we held the first ever Puzzle Challenge at my client's site. The goal of the challenge was for each team to pick a work style that aided them in getting the greatest number of puzzles completed in a very short time (10 minutes per sprint). The set of puzzles to solved was a mix of crosswords, mazes, word-search, sudoku, word jumbles, and number blocks. The teams were told that there was no partial credit at the end of the ten minute sprint. The teams were given a menu of practices to choose from: Team members could one mode of adaptation, leadership, teamwork, noise level, and task switching. A style of 11111 would mean a 1 in each of these categories, a style strongly resembling an "ideal" organization in the buttoned-down 80s. A style of 33333 is basically a productive chaos, which might have been more widely recommended in the free-spirited 60s. Teams made an initial selection, then were allowed some adaptation. In initial selection of work s...

I'm working with Industrial Logic's newest Python album on microtesting (not yet released) and was lucky enough to get to test out the automated critique. So the way this eLearning works is that you download a problem to work on, and you're given tasks to perform. In this case, it's all about writing microtests for some simple python code. When you finish, you upload your results and an automated critique system digs through the code and gives you ratings and pointers. This is rather like having a mentor sitting with you, reviewing the code. I tell people that the eLearning here is something like they've never seen, but people think I'm marketing or something. Today I have a story for you: Yesterday I made a mistake and the automated critique busted me. The mistake was one where I constructed an object incorrectly and invalidated the premise of the test, yet I did this in such a way that the test passed for the wrong reason. I was feeling so sure I'd...