Sunday, July 29, 2007

Contagious

Seth Godin talks about a study that shows obesity is contagious. “If your best friend gets fat, your chances of gaining weight more than double.”

It is very important to have a tool for enticing you to choose what you learn when you’re hanging out with friends. I often tell my kids “Show me your friends, I tell you who you are”. A fat free blog could act as a tool to stay in touch with your selected friends. There is also RSS tool like google reader to let the flow going.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Value Stream Mapping

You are able to see that your process is taking longer than ever and your gut feel says you need new resources to remedy this situation. If application is running slow you think you need new servers or changing the application itself etc.


The question is what tools do we have to map our gut feel to reality? How do you know all the way from start to finish where the waste (waiting) vs. work reside in the process?

Value Stream Mapping - it simply plots the course of the added value vs. non value added (waste) to distinguish where the areas of attacks are. Mary Poppendieck’s presentation on productivity clearly has a great example of this process. You can also watch her presentation here.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

When in doubt reverse it

Language is a tool to express situations. However our language for expressing the software life cycle is very poor and deficient. We couldn’t find a suitable word between 'Development' and 'Test' and we have been stuck with Analysis->Design->Dev->Test cycle. Reversal is a great tool – doing just that you get TDD or TDDA. Now we are equipped with words like “TestDriven” and “Refactoring” coined by Martin Fowler, but there is much more to be done.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Channel 137 - a TV funnel that worth watching

I have created the Channel137 site to contain intelligent videos. This is a channel for people who miss intelligent contents in regular TV channels, topics like agile methodology, Lean, extreme programming, and interviews with great minds on any subject. You just turn off your TV and watch the shows from your computer or by connecting them to your big screen.

You can also rate the channel and vote on its content.