Agile, stop bullshitting me

I wanted to write this for a long time and I must warn you: This is a plain rant.

I have read a lot about agile methods, management, communication and team dynamics and I must say: I rarely find any material that is to considered to be serious. Every week another new method emerges, that is marketed on the basis of a adversative meme, telling us “old method is X is flawed and to be considered evil, just use my method Y and be fine”.All these new inquiries for change of behavior have in common that, in the direct group of followers, a religion like behavior is shown that mainly neglects another thing as bad and the only option is to adopt the method of that group.

What bugs me most is the missing self critique in these new approaches. Does the “Lean Startup Community” blog about the problems and flaws in the Methodology? Does the Kanban Community address the fact that there are several things that lead to a “tayloristic approach” (means discouraging cross-functional methods of work)? Is the Lean community, or any method deriving from it, addressing the fact that there is evidence showing that applying it leads to local optima? has anybody seen that NLP is listed among pseudo scientific methods as “Bach Flowers”? Is the Scrum community discussing the fact that masses of teams are going away from the exact implementation of the method to scrum but(t) and out there are masses of developers who will be more likely to work as cashiers than doing scrum again? My point is: If we as a community address all critique in a way that points out that the person criticizing is wrong or has done anything wrong, we are creating multiple Problems.

Meme Transmission – Adversative: ideas that influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes.

This definition of the Wikipedia reminds me of the “Kanban vs. Scrum” Discussions in so many ways. Don’t got down the Scrum/Kanban road, you will die there. Come here praying at the “Kanban/Scrum” Temple.

Without any cynicism: The spreading of a adversative meme bears the problems that you will mostly convince your own peer-group, mainly people who already believe the stuff you are preaching already. To convince someone who is not in your boat already, there is a much more effective way of transmitting a meme or idea to a group of people.

Meme Transmission: Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.

And in this definition we find the reason why so many agile styles are popularized using methods that resemble the methods of radical religious leaders: It is cheaper to do the marketing this way. If I have hundred people “advertising” that Scrum (for example) is the way to go and you will probably die in your project if you use the waterfall approach this is more effective than taking things apart and explaining (in more than 140 Chars) why that is and while we are on it: Telling the people where the Limits of our own methods are and where they don’t work. Yes, I mean criticizing ourself, limiting the chance that people will adopt the method and henceforth not being in need for certificates, trainings and coaching.

Seriously, when I spot someone spreading a adversative meme I know it is just cheap ass marketing and nothing else. Sorry agile, don’t bullshit me with the notion that you want to “change the world” or “transform the workplace of the 21st century”. For the most people out there agile is a money thing and most of us pretend to be in the business for something else than the money. I don’t know how it is for the others, but give me enough money to settle down and I will stop being a scrum master and develop code for ANY OS project sitting very close to the beaches of Thailand.

What do I want to say:

If you want to change the world, don’t use adversative memes. Neither Christian Religion nor Racism/Fascism had a sustainable success with this. At least did both not have the pleasant outcomes that we want to have at our workplaces
I want you to criticize your own method like none else does, or I wont believe a thing you are promoting. You know you method best, so be the f*** honest with me

p.s. pardon my french, but I am really anoyed and I hope you can spot the irony/black humor. If not, there is always the comments to create better google search results for this page by adding a little slander

Please, no more care-bear Retrospectives

I was stumbling over an article that presented a way to hold a part of a special kind of retrospective:

The purpose of this retrospective is to get only positive cards!

The Basic Idea is to find a positive thing about the things that went bad during a sprint, and this in the phase where we try to gather data.

• Ask each team member to write cards with things that happened good during the sprint and things that went bad.
• For each negative card, ask people to find a positive thing about it, and make it a new card
• Ask people to present only positive cards!

I feel alarmed and troubled when I hear this. This results out of my need of being authentic to people and let them have an autonomous decision on how they feel something went in a sprint/life/job whatever. As a result of this I expect openness and total/brutal honesty when it comes to naming the facts from the teams that enter a room for a retro with me.

I mean this is a pattern we see in parental-ship (Oh little doggy pet died! don’t cry, he is in doggy heaven now) and even in modern communication methods where the hard facts of a “Story” (for example the Drone-war in Afghanistan/Pakistan) are understated to a level of degree that we don’t get the real situation anymore (this is called Meiosis). In full effect I would go as fas as calling it a variant of Orwell’s “Newspeak”. Quote from 1984:

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

We are neither a nation of suppressed people nor little children. There are so many natural safeguards and barriers that people have to overcome when they have to speak up in a retro that I do not want to risk this willingness by not allowing a certain way to take part in a this event.

Let’s see what Esther Derby has to say about the purpose of this 2nd phase:

• create a shared pool of data
• ground the retrospective on facts, not opinion
• consider the objective experience

I find this already very hard to achieve and must admit I find the goals a little hard: Especially the facts, not opinion part. I don’t go for it in every retrospective, especially not the Phase 2 . Why? The separation of observations and so called facts is a very hard thing. I tend to do a mad/sad/glad after the team put some observations to the wall, most times in form of a timeline. What happened when, free from judgements and so called facts. These facts are most times hard to dissect from opinion. Mad/Sad/Glad is based on Feelings aka can be pure opinion as well.

This shared thought thing contains the danger that only popular opinions will be accepted. This is not what I want from a retro. I want disagreement, discussion and a group of people trying to work out one or two ideas on how things can be done better the next sprint.

It’s just my opinion that care-bearing won’t help. True, honest communication will. This is hard to do, we are constantly getting fed other types of communication, far from honest, most times not true.

My retrospective, my rules. So in case you are trapped in any of those events with me and think of something as negative, please say so, any moment with your words whatever they are.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve. Karl Popper

Service Design Thinking, I haz problemz with you

Lately, I have been reading up a lot of stuff on the design thinking movement, style of work and community. All this seems to be a big pool of old and new ideas combined, in order to find the perfect product for the customer. The most important books are “This is Service Design Thinking” and “Change by Design”; the first to be written by a group of industry experts, the later written by Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO – A big international design company). Let me be clear: I love most of the ideas in Service Design Thinking: Multilateral thinking, cross-functional teams up to “transdisciplinary” work, agile fitting in quite well and a lot of solutions to problems I encounter in daily work.

The Problem

However I have observed a issue that heavily disturbs me and that I never sawit discussed in the service design community meetups where I showed up: Ethics.

Two examples to make my point clear:

“Change by Design”

The Book describes a project for the american TSA in order to optimize the (post 9/11?) changes to processes on airports. People, aware of the changes in procedure at american airports, warn regularly about the very open attacks on civil liberties that were introduced with these new procedures. (Damage to health from untested scanners and sexual harassment of kids being 2 of them). Another one was a project for the “Bank of America” in order to create a new product for people to make personal bank accounts more modern. Personally, I would never work for any of these customers:

• TSA: Airport Security ever was (and maybe ever will be) security theater at best. Just Google the stuff and maybe don’t read state sponsored research on that subject. After you did this Google “Project Censored TSA” and be amazed on how the USA has privatized sovereign efforts to TSA and this company is used, in a very similar way military contractors by Companies like Xi, to outsource and undermine basic freedoms of citizens.
• Bank Of America: Just Google “Bank of America Scandal YEAR”. Dear IDEO’s you could have known this before. Where is the research on your customers?

Yes, “Change by Design” has a part on more philanthropic projects in later chapters of the Book, but it’s to late there. I think this is covering up for the more dark aspects of the earlier jobs. Yes, it helps clearing the conscience of the companies and people working there but it is to late by then. You can not make up with a philanthropic project for the damage done in another project.

“This is Service Design Thinking”

In the Chapter “Operations Management – The Quest for Efficiency” the Author Kate Blackmon uses McDonalds as a good example of the combination of elements from “Taylorism” (work analysis and job specification) and “Fordism” (standardization of the inputs and outputs). This was where I went OMGWTFNERDRAGE. Yes, McDonalds might be a heavily optimized workplace, but ask a Burger-flipper of your choice how much he loves that job, a animal rights group of your choice about the conditions the animals live in which land on your dish (ask chicken if you got a good stomach), ask people who know about healthy food ingredients on McDonalds meals and I could go on. I should be thanking for this Example, there is no better explanation for the bad Side-effects if you apply the thinking of Taylor and Ford without additional ethical safeguard. I don’t oppose standardization and job specification at all, but I must insist that you, dear reader, think about a moment what happens when these principles are used without any consideration for the human being part of the whole process. I mjst be addin that we seem to live in th “Post Fordist” age, and hereby the reference to Taylor and Ford seems to be a bit outdated. It’s not the 80ies anymore.

Why so angry?

The lack of critical thinking towards the own behavior was very evident to me when I visited some “Service Design Thinking” events in 2012 and this impression hasn’t got any better through the two books I had read. There is so much communication about sustainability et al. on these events that I feel like listening to the person leading the department for “Corporate Social Responsibility” of a Blue Chip company – I simply feel lied to.

• Someone explaining me why he created this new Headphone and I am thinking: Why the F**K would the world really need a new headphone? Aren’t there a Quadrillion models out there?
• Someone explaining the “Design Challenge” they had at the University, about to create a future sustainable car .. DAFUQ … NO car is the car of the future, with a simple equitation the damn challenge can be solved, if like 80% of the world would have access to own cars the world would be sucked dry of raw materials relatively fast. Let alone whatever kind of fuel is needed. Have fun inventing the “Flux Compensator” first.
• Designing the “Hair Dryer of the Future” – RAGE … The hair dryer of the future will be a refurbished one with remade electronics, because in 50 or 100 years it will be very hard to get the resources for what we are producing today.

As long as we use Methods that potent like “Service Design Thinking” with Ethics that seem to be void of the learnings of the “Enlightenment” and “Post-Industralization” Phases brought, I fear the danger coming from it. The chance of leaps in product development is is there, that is a result of the amazing way to work, but as long as this movement seems to be avoiding basic Ethics it’s a loaded gun on a child-yard. The lack of critical thinking and the fueling of a pure desire based economy with new products is diminishing the Method of “Service Design Thinking” to a simple Tool to add to blind consumption at best and not to a thing that “Changes the World” like the Design Thinking Community tries to imply whenever it can.

References

• Goals of the Enlightenment
• CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility
• Taylorism
• Post Fordism

Craft I: Create things for the sake of creating

@__edorian rants in his latest Blogentry that re-creating tools in PHP that are out there in other languages already is kind of useless.

He has got a point there. Don’t write half assed re-implementations of Stuff in PHP that is already out there in . I do not agree totally with him. So why write the stuff anyway?

If I may use Richard Sennett’s Book the craftsman and cite the smart man directly:

“In the act of making it work, nothing else matters”

People creating things seem to be hooked up in the process, totally immersed by the task at hand. People speak of being “in the tunnel” or in “flow-state”. This state of mind is scientifically researched and enables the person do extraordinary things, way more accurate and creative than in a normal “get shit done” situation. It’s not so much about the concrete result, it’s about the process of creating the things. This is a good thing: Focussing totally on the small steps required to get something (like for example a SASS compiler implemented in PHP) alive. Make each of these steps as good as you can. I understand this can lead to very bad results, especially if you don’t take moral implications into account, but why not let people invest time and mind in things that matter for them, just to sharpen the blade of skills.

“People who make things usually don’t understand what they are doing”

Sometimes you have to create a thing in order to find out about the small details that make it so cool, hard to create and the implications of the result itself being in existence. Sometimes it is pure curiosity that drives us to create something and find out what we can use it for afterwards.

A Example: The creator of the glue, used on post-its, had to create a glue-fluid that was not adhesive enough to be used in a product. But for the sticky-note, that had to be removable, the thing was just right.

We need to create something and then use it in order to find out what it is and how it can be used.

“There is a distinct loop in between problem finding and problem solving”

This is a very important thing. Learning a craft is done in phases of doing and thinking. One could say you find the classic PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) circle there, but this is way older than this. This Feedback loop, the metaphor Sennett uses “”in between hand and mind”", is there as long as humanity started to create stuff like the first stone wedges. First you find a problem, you try to solve it, then you look at the result and discover a new problem from it. The new “problem” might be an improvement to the solution you came up with or a new challenge resulting from your creation. Or even an absolute new solution.

2 Years ago I would have commented the post with a FULLACK. Today I am opposing this kind of behavior because it suggests that everything that is out there is already perfect and done. It isn’t and I am happy about everyone to tackle a problem from a new angle. In the End PHPFI was the same thing: We already had Perl and Perl had most of the things (and much more) when PHPFI started. Nowadays the situation is a bit different.

Bootstrap your Express Project – A agile toolbox

When starting with a new node/express project there is a variety of tools available that help your development effort. I have started a new project and want to write down my recommendations for the tools to use.

TL;TR; You can clone a github repo here and start right away.And see the build status on travis

 NPM and package.json

Since you will have to manage dependencies in your node project, i advise you to start up with a package.json. This file contains the node modules you are using in your application. You might wanna exclude node_modules via the .gitignore file to avoid external node modules beeing checkied into git. You should now have a basic package.json file and a .gitignore file. Both need to be pushed to master right now.

A Blog Post about NPM and package.json

Express.js

After you installed express.js via npm and your package JSON  you simply generate a Application Skeleton via the express command line tool. Now you have the skeleton application and push this to git. You might wanna add jade to your dependencies.

Express.js starter tutorial

Grunt.js

Grunt helps you with linting your javascript files and orchestrate your general build. A grunt.js file in your projects root contains all the information that it needs to validate your project. To integrate it with npm aka npm test you can add a scripts.test property to your package json. Note that the npm grunt package is listed under the devDependencies property.

grunt.js docs

Mocha

Mocha is a nice Unit Test framework. You want to use it for your TDD efforts. You can integrate this nicely into your grunt.js file to combine linting of js files and unit tests. Mocha and its commandos need a little tuning in the grunt.js template in order to make it stop complaining about unknown globals

Mocha docs

Supertest

You mioght wanna test HTTP calls to your apps in a isolated way to check if not only your library code is working but your Webserver anwers with the right HTTP status codes etc.

Supertest Github repo

Travis CI

In order to let all your tests run as soon as you have pushed to your git you might wanna setup a travis ci build. Just connect travis to your repo and add .travis.yml file.

This is a superfast development chain that will help you to get superfast at implementing features into your app. The Setup time of ca. 20 Minutes will help a lot of time.

Travis setup docs for node.

You can clone a github repo here and start right away.

Check-In Activity for Agile Retrospectives

Reblogged from pete roessler:

Fortunately retrospectives are already a standard at our company now. Not only our developers teams, but also our sales team, our team assistents and as of late also our management (surprisingly, the last.. :)) have regular retrospectives. Because it has become standard to have retrospectives there is also the chance of falling into a dull routine, both for the team members and the facilitator (mostly myself).

Read more… 245 more words

Awesome Pete on advanced Retro activities. full ack

The last waltz

I have been silent for a time about the waltz project, there was a lot of activity, traveling, workshops and reading. Long story short: The waltz project was a blast that made me travel 5800 km through germany, train about 70 developers and to meet/make old and new friends. Epic win.

What happened

After the first posting about the project and the brainstorming at the Play4Agile Open Space a number of people got in touch with me and offered some opportunities to work with them/for them. The main focus here was on requests for trainings and coaching and a variety of small assignments that were on- and offsite. It looks like there are two kinds of people in the world: The first and larger group seems to have absolutely no problem with the offer of having a person working just for food, traveling and accommodation and those people were very helpful by providing ideas and offerings where I could travel and work. Another group seems not to understand why someone serious ever would do work for free that could be sold for a good price. This later group was very hard to convince that my offering was serious and candid. It seems that not everyone in the world seems to be positive about the free and open source approach of the waltz project. In some way the market economy left it’s tracks in our minds and view on the world. I do not blame anyone for not buying into that idea, too much of information we get from the media and the society around gives us a narrative that suggests that everything must have a price and this price is directly connected to the quality of the result. Sorry, I do not believe in this.

Workshops

Three companies offered me the opportunity to hold workshops for their developers: Jimdo GmbH, Chip Online GmbH (my former employer) and Mayflower Munich+Würzburg (former employer). As it turns out, all of the liked the idea of the “Pair Programming Workshop” based on the Book “Pair Programming Illuminated” by Laurie Williams. Initially I had created a two day workshop and later, on request by Mayflower’s Albrecht Günther (My Ex Boss from 2005/2006) a modified one day version was created. I was very cautious not to stifle the flow of the two day version. With the help of a blog posting by Tobias Mayer and the experience of the initial 4*2 day workshops I got confident to give it a try. It worked quite well and now I am convinced that both versions make sense. The one day version is more focussed on the pure technique of pair programming. The 2 day version contains more elements of team building and social elements. Every workshop was very unique, depending on company culture and attending developers with a lot of laughs and goosebumps moments. It was a lot of fun to separate the money reward (mostly be not charging any or a minimal fee of max 20 Euro/hour) from the thing that in my opinion is the main reward: Change people for the better without manipulation over a series of interactions, activities and communication. It was very valuable for me as a trainer to create and hold this workshop in different versions. The devil is in the details and so the repetitions of the same workshop made sense to get some things straight. I got better, this is what the feedback of the workshop attendees told me and it seems that the contents of the workshop sticks in peoples mind and one or the other adopted pairing for their daily work. All the companies where pretty aware of my situation (you don’t earn much income without a paid job) and everyone tried it’s best to help me. May it be by providing extra cozy hotel rooms with a class I could/would never have paid for (Jimdo), the right to use an iPad for some time (Mayflower) or the offer to pay me a little price via a so called mini-job (Chip Online). Thank you all. I am stunned what the result of all this was and it will take some time to digest all the little tidbits that made all this good. With some companies lined requesting the pairing workshop or another one there would be the possibility to create a business out of it.

Books

I spent a lot of time reading books of all sorts. Since my financial resources were very limited I seriously had to cut my media spending (surprisingly ca. 5-10% of my normal income) which resulted in: no movies, no tav series, no new Beatport tracks, not much party admission fees and all that stuff. Turned out I am not missing a lot of the good stuff. I was not aware that I spent so much money on all this stuff. To keep me entertained and educated I resorted to ebooks and books. Stuff I read over the last 3 months in no particular order:

• Accelerando – C.Stross (The narrative for the waltz project)
• Iron Sunrise – C.Stross
• All Tomorrows Parties – W.Gibson
• The Craftsman – R.Sennet
• Change by Design – Tim Brown
• Pair Programming Illuminated
• Soloalbum – Stuckrad Barre
• jPod – D.Coupland
• The Antifeminists – Dohm Hedwig
• Judas Unchained – Peter F. Hamilton
• Pandoras Star – Peter F. Hamilton
• Common Wealth – Antonio Negri, Thomas Atzert and Andreas Wirthensohn
• Anarchosynicalism – R.Rocker

The good

Sennett’s Book about craftsmanship was a outstanding read, it was the best book in years and had a great influence on me. Although it is not an IT book, it has a lot of ideas how to improve a craft. A big mover and definitely a recommendation for everyone involved in a creative Endeavor.

The bad

Judas Unchained and Pandoras Star, both of them I had mistaken for the Accelerando Books, were kind of shopping accidents. It took me a while to grasp the story and I had to dig through thousands of pages until the story came to a climax. It is okayish sci-fi, but not more.

The ugly

Sorry, but “Change by Design” was a lot of self advertisement of IDEO and it’s methods, very unstructured, with little practical advice. In my opinion it is not doing the “Service De sign Thinking” community a favor and I hope there are better books out on Amazon. Sorry Tim Brown, Sorry Ideo this Book is by far overrated. Waste of time. Lucky me I could borrow the book and someone else had payed for it.

Coding

Several people approached me to get help with little coding tasks over the time of the waltz project. From javascript performance debugging for IE to little help with PHP Performance tweaks. It was fun to get a little challenge here and there. Sadly these assignments never got me away from home and all of them were very short time jobs. It was nice to dive into code from other people and fix things here and help developers there.

Jimdo

Over the time of the waltz I had to decide what to do with my work-life since from middle of february I was practically unemployed and I did not save up or plan for a sabbatical. It turns out that most of the companies that gave me waltz job assignments were potential candidates to ask for a position. It is a hell of a difference to a normal “job interview” to really do work with the people in a company. It was very nice to see that especially the teams in the workshops shared a lot of values and ideas. In case of Jimdo there was a very clear indication that there was a little more. Coming into a place and going like “Yeah, I want to work here” is a thing that is not happening very often to me. Long story short again, they asked if I wanted to work for them, I asked for a test work day, we signed a contract. Now, 4 to 6 weeks later, I am sitting here in the Jimdo Hamburg office, typing this blogpost on my new work laptop, moved all my life from munich to hamburg, experiencing a first day at work. A good finale in my opinion. Some doors had to close (sadly) in order to open me this new door (happy me). I don’t really know what will happen next, still there is stuff I have to sort out. But for now … Bye Bye Munich – Hello Hamburg. Let’s see whats next.

Wohnung in Hamburg gesucht

Da ich beruflich wohl bald in den Norden wechseln werde, suchen wir 3 Kerle (2 Kater und ich) noch eine passende Unterkunft.

Im Hamburger Stadtbereich (vorzugsweise im Westen), bin ich auf der Suche nach einer Wohnung mit 2.5 bis 3 Zimmern. Ein Balkon wäre großartig ansonsten habe ich nicht so viele Anforderungen.

Ein paar Facts:

• Wenn es aussenrum grün ist finden wir das nicht schlimm
• Eine Küche haben wir zur Not
• Wir haben manchmal Gäste aber aus dem Partyalter sind wir raus
• Wir würden gerne im ersten Versuch am richtigen Fleck landen
• Mieten ohne Makler finden wir toll
• Es ist eilig. Am 01.06 soll es in Hamburg losgehen
• Da wir alt und seriös sind wird in einer Festanstellung gearbeitet. Diese hat auch den Umzug getriggert

Ich bin für jeden Hinweis dankbar

Kontaktinformationen

• Mail: sebs {at} 2xs.org
• Xing
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

The seven Lamps of (Software)Architecture

I am still reading “The Craftsman” by Richard Sennet, a book that was given to me by a very smart Product-Designer/UX-Guy/Carpenter because we talked a lot about the merits on the crafty part of software-development and web-architecture. Amazon describes it as:

Why do people work hard, and take pride in what they do? This book, a philosophically-minded enquiry into practical activity of many different kinds past and present, is about what happens when people try to do a good job. It asks us to think about the true meaning of skill in the ‘skills society’ and argues that pure competition is a poor way to achieve quality work. Sennett suggests, instead, that there is a craftsman in every human being, which can sometimes be enormously motivating and inspiring – and can also in other circumstances make individuals obsessive and frustrated.“The Craftsman” shows how history has drawn fault-lines between craftsman and artist, maker and user, technique and expression, practice and theory, and that individuals’ pride in their work, as well as modern society in general, suffers from these historical divisions. But the past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working (using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials) which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilize their talents. We need to recognize this if motivations are to be understood and lives made as fulfilling as possible.

In the Book is a whole chapter about John Ruskin, a art critic in the Victorian era who had interest environmentalism, sustainability, craft and his “7 Lamps of Architecture”. These are a part of an essay that was a (slightly polemic) critic on the architectural style of that time. The “7 Lamps of Architecture” represent a take on the “good deeds” of construction things, in this case architecture for buildings. Long story short, I find these 7 principles apply to the construction of software architectures as well and I want to outline the connection here.

The Pairing Workshop v0.1

The guys at jimdo were the first ones to invite me over for a workshop. We agreed on a training about Pair programming, a practice known from Extreme Programming. Jimdo really is drinking the agile cool aid (Kanban, Visual Management etc.) and the team seemed to be fond of a training on this very specific topic.