Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Just spotted in a job ad for a lead developer: "You will be expected to implement a rigorous Agile Development process and work with the Technical Architect who will define the technologies and toolsets"

Finally, after several days of thinking, searching for templates, scratching head over the CMS and rewording, my poor, neglected website has been revamped. Or at least Stage 1 is complete, and it is now in a state where I can iterate further changes over the weeks/months/years. It now reflects more accurately what I actually do these days, which is an added bonus!

Ron Jeffries has just blogged about dropping quality in favour of speed. Take a look at Quality-Speed Tradeoff — You’re kidding yourself . Having seen many, many projects fail because of this common fallacy, it is a subject close to my heart (but there goes the draft blog article I was writing....). In summary, there are two choices. Subjective historical addenda are mine based on my experience: Reduce quality to go faster. You might get ahead short term, and you might even get ahead longer term if you don't add too many bugs and if you don't make the code uninhabitable. [But history is really not on your side here.] Increase quality to go faster. There is a chance that you will over-polish and not add important business functionality. [Historically this will not happen. Especially if you make this possibility an integral part of the quality process by holding regular customer product reviews and focus on delivering important business value first.]

It would seem that someone at that fine institution Google had a bit of finger trouble over the weekend. I can't help thinking that some (more?) unit testing might save them a whole world of pain and panic in the future. 'nuff said.

Bletchley Park is an unremarkable, run-down country estate in South East England. Unremarkable, that is, until you realise that it was where a team of boffins , including geniuses like Alan Turing , broke the German Enigma code in WW2. This allowed the Allies to intercept vital information and save countless lives. It is also likely to have significantly shortened the war - maybe by up to two years and 22 million lives. Its place in history is assured by this alone. But even more remarkable, in order to break the code the scientists had to invent from scratch the first ever electronic computer - Colussus . Thanks to the efforts of Max Newman and Tommy Flowers and many, many others we have the computers we have today. Through their efforts, we have the software industry - the productivity tools, the games. We have levels of communication no-one could have dreamed of back then - mobile phones, satellites, GPS. We went to the moon, and are now eyeing up Mars and beyond. We have the abi...

Via Simon Voice : wagile adj a cross between agile and waterfall process. The mess that's left if agile is only partially implemented without cultural change. See also: failure , compromised , doomed

I have just finished doing my own, personal retrospective of 2008 after spending a couple of weeks relaxing and decompressing. Definitely a cathartic experience that has left me re-energised and ready to go in 2009. Highlights: 2008 saw me go into several flawed companies/teams in succession as well as some well adjusted ones. Although I delivered results, they were nowhere near the level that I am used to getting, and the battles to get even those results were long, protracted and draining. Portia Tung wrote about something she called " The Wall ". Well, I found my wall last year and although I managed to scale it, it wasn't elegant. So in 2009 I intend to only work with well behaved clients who genuinely want to change, or have already made the change to agile/lean thinking but need guidance. Life is too short not to. Consulting should not be a battle, it's a co-operation. More of that in a later blog post. But I also need to understand better what my personal ...