persillie's blog

Just stumbled across this interesting blog entry. Originally coming from Kathy Sierra’s twitter stream.

What the excellent summary of the video is missing:

• accept every offer or in other words, choose between a dead end or a possibility
• make the partner look good

This is not only true for innovation, but also for motivation.

Interesting article for further reading: http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/42156

Richard Sennett’s books The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998) and Respect: the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (2003).

Ten tips for businesses in down markets. But at lot of them make sense any time

http://web2.sys-con.com/node/714787

First let’ s start with a disclaimer. What follows is mostly for my personal further reference. Because I think it is something that improves the daily life of software developers, I think it’s worth sharing it.

Why do retrospectives? Because we want to improve the process of developing in the current project. Therefore it is important to gain some feedback of the current process. Retrospectives should be done after every iteration and at the end of the projects. And the goal of a retrospective are some actual TODOs.

Every Retrospective consists of five parts:

1. Set the Stage (5 - 10′): Introduction, defining the goal
2. Gather Data (30 - 40′): this is the base of everything what follows. There are some rules:
   • don’t interpret
   • be personal
   • don’t judge

   Some methods: Timeline, Mad Sad Glad etc.

3. Generate Insights (30′): what was good, what should change. The important thing here is to find the real reasons and not stay with the symptons.
   Some Methods: Five Whys, etc.
4. Decide what to do (15′): Here so called experiments are defined. Normally there are only a few, only what you can manage in the next iteration. An experiments consists of:
   • Goal
   • Action
   • Key Figure (something measurable)

   It is important, that you can decide if the experiment was a success or not.

Close Retrospective (10′): That a short retrospective of the retrospective

The time above is for an iteration retrospective, provided that the iteration is about 4 weeks max.

Actually I didn’t think it was possible to break the build on the build server if one is using Teamcity’s Remote Run feature with automated commit. But it is. Of course, it isn’t actually the fault of TeamCity…

That’s what I did. 

The project I am working on still uses CVS. Not the state of the art repository anymore, but that’s how it is. And the special situation is, that I am working remote, meaning we have to go over a VPN connection for CVS access. Also meaning that certain CVS operations done on the whole project sometimes fail due to connection failures. Which was the case when I was trying to create a branch. The CVS operation hanged and I cancelled it. What I didn’t realise was, that some of the files actually were switched to the branched and added there.

So some time later, I started a Remote Run on our build server and everything went fine. Relying on the auto commit, I was pretty astonished, when the next build actually failed. That could not possible be, couldn’t it? But it could - because some of the new files which needed to be committed were added on this crippled branch and never made it on the HEAD. Which of course lead to the fact, that the project couldn’t even compile. Took me a while to find the reason, but alas. 

Later the same day, my coworker experienced something similar, but this time the build failed after a successful Remote Run because a file should have been deleted but couldn’t because in the meantime somebody else made some changes on this to be deleted file. And because the file locally was deleted, the update executed before the Remote Run didn’t lead to a local conflict, but prevented IDEA from checking in. (The solution for this problem actually was to re-add the locally deleted file, get the clean copy of it and delete it again).

Conclusion: Even good tools don’t prevent you from breaking the build. Pity!

That’s the proposal of Alan Cooper for a 5th statement on the agile manifesto. What do you think about it?

I don’t know what you experience when you go into a book store. But if you are like me, you spend quite some money there, in spite of amazon and the like. Today I went into a book store looking for a gift - went out with the gift and to additional books for me.

About the icelandic author I can’t say anything so far - at the moment I am just hooked by Iceland, so I hope I like it. And then I saw the newest book of Gertrud Leutenegger, a swiss author. She has written many books, but is not very well known. I suspect because not much happens in her books. At least at the first glance. And her language is excellent - it is really fascinating reading her. Only to hope that I don’t expect too much from the new book.

By the way I wouldn’t have known Leutenegger either, if it hadn’t been for Monika Schnyder. Besides teaching arabic (egyptian dialect), Monika is writing wonderful poems. And she happens to be a good friend of mine!

was last weekend and guess what? I bought art. Two paintings from Rätia Velten - love them.

White reminds me on northern norway where I spent a year once

And Blue, mmh, not much to say isn’t it?

For further investigation:

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app

Tags: Visualization, software, data,