Communication

to self - mainly because the talk slides are in pdf, some with unclickable links

Books:

• The wave rider
• The art of powerful questions
• Collaboration explained
• Software for your Head
• The skilled Facilitator
• Fearless Change
• Clean Code

Online

• S.O.L.I.D

more to follow

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

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.

May be something useful for marketing stuff.

Since starting commuting I often hear people sit in the train and making phone calls as if they were in their office. Private office. They banned smoking in the trains some years ago I wonder if there is any initiative to ban cell phones? (I know some times there are some wagons, but somehow I either never see them or there aren’t on my route.

A thought after a meeting I was attending today.

Do you know the situation, where the release date for your software project gets closer, you are already working overtime and actually you don’t really see how you manage. And even better nobody in the team can actually tell what the chances are. You just know that everybody needs to work even harder. And you do it because you don’t want (the project) to fail. And if you succeed you are proud. Even if you say that the next project need to be different.

But it won’t.

When having children that’s one of the first thing you learn (or you suffer): As long as they don’t fail they do not change. As long as you don’t let them experience the consequences of their behaviour, they don’t stop to misbehave. As long as a no is not a no they don’t believe you. And the longer you wait the harder it is to teach it.

As long as we comply with unrealistic planning, work overtime, get the impossible done things won’t change. Not the next time, not ever. In the long shot not releasing on time once can lead to more satisfying projects. If (and only if) the lessons are learned.

Hyperwerk student launched a project in Basel where one can register to the Stadt 2.0 community. You then get a sticker and are visible as a Stadt 2.0 user. On public billboards on can read and post messages. And a ferryman as a living news server.

Good idea, hope that I manage to register. Really interesting how communication evolves with new media and finally comes back into real life.