Agile Otter Blog

I've had enough questions and references to this that I need to explain this odd effect with the fashionably Asian-sounding name, which is being mentioned in boardrooms and team rooms all around the earth today. It's not from any Asian language. It is "poo" (such as you might unhappily find on your lawn), and "shoe" which you might happily purchase for your feet. The poo-shoe effect is when you stepped in something, and it stuck to you so that you will have to work long and hard to rid yourself of the stink of it. Now, this doesn't refer to bad choices or acts of temper or moments of ill-will or malfeasance that will be remembered. That is simply "bad reputation" and is a component of social justice. That's not worthy of being considered an instance of the poo-shoe effect. Nor is it about the honest or unintentional kind of mistake or accident that can mar ones reputation "oh, yeah, he's the kid who peed his pants in third ...

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. -- "The Retrospective Prime Directive" by Norm Kerth Software, as Dr. Ralph Johnson informed us, is distilled experience. Writing software, Ray Scheufler reminds us, is a process of making decisions. To make decisions, we have to understand the system we're working in, and the consequences of our decisions. That means that most of the work of a programmer is learning, and very little of it actually involves typing. Understanding any existing body of software is involves understanding the domain,  the user being served,  the specific problem being solved,  the solution chosen,  the techniques of safe software development,  the organization producing the project, and  the technology (language, operating system, network...