Agile Otter Blog

There are some special challenges with dealing with productivity of knowledge workers. Most of them have to do with the invisibility of the work and the difficulty in managing invisible work. Programmers and testers don't assemble machinery or bend paperclips or mold parts from molten goo. They don't stack boxes or bricks, or swing hammers. The work they do has no physical manifestation, which makes it both hard to observe and hard to understand. I don't blame managers in the 70s and 80s who counted lines of code. It was one of the few visible manifestations of the work programmers do. It was entirely misguided of course, and several of us have experienced net-negative lines of code in consecutive weeks of work (I've even had awkward and unpleasant meetings with managers for "messing up the metrics," ending in an admonition to stop it). Other attempts to make the work visible count data fields on screens and in databases and on reports. This is a bit...

Jim Hood (of Pillar Technology) and I just installed our first ever "ambient annunciator" to announce our build's breakage. Well, technically our first two. What it does is watch for a build to fail in Jenkins, then start playing a series of randomly-selected choices from our assortment of spooky public domain sound files. Some are musical interludes, some are animal sounds, some are just weird. Annunciator #2 video, woofer, and R/L speakers. Our intention is that these sounds, playing through a decent set of speakers, will create an atmosphere of something being "not quite right." With both systems playing test noises, it was a tad eerie. You really felt that there was something different about the space. It is a bit more subtle than flashing lights, and we're hoping this will be an advantage. Developers will know the build is broken, and will have incentive to get the space back to normal (it is a little annoying) but will still be able to have co...