Pols Consulting

Chris Stevenson just told me a funny story (for me, not him).

He has recently moved from the UK to work in India. So he told his ISP to turn off his ADSL connection. Unfortunately, they kindly switched off CGI and deleted all his web content (with no backup) too. Bye bye blog.

Luckily (there is a happy end to this story), Google has cached his blog so he can recover the content. Phew. Hope his blog is back soon.

Now, I think I’ll just check my backup script…

Its been a busy couple of weeks for me as experience reports chair of ADC.  We had 31 papers to review.

An interesting point for me, and worth blogging (well, Tim Mackinnon suggested I blog it) for anyone interested in submitting papers to future conferences, is how we decided on the final papers.

We tried to be as agile as we could (difficult as most reviewers live in different time zones). So we:

• Only asked for an initial abstract to whet our appetite.  There is no point wasting people’s energy writing a full paper if they are going to be rejected.
• Interviewed each submission in person, or on the phone so we could ask questions and explore the submission in more detail.
• Paired on the reviews.
• Had a conference call to tell each other what we liked and disliked.

The key aspect for me was using the Identify The Champion pattern for deciding on which papers to accept.This says someone has to advocate the paper for it to be accepted.  To advocate, you have to be willing to shepherd the submission and make it happen.  So when people said “we quite like this one, …“, I would say are you willing to advocate it?  Most times the answer was no.  It really helps focus the reviewers and keeps the quality of the papers hight.

The end result is we have 16 really interesting papers.  Hope to see you at ADC!

I’m particularly fond of this definition of Agile Software from the Menlo Institute.

It really focuses your mind as a developer. How many of us can put our hand on our heart and say we are agile if this was the only definition?

Before you can build a team that rocks, you must first become agile. If you don’t already know what an Agile team is, let me help:

An Agile software development team can add features in any order and can release a working version of the product at any iteration.

There is lots of talk in the Agile community of the parallels with Manufacturing.

Mary Poppendieck (Lean Software Development) points out that development is an exercise in discovery, while production is an exercise in reducing variation, and for this reason a lean approach to development results in practices that are quite different than lean production practices.

That’s not to say that we cannot learn from Manufacturing - certainly the drive to reduce waste (muda as its called in Lean Thinking). reducing batch sizes and focusing on quality are equally applicable to software. I just liked Mary’s overview.

Oh well, back to the book…

This made me smile today.

Commenting on a complaint from a Mr Arthur Purdey about a large gas bill, a spokesman for North West gas said, “We agree it was rather high for the time of year. It’s possible Mr Purdey has been charged for the gas used up during the explosion that destroyed his house.”
(The Daily Telegraph)

http://www.youngscot.org/lab/index.asp?id=5773&SR=374