“Capability is more than just how good the flow of value is. It is also how well the flow and value can be sustained and improved over time. Simply swapping in and out different people to an existing process (flow) with existing requirements (value) will not work. Businesses are social and cognitive systems where people have tacit knowledge, and they share and use that tacit knowledge to deliver the work.”

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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!