Agile Otter Blog

I did not manage to use my Christmas break to get a lot of work done on the book . I tried, but there was much going on in our world (almost all good stuff) and I was unable to get the focused time I was hoping for. You might be able to access a sample of the draft as of today. It is only a small bit of the book, but maybe enough to whet your appetite. I hope to decide on the "early adopters" price soon, and finish up the initial set of illustrations (thereby getting rid of the ugly ascii art that appears in some places, and breaking up the expanse of text that appears in others). If you want, use the public page to suggest a price. Thanks for waiting. I hope you'll find the result thought-provoking and useful.

Messages from the past have a way of reaching into the future and getting your attention. This week everyone is talking "apocalypse." This is because of an ancient mayan calendar which quits tracking time on Dec 21st. The joke (I hope we all know it's a joke) is that it stops because that's when time ends. Of course, my calendars used to run out every year (before Google Calendar). The word "apocalypse," according to my sources, was a theatrical term. It referred to the moment when the curtain was pulled back and all was revealed. When I learned that, the title of the biblical book "Revelations" finally made sense, as did more of the text within. Today I'm facing my own apocalypse. An ancient message (from two years ago) has come back and presented itself to me. I like this team. They're good people, and they understand their business. They write quite a lot of code, and they get along. There is nothing to dislike, and much anyone...

I'm starting to see a lot of these: for(int x=0; x < someLimit; x++ ){ if (x == 0 ) { // do initialization } else { // do everything else } } Is it just me, or is this a pretty weird thing to see? I've seen it a half-dozen times in the past few months and I don't think (outside of Duff's device) I've seen a switch/case or if/else on the loop counter in years.

I was talking with some folks in California last week about the evolution of cubicles from the original "action office" where everything was movable to the modern view of cubicles as tiny jails with fixed walls held firmly in place by management policy and departmental will. Originally, the office was supposed to adapt to the needs of the people living/working in it, but then something sad happened: Propst believed that the facility should adapt to the needs of the individuals, and there could be many forms of adaptation. But in the 1980s and 1990s, standards programs and the box move—move people instead of the office—became the predominant planning model. Workers had to adapt to the facility. What happened to a human-focused, individual-focused interior design approach? This is not an unfamiliar story. I think it has some parallels with other great movements of the past few decades in that some mechanical aspect of the original work is kept, but only after the humani...

I read an interesting post from  The Library Corporation's TLC Labs . Here's what I learned: Since we ended reviews, we have seen employee retention improve substantially. A host of other metrics that one could argue would be likely to be affected by “performance management” have also improved. I can’t prove (or disprove) that not doing forced ranking was a major driver of these outcomes, but I feel safe in saying that at the least it has done no harm. When you see your company asking how they can improve employee retention, try pointing them to this blog post and let them see what happens when people realize the futility of pitting employees against each other.

I've had a side-project that started because I've been working with dual-role (and one triple-role) Scrum Masters lately. I appreciate how hard it is for them to be good at several things simultaneously. Once I started collecting techniques for them, I figured I should publish it somehow. I was thinking of a blog, but Joshua Kerievsky (our leader at IndustrialLogic ) had mentioned possibly using something like LeanPub. I really need to learn to release a product early and use feedback to guide it to be something that really addresses a market need. I've invested some odd hours here and there on this, and have gotten some friends to look it over. Sadly, most of them who are dual-role SMs haven't had time. Still, here is a chance for me to learn in a lean startup kind of way, releasing early and often, and let the market help me develop the product further. I'm interested in hearing what you think of the cover, and the idea in general. I've not...

Wherever I go, I find people who want to "implement agile" but they want to start with processes and tools. They could develop techniques first, but they want to begin with working at a very large scale and comparing capabilities across teams and maintaining individual accountability and individual review. They want a big program they can plug into their existing system. A lot of organizations want to "go agile" starting with long-range planning, so that they can control the direction and results of the agile teams and track their progress toward n-year goals. They want an agile way to drive their teams in a straight line. Some corporations have layers of hierarchy devoted to contacting customers, usually in the interest of controlling perceptions and getting marketing intelligence. They wouldn't let developers within a mile of anyone who actually uses the software, for fear that they would let the internal culture and personality of the company leak out. O...