Saturday, June 27, 2009

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

One day in Kanban land

A great way to describe a Kanban software process. I'm not sure why there is a person who only does deploy, but it's still a good story.


Video of a talk by Kent Beck (>71 min). I particularly liked this gem "Design = Beneficially Relating Elements". He analyzed data from Gump and found that there is a power law distribution for length of builds and time of runs for failing tests. He says this distribution is it lots of places (e.g. number of incoming calls into an object and size of methods). He thinks it's interesting, but doesn't know what it means other than some of our metrics wisdom must be rethought. I agree.


Starts off with his most negative people series Greg the secretive, Jon the incompetent, Gary the not invented here, and Roger the refactorer. This is followed by good advice summarized here (the details are worth reading):

1. It pays to share everything you know.
2. Give people credit, even if they don't deserve it.
3. Don't play any blame games.
4. When the code is good enough, stop working on it.
5. Work hard.
6. Lighten up.
7. Take time for yourself and your family.
8. Keep studying.
9. Keep regular hours.
10. Don't fool with fools who'll turn away.


Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained [Lifehacker Top 10]

Good ideas to try.

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