me.andering – Willem van den Ende

Johannes Link announced his new weblog My Not So Private Tech Life today.

Johannes has already written a book (on unit testing, in German), now he starts publishing in smaller increments . Looks like the blog will be a mixture of working in pragmatic ways and up-and-downsides of actually making stuff , starting with a thread on Ajax programming. (to Dutch people, Ajax remains a soccer team nevertheless).

To work more effectively with a client, I collected the steps I use to make a diagram of effects:

1. Tell a short story to give an overview of the situation.
2. Select the most interesting story (In a multi story workshop)
3. Ask (the storyteller) detailed questions on the selected story
4. Collect variables (observables or measurables) variables and other elements based on the current situation. Interventions come later.
5. Draw arrows between variables. does a variable have a positive or negative impact on an other? Start with the most interesting variables.
6. Simplify. strive for 7 ± 2 variables. Remove all variables that aren’t related to others. Keep only the most interesting variables. If there are still too many, split up the diagram. Try step 10 if there are still too much.
7. Look for loops in the relations. are the loops reinforcing or balancing/stabilizing?
8. Add intervention points
9. Draw a ‘new system’ diagram (in case intervention points are not sufficient)
10. Present the diagram to a group
11. Adjust the diagram based on the feedback (use any of the previous steps as you see fit)
12. Store the diagram so you can easily retrieve it later (digital photos of flipovers, or use a diagramming software).

I did write every day (virtually) since march 8, only not much in public. I made a couple of fieldstones, and I’m busy writing a report for said client – this time using a lot of systems thinking.

A diagram of effects makes it easier to get the writing juices flowing, as well as connecting the dots in clients’ stories and (help them) find holes in my understanding.

Practice writing. Write every day. If you are a top-notch computer scientist, you probably read technical papers nearly every day. You are a writer too, so practice.

From RPG’s writing Broadside, also featured in Patterns of Software – tales from the software community by Richard Gabriel. This book gave me energy, back in the 1990s. Richards’ tale about founding a company helped me stay out of the dot-com craze.

I looked it up, because I remembered he writes a poem every day. Only practice makes perfect. In this book it shows.

Patterns of Software is also available as a free PDF, so why hesitate reading it?

I’m preparing to assist Marc Evers tonight at the Thinking for a Change workshop (description for use at the SPA conference, later this month). Marc and Pascal already made a presentation. That contains this gem by Richard Bach:

“If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That’s all there is to it.”

Hmmm. Simply. Easier said than done. Nevertheless, the only way to end drama, is to end drama. So I agree.

Ron Jeffries writes on Integrating Agile Methods :

“I could go on. I see much commonality among the Agile methods, and I think there would be more were there not so much advantage — or perceived advantage — to having a brand of one’s own. It would also be helpful if a few of us egomaniacs populating the upper tiers of the Agile thought space were able to follow our own dictates and communicate effectively with each other. ”

I believe branding is overrated. Branding makes me think of what cowboys do with cows – mark them with a hot iron to show which farm owns them. I prefer not to see my clients as cows, and I do not believe people want to be owned by a methodology farm either…
Here’s what Merriam Webster said when I searched for branding:

“One entry found for brand.

Main Entry: ²brand
Function: transitive verb
1 : to mark with a brand
2 : to mark with disapproval : STIGMATIZE
3 : to impress indelibly <brand the lesson on his mind>
- brand·er noun”

Dutch also has the word branding. It means washing, as in waves washing the shore… As far as impact of branding for consultants goes – shores have the tendency to move slowly, even here in Holland where shores tend to wash away sometimes.

(I’m deliberately ignoring the communication remark in Ron’s quote. I’m puzzling on that, I hope you are too).

I found this retrospective mug on the website of the German firm it-agile. As the accompanying text says (rough translation):
“the retrospectives mug encourages you to have a mini retrospective during the coffee- or tea-break. The mug poses those nasty little questions we prefer to avoid during our daily work, over and over again:

• Why am I stuck?
• How does it work? Why?
• Does the work I’m doing now bring the project forward?
• Should I inform someone about problems…?”

For a bigger look back, Keith Ray collected links to Pascal van Cauwenberghe‘s things I didn’t learn series.

La vida robot How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship. inspired me. It shows how college kids built an underwater robot with passion, ingenuity, the courage to ask for help and an 800 dollar budget.

What Juergen Ahting writes here is connected:

So the next time a manager tells us e.g. “Yes we should do that, but we haven’t got the right people / enough resources / … to succeed.” we should test him by asking “And what are you going to do about that?”.

In my experience, with a big budget it is hard to get things done. The team is overstaffed, and the incentive to set priorities is low. When I hear someone complaing about lack of budget, I am happy – I see an opportunity to do what matters most.

I’m working with Nynke Fokma on some budgetless websites right now. It’s fun, useful and goes way faster than a fully funded CMS project I was on. We are working from passion instead of a budget.

So, next time a manager tells us “This project is fully funded”, we could test them by asking: “What would you do if you had one tenth of the budget?”

I am reading Weinberg on writing – the fieldstone method. It’s a combination of tales from Jerry Weinberg’s long writing career and hands-on exercises.

I particularly resonated with the tale he tells in the beginning, about how writing classes in school almost killed his desire to write. It almost did that for me too. Working from an outline doesn’t work for me. I usually wrote my essays the night before, when I was angry enough to start writing. Afterwards my MSc thesis almost did it. I find it hard to write where my energy is not.
But apparently, something draws me towards writing of some sort, even though lately it’s been limited to blog entries, e-mails and instant messages.

I said “I’m reading”, in the first paragraph, because I got somewhat stuck on the first exercise, which is deceptively simple…
It is a test to measure the time it takes for you to start writing down a fieldstone.

I’m Sorry, did I break your concentration?

I thought,

how hard could it be. I’m in my office, I’ve got pens, paper, computer.

I failed this test. It took me longer than five seconds to start writing something down. The five second test showed me I had no index cards present, couldn’t find a pen and it took me much more than five seconds to open firefox, navigate to my wiki (there’s a bookmark in thet toolbar but I don’t see it, apparently), and find a suitable page or make a new one.

Clearly I wasn’t ready to start applying this method…

After this test, I’ve changed a couple of things in my environment. I made sure there was a fresh stack of index cards and some pens beside my bed (The title and introduction of this entry originated there). And I finally got around to make the gnome-blog applet on my computers’ desktop functional. I need something I could just post to, and worry about organizing it later. The wiki is great for writing articles-to-be and relating them, as well as for collecting systems-administration stuff I figured out eventually. Finding a new page in the wiki when I have an interesting link or something pops up is sometimes enough to break my concentration;
I noticed I miss a lot of the interesting links and stuff that come up during chat sessions.

I set up a textpattern instance, specially for collecting fieldstones, and the gnome-blog applet posts to it, and the fieldstone appears directly on the front page. That seems to work very well. The Blog button is always only one click away, since it is on the menu bar of my desktop. I don’t have to start a separate application, and it doesn’t take time to load.

I took a first step. Make it easier to collect fieldstones. The next step would be doing something to organize the fieldstones after I’ve added them. I can search them already, which is good. Now I would like to have something to organize and relate them too.

If you have an interest in writing, want to try another style, or find your fun back doing it, I find Weinberg on Writing worth checking out.

Having enjoyed the first one a lot last year, we (Marc Evers, Vera Peeters, Pascal van Cauwenberghe, Nynke Fokma, Rob Westgeest and yours truly) decided to organise another Agile Open.

Agile Open is an unconference aka Peer Conference , where the sessions and programme are made by the pariticipants.

We scouted for another location, but ended up choosing the Elewijt Center in Mechelen again – there is something very comfortable about a well organised conference facility, where people know who you are. As I noticed last friday when we went there for a meeting. Nynke and I arrived a bit late, and before we could ask for directions we were greeted at the desk – “Ah, I was wondering if you were going to turn up today. Vera Is over there in the Lobby, next to the paintings”. I find the “Cheers factor” very important-

you wanna go where people know,

people are all the same-

you wanna go where everybody knows your name

I want a conference to have the Cheers factor (the SPA conference is where I found that first) . If the location has it already, that makes it even better.

So, I hope you wanna go to Agile Open. Space is limited to 40 people, so we can know each others’ names . If so, I’ll see you at April 27 and 28 in Mechelen, Belgium.

I was having a good laugh at the waterfall2006 site, until some stuff
started to integrate. (I had some uneasy feelings initially, but it
needed some time to sink in apparently)

I enjoyed Mary Poppendiecks’ presentation at xp2004 about crossing the chasm a
lot. Mary’s advice was to not position agile against waterfall, but
against chaos. I found that sound advice, but very hard to follow.

I gave Joel Spolsky’s “great software writing” to a friend, and he came
back to me yesterday after having read a group is its’ own worst enemy
by Clay Shirky:

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and
vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone
who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see
this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a
big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation
going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding
from their ears, they would get so mad.

It seems waterfall is to agile as microsoft was to open source…

So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an
enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion.

(second quote also from Clay Shirky )

I recently got an interview at a prospective client because of a
reference from someone on ‘the other side’ that I haven’t even met yet. When
I am getting anti-waterfall feelings, I try to remember the ‘other’
people are also striving to build better software.

Which makes us allies with different points of view, rather than enemies.

I know. I was on the ‘other’ side once. I laughed at the waterfall2006 site, because I recognized some of the mistakes I have made (and I will continue to make interesting mistakes ‘agile’ or otherwise. That’s one of my ways to learn). What about you?