Meetings

Some folks are going to eight hours of meeting a day. Many of them have meetings to prepare for meetings. If you are serious about solving this problem and interested in getting things done you need to ask some serious questions:

- Why am I here?
- Why there are too many people in the room?
- Why is there a default length?

Perhaps this meeting-meter which calculate the cost of a meeting can give a guilt zone for those folks.

Power tools

I've been working with couple of interesting (great) tools recently. These tools are for those with an attitude and willingness to play around until get it right. “do it right the first time” addicts are doomed!

1) Visualization tool ManyEyes
2) Pentaho – NP and I were paring and quickly we felt that the ETL piece can save you time, money and reveal interesting insights about your data. I would recommend this to any friend who wants to extract, load or want to build a data warehouse application.

Visual view of Obama's stimulus plan

I am a big fan of creating information visualization problems in purposeful,understandable, and beautiful ways. While creating some of our own reports this way, Charly mentioned that there is a nice treemap visualization on A breakdown of Obama's stimulus plan. The treemap boxes are proportional to the size of the proposed cost of each program.



The ones in this posting were created with IBM’s free Many Eyes tool. It is a very simple tool to create many types of information visualization. It gives you opportunity to look at things differently and uncover hidden aspects of data with one glance.

Why "As a" in User story template is important

It gets interesting if two different persona (different users) find a given feature of software contradictory. I was thinking about one today, where we worked with one group and same story could cause whole bunch of unintended activities for other groups.

In software development process people write stories in the similar manner that a filmmaker make a blueprint of a movie by constructing story board.

Each feature is captured as a "story", which defines the scope of the feature along with its acceptance criteria. The narrative should include a role, a feature and a benefit.

The template of user story: "As a [role] I want [feature] so that [benefit]" has a number of advantages. By specifying the phrase "As a" within the narrative, you know who to talk to about the feature and also reminds you of a role or persona. Someone who can benefit by using the system (until then the system just costs). By specifying the benefit, you cause the story writer to consider why they want a feature. If you can't actually spell out the benefit, then something is missing.

Having done the homework and describe the same story from different point of views can save time and re-work. It seems like a good habit to write the same feature from different group's perspective.

Here is a an Aesop fable (great for telling your kids at night time) showing two different persona (Fox and Crow) having different goals in a situation.

The Fox and the Crow

A fox was walking through the forest when he saw a crow sitting on a tree branch with a fine piece of cheese in her beak. The fox wanted the cheese and decided he would be clever enough to outwit the bird.

"What a noble and gracious bird I see in the tree!" proclaimed the fox, "What exquisite beauty! What fair plumage! If her voice is as lovely as her beauty, she would no doubt be the jewel of all birds."

The crow was so flattered by all this talk that she opened her beak and gave a cry to show the fox her voice.

"Caw! Caw!" she cried, as the cheese dropped to the ground for the fox to grab.

Flip The Bozo Bit

The Term comes from Jim McCarthy’s book Dynamics of software development: Don’t flip the Bozo bits and more rules for delivering great software on time.

Problem. There is an idiot in your organization who drive and wastes everyone’s time.
Context. You are working on a project; one person makes unreasonable demands and pushes the wrong things all the times. One who never contributes anything remotely intelligent.
Forces:
* The work needs to get done.
* You can't fire the guy.

Anti pattern (possibly a wrong solution): Set the guy’s "Bozo bit" to TRUE. This means that, in your mind, everything he says and does can be safely ignored.

In some situations this technique can be used to filter out noise from your life. However ignoring the root cause for too long can lead to disaster.

How many of these guys do you have around?

Real-state market

When real-state price is falling many investors/buyers tend to wait until it falls further. This hurts the economy. As a result the market falls further because some people need to sell at lower price.
Why not, create a new deal that you sell at today's price but contract with the buyer that in a year or two if the house price index has fallen by a certain percentage (you keep that in an escrow but collect interest) then you refund that % to the buyer. There is no point in waiting. The market moves in a self organized way (not by government intervention) and the market stops falling and you may not have to refund anything. This could be a new type of contract which creates possibility of win-win situation.

Why open source software works?

Open source developers, scratching their own itches. They don’t suffer from phony deadlines and decisions others make for them. They are the first class customer for what they produce and the problem "let’s check with users and where the requirement …is" simply doesn’t exist.

Creative pause

I am a big fan of pausing after a quick episode of getting something done. It is a good habit – you pause and interrupt the current path (if it isn’t a happy path), thus formulating thoughts about the situations that has not previously emerged in your thinking.

What if you can’t go back into the flow after a pause? Then your brain needs a nap. We are the only mammals who have consolidated our sleeping pattern into a long nightly period. My dogs are far more advanced when it comes to productivity as they follow these principles:

1. They take a nap whenever they want

2. Don’t care who is rambling, if they don’t understand – a quick nap get them back to where they can understand the rest

3. They are honest and not in the business of consolidating things

4. Have guts to admit they are mammals

5. They follow the open space principles – wherever is possible, take a nap

6. They do what they mean

7. They make me jealous

Google has a place to nap. I am wondering as to how best we can have a napping place at work. If you need a full handy tips for learning when you’re most likely benefit from a nap, read the wonderful article of Boston guide How to nap.

Slack

There is a great lesson in watching the faces of Olympic athletes just before they start a race. Bolt the fastest man on earth has a calm and peaceful and playful confidence. Swimmer Michael Phelps has a quiet and intent look and is always connected to his iPod (great unintentional advertisement for iPod).















When facing the project – minimize noise, long meetings, leaks and ask yourself what could I do about this thing to make it doable and great.

Visual thinking

"When it comes time to discover, develop, or share an idea, nothing is more powerful than a simple picture drawn live in front of--and ideally with the participation of-- our audience.

Aside from the cognitive and neurological science behind my statement, the fact is that when an audience sees an elaborate and polished presentation, they instinctively believe it is done and have a very hard time adding anything constructive to it. On the other hand, when they see the picture coming together in front of their eyes, regardless of how simple or ugly it may be, they emotionally respond and participate. "
- Dan Roam - the author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

Here you simply watch the video below where Dr. de Bono, presents his six thinking hat ideas to the audience with the drawing in the back of the napkin style (an effective way). I have used the six thinking hats in the planning games for software to cover all the aspects. This video has the sticky factor for me and I can’t imagine getting the same effect through a power point presentation (unless it is a cartoon).



You might consider presenting your ideas on the plain paper next time you are posed to present something for your next project. For sure it won't be boring.

Cutting in the bad time

Cutting is typically Recession obsession-preoccupation. It may well be necessary, but smart leaders can always increase profit by promoting great and creative bunch, people like you who read stuff like this. The cutting mentality is deadly – most everyone goes into a demoralizing shell when "cutting" becomes the smell of the place.

Virtualization is green

Jon made an interesting comment while we were talking about virtualization of servers. Beside other benefits he added: “it is also green”. It is good for our environment since you don’t need many servers, less heat, less parts and it requires less space.

Buy Don't Build

Now that I am working at a Start up, the concept of build vs buy is the top topic of my daily life. Here is the principle that I am following:

• Buy big things (operating systems, compilers, database engines) and build small things.

The main question is? Does a system “Upgrade your users” and not just the product? Does it enhance user’s life?

Reverse Living

I've been too busy changing job and starting things from scratch in the new company. Things like using open source development tools, getting back into creativity mode and working closely with business. I should say that I miss seeing my friends and should have a better plan to meet with them. I also feel younger in a reverse living fashion. As Roger von Oech says:

"Reverse Living":

… The life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, and get it out of the way. Then you live for twenty years in an old age home, and then get kicked out when you’re too young. You get a gold watch and then you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement.

What is your story?

You make a story. You verify your story (if you are a programmer – you write tests to shape up your stories). Then you do work that matches the story. Your decisions are toward accomplishing the story. The story will become true because you're living it.

When it's time to quit?

It is time to quit when you realize you have been saturated and you need to open the space for your friends to move things forward. If you are working on project O then it is keeping you away from doing project N. It is time to quit when you think what you are changing is small and you can create a much bigger change and opportunity for your friends by conquering a new horizon.

Productive times of the day

What is your most productive times of the day? Don't go to meetings or tasks around these times of day. Look at your energy level during the day to find out when you are at the pick. After a week - you are positioned to do something about it.

The Red, Yellow and Green pattern

Using colors can add intelligence and meaning to your work. I found using red, yellow and green pattern in many different situations giving you the control needed to achieve quality. Control is a wonderful feeling when you have been out of control. While busy red indicates that you don’t have time to talk, yellow means strictly business and green shows that you are open for any kind of conversation.

In today world of agile software development, Red is failure, yellow is for code smell and green asserts that you are in control.

Cars use the color pattern indicating oil, gas and other things that are running out. Where else do you see this pattern can be used?

“If you do not design your own life then someone else will do it for you.”

Subtracting = Simple = Better = Beautiful

Fresh from several years of computer programming, 137-year-old Sirius settles in the LA to finish his research on the behavior of computer programmers. But during his research he found most of the code written so far follows the Brownian motion that happens in physics. He was fascinated by a gentleman (Danash) who learns all the computer languages alphabetically…Ada, Basic, C, C++ etc. His research shows that people are always adding stuff and he thinks: “Kids should learn subtraction at school prior to learning addition”. He remembers in his dream while having fever, that a fat hand starts writing really bad code in solo. There is only one hand coding and the other one is missing. The hand then opens his mouth and starts drinking coffee and throw up almost instantaneously on the code. This goes on for the entire development cycle.

Over time, his disgust towards bad-code forces him into near-insanity, and finally Danash introduces him to a group of people who actually care about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. He anxiously study and searches for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.

Their code was like a garden with a few things carefully selected and placed, simple, beautiful. Sirius realized that they also eat in smaller plates, pass the keyboard frequently to each other, laugh frequently, test like there is no tomorrow, and build their software 20 times a day. That was a turning point for Sirius’s research. There were no bad dreams and there were always 4 set of hands involved in any coding episode.

I should take my medicine, before this writing gets totally out of hand.

Video Specification

YouTube is a great way of learning almost anything. Why not create a similar tool for your company to deliver visual requirements to remote teams besides sending a textual specification.
Those who are remote then have a chance to watch a three minute video and get an idea as to what the topic is. However, if people who are making a 300 page of boring specification are the same who will make these videos then forget it.