Pols Consulting

Joes Walnes twittered this hilarious link from microsoft claiming that Internet Explorer 8 is the best web browser.  Then I found this even funnier rebuttal from Kilian Valkhof’s. Enjoy.

“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.

A wonderfully clear and easy to understand explanation of the current Credit Crisis by Jonathan Jarvis. Reminiscent of Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam…

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.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7702913.stm

I remember having a rant at the eXtreme Tuesday Club a few years ago, “Who cares about working software, if it’s not what the business need? Delivering Business Value is the most important thing!”

This was triggered from seeing too many agile teams get bogged down in the minutiae of the process.  They did not think about how the business would benefit from what they did or how they could deliver value early.  Delivering “working software” was the only important measure they cared about.  They missed the subtlety of the Agile Manifesto that talked about delivering valuable software:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

I saw several agile projects that delivered software the business did not want.  Chris Matts and I made it our mission to bang on about Business Value back at the Agile Development Conference in 2003.  We published a paper in Cutter in 2004 based on our experience of applying these ideas on our projects.

It’s great that this is starting to get traction in the agile community.  There was even a whole track dedicated to this very subject at Agile 2008.  This has to be a good thing.

On reflection, I think the moniker “Business Value” was a mistake as it confuses the conversation.  People start assigning a “Value” to what they do:

• This project will attract 120 new registrations per month This statement is expressed as an absolute rather than a model. The greatest problem with this statement is that it’s
  impossible to reevaluate the business value if market conditions change. There is no mention of the cost of generating this revenue or the amount of capital investment required to generate the revenue.
• This project is worth $12M
• This project with generate 4 million page hits in the first year.

Several speakers at Agile 2008 talked about business value “Story Points”. Joe Little proposed assigning Business Value points to each item in a backlog.   My experience is that this consumes a vast amount of energy and the business people start making up large values to game the prioritization process (Luke Hohmann has a nice posting on why prioritizing the backlog by ROI like this does not work).

I really enjoy watching the BBC television series Dragon’s Den.  Entrepreneurs pitch for investment in the Den from five Angel Investors (The Dragons!), willing to invest their own money in exchange for equity.  When the Entrepreneurs provide a “Value”, the dragons always probe for the model: “How much does it cost to manufacture?”, “What’s the size of the market?”,  What form of distribution channel are you using?”, “So how did you come to value your business at $8 Million?”, etc.  It’s impossible for the Dragons to make a sensible investment decision from a simple value.

This is why chris and I always say Business Value is a “Model, not a Number”.

Software development is also an investment and, just like the Dragons (although I’m not suggesting our customers are dragons!), the Business need to probe the model to assess the value of the software investment.

Another problem is the model is is a state of flux.  Few businesses exist in a vacuum.  Markets change, assumptions become invalidated and competitors launch disruptive technology.  If you assign a value to a story based on a model, there is a danger that the model’s assumptions have changed by the time you want to implement it.  People take the business value number for granted and rarely question its validity.  I like being less formal, and simply using the model as a litmus test to verify if the next chunk of work makes sense as and when you need it.   

Creating solutions that deliver the maximum business value should be the primary purpose of what every development team does, regardless of their process.  It’s more then just consuming stories or taking for granted that the items in the product backlog make sense.

This post is a bit of a therapeutic release valve. Last night I tried to book some airline tickets.  It took nearly 3 hours; although it felt much longer. How hard should it be?

I started out trying www.kayak.co.uk. It has a refreshingly intuitive user-interface and it searches lots of web sites for the best prices.  Just what I was looking for.

I particularly liked the nifty flight filters you can use to explore how the time of the flight, or the choice of airport impact the price.  Although I did find myself having to scan around the search results page (see above) to hunt down the date of the flights (I didn’t expect to find it in the heading. I guess the annoying advert in between the heading and the search results did not help).

The killer problem with Kayak is that it’s only a travel search engine (a friend described it as all fur coat and no knickers!) You can’t book the flights on Kayak and they have no control over the quality of the data.  It turned out that I couldn’t book any of the flights returned in the search results!

They all pointed to a dreadful site called cheaptickets.com (the name should have triggered some alarm bells!).

When I first clicked the link from Kayak to Cheaptickets.com it spent ages displaying the following:

before it finally gave up and said (at least it said sorry!):

I tried clicking the link again (glutton for punishment).  This time the error message read:

We’re sorry. Due to changes in airline availability, the fare for your selected trip is no longer available.

It presented a list of alternatives that I could select.  At least it’s been helpful!

So I, rather naively, selected one of newly presented alternative options, and waited, … and waited, … and waited some more before it responded with  (yes, you guessed it):

We’re sorry. Due to changes in airline availability, the fare for your selected trip is no longer available.

Not one of the recommend suggestions actually worked!  What kind of web site gives you a collection of impossible to select products?

Aaaahhhhhh.

Next I tried Lufthansa.com – the cheapest option was £1600 per passenger, just to travel within Europe.

I then moved onto Lastminute.com.  I entered the dates and airports all over again and just when everything was looking good, I got this:

Aaaahhhhhh.  I was starting to think “Sod it – I don’t need a vacation!!”

In final desperation I went to expedia.co.uk.  I tend to stay well clear of expedia for multiple destination flights due to the high chance of sustaining a repetitive strain injury from the amount of mouse clicking required to complete the simple task. 

I entered the data and it presented me with the various options for the first flight.  The idea (if you’re feeling charitable) is that you select the first flight, it presents the options for the second flight.  You select the second flight and it presents the options for the third flight.  At this point it tells you that this combination of flights will cost several thousand pound. You gasp, mutter something under your breath, and start all over again; randomly clicking flights and hoping for the best.  With any luck you will be able to remember which ones you have already clicked on.

There is another option.  You can choose “view complete trips” and Expedia will display selected combinations of flights that are ordered by price.  I clicked this.  Some of the options were very close to what we wanted – except that one of the flights left at 6am.  So I adjusted the time of this flight to see what would happen to the price and all the other flights changed too.  Aaaahhhhhh.

Eventually, clicking like a madman, I manged to find a comination of flights at the time we wanted that we could afford.  I thought the internet was supposed to champion the consumer?  All I got was a shonky and painful user experience.  Something I don’t want to repeat in a hurry.

That’s better.  It’s all out of my system now.  Deep breaths… Think nice calm thoughts…

One of my clients was telling me about the problems that they are having with “Aspirational Planning“.  I thought this was an excellent description of the problems lots of organisations have with planning.

Then it slowly dawned on me that he was serious – they really do create “Aspirational Plans”.  They are fully aware they don’t reflect reality (as they take so long to prepare), but the senior management love to spend lots of time and (other people’s energy) creating detailed plans of what may or may not happen one day.

The teams on the ground just roll their eyes when I ask about these plans. I’m going to have my work cut out on this one.