Archive for February, 2008

Subtlely

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

There is no subtle way to carry a hula hoop on public transportation.

I got the purple one.

Posted in personal | Comments Off

Things to accept

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

I was reading Reader’s Digest, and noticed a quote attributed to Brendan Fraser:

Everybody has bad hair decades.

I’ve accepted that 2000-2009 is mine.

Other ideas I’ve had to work at accepting in the past include

  • Not everybody is as passionate about work stuff as I am
    • some are more
    • some are less
    • some are passionate about different aspects of work
  • This is ok
  • Sometimes I should slow down because I’m not giving people enough time to learn what I’m doing
  • Sometimes I should not slow down because going fast is a good example to set
  • Sometimes I know which one applies for a given situation
  • No email reply is so urgent that I should send it without review and at least 5 minutes reflection on how the recipients might interpret it.

Posted in work | Comments Off

Requirements Testing

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Well, that takes care of one counter-example. What other exceptions can you think of?

Posted in personal, testing, work | Comments Off

What he said

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Jonathan Kohl is right. Often.

I suspect when he’s not right, he’s wrong. Which is a good thing.

Posted in testing, work | Comments Off

2 process thoughts

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

First thought:

One of the software development teams I work with has been using xp-style iteration planning and velocity measuring, with cards and points and walls and such.

I was standing in front of the wall, talking with one of the coaches, when the following dawned on me:

I can tell a product owner that by investing x points into making legacy code more maintainable, the team could subtract 1 point from the estimate on each of the cards for stories in that code area.

So if there are, or will be, more than x cards of that type, then it might be worth it to invest the time to improve the code.

Second thought:

Corey Ladas posted:

There are no a priori best practices

There are only the practices you are using now.

And practices that are better than the ones you are using now.

I’m always impressed by the simple revelations.

Posted in testing, work | Comments Off