NAYIMA
Mar
29

SPA 2006, Cargo Cults, Angry Monkeys and Platypuses

In one word: THINK!

Dave_Thomas

Dave Thomas gave an amusing keynote, with a great, clear visual style that’s all the rage in geekland: little text, large fonts and beautiful images. He also had some nice effects: scrolling code, pages that looked as if they fell over. One sentence seemed reluctant to appear. Dave had to encourage it a bit. I’m not a fan of presentation effects (probably because I’m unable to do them well), but these effects worked. Enough about form, on to substance. Dave talked about “Cargo Cults” and “Angry Monkeys”.

Cargo Cult stands for every situation where we blindly copy something, without understanding it, to get some positive effect that we’ve observed. Angry Monkeys stands for every situation where we blindly do something, without understanding it, to avoid a negative effect that we’ve experienced.

blackdevilduckDave gave several examples of both systemic problems, reflecting his interests and preferences: real object orientation, dynamic typing, agile processes… He could have put up just one slide with, in big friendly letters: “THINK!”. But that wouldn’t have been as much fun.

There is only one practice

What came out of this keynote tied in with what Norm Kerth told us: perform regular retrospectives to improve your team, your practices, your process(es) and your process-changing process.

Hansei. Kaizen.

Evolution at work

platypus

Some of what Dave said resonated with Richard Dawkins‘ writing on evolution:

  • You can’t capture everything in a taxonomy. There are no species; no classes. There are only individuals with sets of genes; objects with state and behaviour. Some of those individuals/objects are so similar that you can lump them together, but you’ll always encounter Duck-billed Platypuses.
  • Evolution is a powerful tool. Luckily for us, we don’t have to wait millenia, we can guide evolution. Sometimes, we even succeed in improving the system, as we learn more. But, in the end, it’s always the world that decides if we are fit enough to pass on our genes.

During the train journey back to London, Duncan Pierce suggested that agile metrics should measure the “fitness criterion” of our process.

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March 29th, 2006 | Category: agile, spa2006, systems thinking
Mar
29

The Ancestor’s Tale

Wednesday afternoon

TheAncestorsTale

This afternoon, I’ll go to the “A good read” session, where a panel discuss a set of books. As you might have noticed, I love to read books. The one I’ve got with me to read on the train, is “The Ancestor’s Tale” by Richard Dawkins. Nothing to do with the day job. I just find evolution to be fascinating. Darwin has really changed the way we see the world, as few people have done.

In the Ancestor’s Tale, Richard goes back in time to find the common ancestors (“concestors”) of different species. For example, the first concestor is the species from which both humans and chimpanzees descend. Then come the gorilla’s, and so on. I’m currently 425 million years from today, where I meet with the ancestor of the Coelacanth and us. The Coelacanth caused a bit of a stir when it was discovered in 1938, because everyone believed that Coelacanths had gone extinct a long, long time ago.

Dawkins makes it clear that there’s no strict, clear boundary between species. It’s all gradual evolution, there are no large discontinuities. “Species” are just arbitrary classifications invented by biologists to indicate that two types of creature are sufficiently different to make the distinction useful. We are not descended from Chimpanzees, but we had the same parents. We are all siblings of Coelacanths, even creationists.

I’m reading the Ancestor’s Tale because I liked “The Selfish Gene“, which argues that the reason for all life is to propagate genes. It’s a great book, the argumentation is very convincing, but I fear the metaphors he uses are prone to misinterpretation. For example, what does it mean for a gene to be selfish? If you look long enough (a few million years or so), it would look as if genes have some sort of will or goal. Of course, it’s all massive, random processes with feedback from selection.

ThreeTales

I read the Selfish Gene after hearing Dawkins in Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s “Three Tales” music video.

Part of Dawkins’ text is:

“We and all other animals
are machines
created by our genes

A monkey is a machine
that preserves genes up trees

A fish is a machine
that preserves genes in the water”

Hmmmm… How’s that for a metaphor that can be misunderstood? Read the book to understand what Dawkins means by “machine”.

How do you decide which books to read? What’s the story behind the last book you read?

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March 29th, 2006 | Category: books, spa2006
Mar
29

SPA 2006, Tuesday and Wednesday

Tuesday

Norm Kerth’s keynote looking back on 5 years of Retrospectives wasn’t surprising if you read the book or performed retrospectives. Many (most?) people in the audience have done or want to do retrospectives. Norm gave a great overview of Retrospectives and the results he and other retrospective facilitators have achieved. Performing retrospectives is good for the health of your team, the results of your project and your career. A simple and effective way to improve your process is the only thing you really need in your process. Everything else you need, will be introduced if and when you need.

An interesting and fun session about Product Managers. In the workshop we looked back at experiences with Product Managers. From these experiences, we determined what a product manager needs to do and what qualities we’re looking for. It is a very difficult job, juggling all those (possibly conflicting) demands.

Clarke Ching just wrote a blog entry about a book on “Agile Product Development”. Maybe worth checking out.

After a nice walk in very windy St Neots, off to Richard Mitchell’s session on modeling with views. Instead of making one big domain model, Richard creates smaller models, specifically for one (type of) domain specialist. He can then combine them in one, consistent model.

We talked a bit more about the theory of constraints and its application in software development. And then it’s time for the traditional last evening diversion. This year we had a wine and cheese tasting. Most people seemed to prefer the wine to last year’s Belgian beer. Apparently, Geuze Lambic is an acquired taste…

Wednesday

First, get some work done: handle registrations for Agile Open. If you want to attend, don’t wait to long to register, because we limit the number of participants to 40.

I’m looking forward to Dave Thomas’ keynote. “Cargo Cults and Angry Monkeys” sounds very interesting.

Read more at http://www.spaconference.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl

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March 29th, 2006 | Category: agile, spa2006, systems thinking, theory of constraints