Pols Consulting

Whoops. Coney & Barrow recommend I use Chrome when I’m using Chrome…

Inspired by Not the Nine O’Clock News. Chris Matts and I thought a “Not the Agile2010″ evening would be a fun thing to do while the official Agile 2010 conference is being run in Florida.

The “Not The Agile 2010″ conference is on the 10th August at 7pm. We’ve got some interesting talks. It’s free, but sign up here so we know who is coming: http://skillsmatter.com/event-details/home/not-the-agile2010-conference/

Hope to see you for a chat and some beer.

These are some of my favourite talks from this year’s TED Global Conference

I loved Matt Ridley’s meme of “Idea’s Having Sex”.  A fabulous talk exploring the importance of collaboration and exchanging ideas – the power of the collective brain.

Lewis Pugh’s incredible Mt. Everest swim to highlight melting glacier ice.  An amazing story.  
I’ve started sending this to people who ask me to help rolling out a standard agile software development process – showing the pitfalls of a standard process.

The most captivating speaker was Elif Shafak, talking about the politics of fiction. Such a wonderful story teller. I’ve ordered a couple of her books as a result!

A mind-blowing bit of technology …

Have you every wondered what the acronym UTC stood for?  I came across this little gem in the Javadocs for Solr today:

In 1970 the Coordinated Universal Time system was devised by an international advisory group of technical experts within the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU felt it was best to designate a single abbreviation for use in all languages in order to minimize confusion. Since unanimous agreement could not be achieved on using either the English word order, CUT, or the French word order, TUC, the acronym UTC was chosen as a compromise.

See, you can have fun reading documentation!

photo © 2009 John M. P. Knox | more info(via: Wylio)

Luke Hohmann is in London and has agreed to come along to XTC on the 17th November to describe and play some of his Innovation Games.

I became hooked on Innovation Games when I read an early draft of Luke’s book. Customers can’t always tell you what they want because sometimes they don’t know themselves, so asking them to rank requirements or write stories might not be the best place to start. I’ve found using Innovation Games really helps with situations like this. Luke has lots of practical ideas for Agile Teams.

Talk starts at 7:30 on the 17th Nov at  Zuhlke Engineering‘s offices  (43 Whitfield Street, London W1T 4HD).

It’s free, but please signup on the XTC website so we get an idea of numbers.

Many thanks to Luke for doing this and Keith Braithwaite for kindly offerring the use of the Zulke offices to run this session (knowing Luke, there will be lots of noisy audience participation so our usual pub venue wouldn’t work too well).

We were so lucky to get Dave Snowden as an XPDay keynote back in 2004.  One of the memorable moments was when he used the metaphor of organising a childrens party to explain the various approches to managing complexity.  It certainly resonated with the audience (based on the conversation in pub afterwards – a wonderful XP day tradition!).

Dave’s now uploaded a version to YouTube… Fantastic stuff. I love the deadpan humour.

I have always been a fan of teams sharing experience and knowledge within a company. It’s a great way to learn new techniques, find our how people have solved similar problems and discover who’s doing cool things in your organisation.

Today I witnessed a session on agile software testing that made be rethink this.

The key problem was that the person had been told to do it – it was not something he volunteered to do. He had no passion about the subject.

He started berating the audience for producing “crap”. Not the best technique for wining people over to your point of view!

It also appeared that he didn’t have much experience in using test driven development techniques (as he had some rather strange viewpoints).

Perhaps this is an indication of the corporate culture?

“Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely is one of the best books I’ve read for a long time. Here he is talking about it at TED.

While on the subject of decision making, Joachim de Posada shares a landmark experiment on delayed gratification — and how it can predict future success. With fascinating video of children trying their hardest not to eat the marshmallow. I must read more about this.

I’m also interested in what’s happening as the worlds of TV and the internet collide. So this one by Peter Hirshberg also caught my attention.

After moving all my source code to GitHub, I wanted to build it on my Bamboo build server – especially now that it lets you run the build agents on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Bamboo does not support git repositories out of the box. I found this Git Repository Plugin by Atlassian’s Don Brown, but it didn’t like the GitHub style repository URL’s when I tried it.

So I wrote my own GitHub repository plugin that is fully integrated with GitHub:

• Adds the option “GitHub” to the list of available repositories when you add or edit a build plan.
• Shows the changes that triggered the build.
• Links the code changes back to the GitHub page containing the commit/diff.
• Trigger the build via a GitHub Service Hook (Fires service hook on each commit)

See the plugin wiki for some screenshots and installation instructions.

Mark has been explaining Solutions Focus to me for a while. It has some really compelling ideas and techniques that Agile people will find useful. So I thought it would be great to get Mark to come along to XTC and explain it himself.

Talk starts at 7:30 on the 13th Jan at The Counting House pub (50 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3PD).  It’s free, but please  signup on the XTC website.

Just to whet your appetite:

The Solutions Focus approach is creating a stir in the fields of psychology and management. Whereas conventional approaches assume stable environments and predicable outcomes, SF is bringing a new, simple and effective flavour to the workplace and the therapy room with a view on ways to make progress while everything changes. Surprisingly, the approach is as effective, if not more so, than conventional methods.

In this session Mark will share his experiences of using SF in many business settings and help us to experience the approach in some quick interactive exercises. We will discuss how SF sits alongside Agile, how the two philosophies reflect each other and how Agile processes like retrospectives might be even more agile with the inclusion of some SF techniques. This will be a session to appeal to both the pragmatist and the philosophical.