Monday, March 19, 2007

Make the study interesting by using test driven approach

I was helping my daughter with the goal of making the social study subject interesting. Initially she was torturing herself by reading a page passively trying to get through the chapter. I was thinking that timing of this material isn’t right for an eleven year old person. We all get interested in these subjects later in life when we are busy working and there is no time for literature, social study and other great things.
To achieve our goal (learning the topic by injecting interest) – my daughter and I decided to use the test driven approach. Without reading any of the chapters we tried to answer the questions first. It was kind of like a guessing game which you do your best to come up with the answers. Now that acceptance criteria were defined early in the game and our brains were sensitized to those questions, we started reading the chapter. Every time we hit the line containing an answer – we look at each other, if we’ve gotten it correctly we smile, nod and hi five, otherwise we learn and that learning sticks.
This is a fear reducing method that can help your child [team] overcome something that is perceived as boring or scary.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Helping people determine if they work for an asshole.

This is the test of ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam ) scores based on Bob Sutton’s book, The No Asshole Rule . Clearly, I am not a fan of profanity and forgive me for using this word here; however "asshole" is the only word that delivers the proper message in some situations.

How do you improve the productivity of meetings for software developers?

Bring a mobile projector to meetings. Many people may raise their eyebrows by saying it is expensive but if you use a projector in your working session you’ll see the difference. These days I say that every team should have one projector handy.
Why is this important? If you have a working meeting and need to share and see different things, it is far better to show everyone the same thing on a big screen. If you print screens on paper people will drift off and meeting can’t follow its course. The feedback loop increases once everyone is on the same page and usually your meetings are very focused and productive.
This is not as expensive as most people think. One of my friends said the price for a mobile projector is in the range of 1000 to - $2000. People are expensive; it doesn't take much to recover that kind of cost.
Sharing ideas over a big projector screen is a wise investment and cost reduction act.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Measurment Rules

"Isn't it about time we quit measuring professional success in one dimension, vertically, and start considering how much your actual work matches your desired work?"

1: A useful measurement should help you to understand and make decisions.
2: The cost of gathering metric shouldn’t exceed the benefit it provides.
3: The aim of metric shouldn’t threaten the safety of employees.
4: People who measure shouldn’t design it to nudge the numbers to make themselves look better.
5: Management shouldn’t have a preconceived outcome in mind and are open to whatever the data tells.
6: It is about learning
7: Use “Just enough” measurement to understand the system
8: Don’t measure individuals
9: Create Safety – Before collecting data, talk with the entire team. It’s critical that your team understands that they will not be blamed, ranked, or rated based on the data.
10: Assure your team that you won’t be using the data to evaluate them. You are depending on the team to collect the data, and you want accurate data.
11: Having distorted data is worse than having no data. If your team starts reporting the data in a way designed to make their performance look better, you will be relying on distorted data.
12: See the whole - Increase employee safety by only seeing aggregate data, not the results associated with any one employee. Otherwise you lose trust.
13: Gather Data based on your department goals, anything else is irrelevant.
14: Find the motivation - Ask why five times to get to the root cause of why we need these data in the first place.
15: You don’t have to have fancy automated data collection or an elaborate measurement program to do this.
16: Make sure the collected metric is used in a way to increase customer satisfaction.
17: Check the progress
18: Stop - if there is no reason to keep collecting the data.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

137

Sometime back our team had a lot of fun using number 137 to estimates unknown requirements. We could have used another number like pi but pi was a known number and less likely to believe by the project office.
137 is a mysterious number mentioned by physicists as the value of the fine-structure constant (the actual value is one over one-hundred and thirty seven), which is defined as the charge of the electron (q) squared over the product of Planck's constant (h) times the speed of light (c). This number actually represents the probability that an electron will absorb a photon. Pauli the famous physicist did a lot of research about this number and he died at room 137.
137 is the odds that an electron will absorb a single photon. Protons and electrons are bound by interactions with photons. So when you get 137 protons, you get 137 photons, and you get a 100% chance of absorption.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Two biggest mistakes

1. Not giving your team authority and enough space
2. Not managing peer relationships effectively