Edge of Chaos | Agile Development Blog

Last week at the mini-conference, one of our guys had no time to do a nice visual wrap-up for his presentation and sufficed with showing portraits of authors while just reading the extracts from their works. The topic was lean basics, and he was talking about Deming and Taylor. While everyone seemed to get bored with listening, as there was no nice visual stuff like we’re all used to now, I suddenly caught myself visualizing the talk of the boss and this worker. The story was about the boss who was convincing  the worker to bring 47 tons of iron instead of 12 or something like that.

This got me to thinking that sometimes visualization is doing lip service to us. We’re sitting comfortably, watching TV or watching presentations with nice stylishly UX’ed data, and we are losing the ability to make visualisations with our own brain! The picture is brought to us, so we make no use of the imagination “muscles” and our imagination weakens.

I’m not saying that everyone who watches animated drawings from RSA Animate is doomed. But there always should be a balance between perceiving someone else’s visualizations and creating your own. The power of creative imagination is above everything. No speaker or agile champion, or TV presenter will draw a vision of your business, your product or some function of the software you’re crafting. There’s always a time to look at someone’s visualizations, and time to create your own. Each and every “how-to” about creativity includes this magic word called “vision”. Have you ever thought why any business starts with a vision? It’s exactly for this reason.

There’s a paradox:  on the one hand, visual media is everywhere. Lots of visual channels deliver the dish to any, even the laziest perception. The problems is that the legion of those watching produces too few creators.

We’ve got 1 more day left in the year 2010. It’s time for New Year miracles. So let’s devote this day to our creativity, to cleaning the debris of anything we don’t want or need any more, and let’s visualize a

Our company is quite small (25 people). Most companies of this size focus on rapid growth and don’t pay much attention to learning. We are different. Fortunately, learning is very important in our company. We boost it in all possible ways:

• We highly encourage people to try and learn new things.
• Every employee can dedicate up to 12% of their time to unstructured learning (5 hrs per week).
• We organize internal trainings twice per months.
• We organize so-called Friday Shows every other Friday where we watch and discuss some interesting videos about UX, development, business, etc.

About a month ago we decided to structure our trainings in a better way. The resulting idea was internal mini-conference. Mini-conference is a full-day event dedicated to sessions and discussions. All sessions are prepared internally. The idea is to have a very focused learning event instead of several trainings over 2 months.

Our first conference will take place this Friday. Here is the program

10:00 Registration, “wake-up” coffee
10:15 Data Visualization Alex Tsayun /45 min
11:00 coffee break /15 min.
11:15 Node.js intro Vadim Gaidukevich /30 min
11:45 MongoDB (NoSQL) intro Oleg Seriaga /30min
12:15 coffee break
12:30 Exploring Good Experience Seth Godin (guest video) /20min
13:00 History of Kanban Anton Marchenko /30 min
13:30 lunch
14:30 Performance Metrics Alex Fomin /1h
15:30 coffee break
16:00 Marketing and Sales @ TargetProcess Andrey Mihailenko /1h
17:00 free discussions.

I am really curious about the outcome. Wil people like it? Will we keep this practice? Not sure. But we are trying new things :)

Read first part of the review.

Evaluating Design

There are two important aspects of design process: generative and reductive. We generate a set of alternatives, then we restrict this set based on various criteria. It is impossible to evaluate a solution without its alternatives.

The best way to a good idea is to have lots of ideas — Linus Pauling

I can’t critique just one thing — Richard Sewell

That is one more reason why sketching is so powerful. It helps to generate and evaluate various alternatives. I’ve read in one article that Apple creates a dozen alternative designs for any product. Good enough…

One of the most positive form of criticism is a better idea

Acquiring positive attitude to criticism is a hard change. People don’t like to be criticized in general. You can’t get the correct reaction to criticism out of the box, but should apply every possible effort to make it a part of team’s culture.

People on a design team must be as happy to be wrong as right. If their ideas hold up under strong (but fair) criticism, then great, they can proceed with confidence. If their ideas are rejected with good rationale, then they have learned something. A healthy team is made up of people who have the attitude that it is better to learn something new than to be right

Built to Last

Without appropriate design, yesterday’s success is tomorrow’s failure, since today’s great applications are tomorrow’s legacy systems

Some design decisions live for about 20 years if product is successful. For example, Photoshop has been on the market for 20 years, and some parts of its initial architecture still exist. Can you now imagine how important architectural decisions are? On to entities framework in TargetProcess that was designed 4 years ago. How long will it live? Definitely we did not consider a 20 year time frame back then…

We should assume that technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next 10 years is already 10 years old!

My takeaway lesson is that we should pay more attention to new technologies and think ahead at the same time. This may sound impossible, but it is worth trying.

Learning

Learning is a very important thing. No, I will re-phrase it. Learning is the most important thing in your company. Surprisingly, Bill has given an interesting perspective on learner’s experience levels:

I haven’t seen this concept of levels before, and I like it very much. If we take agile, I am in transition between levels 9 and 10 (I think). In UX, I am between levels 5 and 6. This model is a good guide and may help understand and plan personal or even corporate learning process. Is it possible to apply it to the whole company? Maybe.

Story-telling and Play

A good story is worth thousands of pictures

That one is true. For example, Steve Jobs told 3 stories from his life at Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005. And this speech was remarkable indeed. I remember all the 3 stories, despite the fact that I heard them only once.

Without play imagination dies

and one more:

Stories, and more importantly, story-telling and play, are critical part of design

Ever been on a boring brainstorming session? Fun is an essential part of any creative activity. It should be encouraged, not suppressed.

Design

Finally, some outstanding quotes on design:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well, you have to ‘get it.’ You have to really grok [understand] what it’s all about — Steve Jobs

The last thing that you should do when beginning to design an interactive system is write code

The role of design is to find the best design. The role of usability engineering is to help make that design the best.

If we think about conferences in general, the traditional understanding is: people come together to share their knowledge, to learn, to discuss, to network etc.  Some people expect that if they attend a conference they for sure must learn something totally new, something that will change the way they work or even their lives.  Some people come to see who’s out there, to network and to have some fun. In a nutshell, as many people as many reasons to attend conferences :)

I tend to think that with all the  information we’re consuming, it’s very hard to come up with something totally new to a thinking and knowledgeable audience. If you’re engaged in agile community, and if you’re a thinking person, you thrive in the blogosphere and you practice agile  - it’s hardly that something will be totally new to you (“totally” is the keyword).

Recently we attended Agile Central Europe conference in Krakow. I’d say that my #1 enjoyment about this event was live cross-twittering. Broadcasting Agile CE to the Twittersphere has really been fun. I liked tweets by Andy Brandt, Marc Loeffler (aka scrumphony), Pawel Brodzinski and Robert Dempsey (for the two latter, it’s not only tweets, but their presentations that I enjoyed) .  As opposed to most attendees,  I didn’t very much like the closing show by Gwyn Morfey and Laurie Young. The guys have done a great show, but it was more about dramatic presentation of what’s going on in any dynamic agile team :) I’ve seen a bit of those “paper sword fights” :)

After attending Agile 2009 in Chicago, I’ve really got a little bit skeptical on the conferences overall because what I’ve seen was people talking about simple truths but with such an air as if they were uttering epiphanies. So, when going to Agile CE I wasn’t expecting epiphanies. It was more about going out there with our team, watching people and taking every opportunity to enjoy everything that comes up on the way  (including live jazz night in Krakow).

This approach worked better than huge expectations. Strangely, this small cosy conference has become an unexpected source of inspiration.  In a sense,  that it’s not always you have to come up with an excellent new topic or idea no one else knows about. The main thing about conferences is confidence and freedom to express yourself, share your personal experience and absorb experience of others. Somehow someone will find it useful. There’s no need to be afraid to appear too simple. People will listen and admire  even if this is your first experience as a speaker.

And.. it’s great that there’re many more agile conferences to come :)

There’s so much room for observations and analogies in the evolution of production trends. Analogies are not merely a candy for the brain. They bring along a deeper understanding of phenomena and ultimately are one of the greatest aides to align (or misalign) with mainstream.

If we look back, to the 18-19th century – mass production was a dream. The philosophy was: produce more.  Lavish architecture designs, garments, gardens – everything created by people was about going more massive and taking much space. Standards of innovation have been changing over the centuries  - what’s been innovative and massive, has been becoming obsolete. Minimalism is the new innovative. Is it because humans subconsciously feel they’ve taken too much terrain and sky on this planet for industrial experiments and now are trying to compensate for that by being minimalistic in everything? Or simply finding ways to fit in?

Hardware/software as well as visual designs and interfaces are meekly following the same trend. This just shows how subtly the “new innovative” standards are taking over. We remember huge PCs. Now we’ve got all kinds of minimalistic devices the names of which start with “i“. We remember waterfall. CMMI standards  with their tons of rigid rules, regulations, documented processes. Now we’re  going “lean” and “agile” – the same minimalistic tendency.

People have managed to stuff the overproduced artifacts not only all over the planet but all over themselves. Fatness is the problem. Again, what a shift in standards –  as late as in the beginning or even middle of the 20th century it was considered trendy to be fat. Well, not obese, but hearty fat. Now, we’re all about lean. Off with plump beauties. Straighten up now, lean is the philosophy of minimalism in production.

P.S. I truly believe that all the fat folks are hiding the “lean” insignia deeply inside them. It just takes some effort to peel off the layers :)

Recently I’ve come across a post on harmfulness of analogies with martial arts. Indeed, there’s a handful of posts comparing software development, or agile adoption, or product development  with  martial arts  - Aikido, Karate, Judo etc.

If you make a direct analogy of software product development and mastering some martial art, it would not be exactly accurate. I guess  people revert to the analogies as they try to project their copies as romantic martial arts disciples into their usual lives as software developers, managers etc.  Perhaps, they’re making the image of their lives more mission-filled this way since there’s not too much space for showing primeval qualities of warrior in software development. But the need to exercise this attitude is still there, as it turns out.

We don’t have beasts to fight, bloody battles and mortal combats. This wrap-up for courage, strong will, persistence in achieving goals and readiness to fight has remained in the past largely. With no wrap-up, people forget that there’s lots of space to exercise these qualities in their usual life.

Let’s go back to analogies. Roger Federer is an unbeatable specimen of mastered elegant performance to me. Look at the way he plays. No waste. He knows, what to do, he knows when to do what. It’s a perfect flow,  the model for effective lean production with no waste and –  the model for perfect warrior  in our modern life. Elegant, no blood on his hands, but he fights, has pitfalls on the way,  stands up, recovers, marches on and wins gracefully.

But he’s just a guy in red T-Shirt. As many software developers :)

Another point is that it’s much harder to fight, win and achieve goals when there’s no immediate physical danger involved as in tennis.  Soo much room for elegant warriors, isn’t it ?

The point I’m trying to make is – let people compare their lives and their jobs to whatever they want. If it inspires and motivates them, makes them feel good about their lives and their work – and makes them feel like warriors, achievers, believers, fighters, winners.

P.S.  February 23 is a perfect day for such a blog post :) Wish you well, guys!