Thursday, July 27, 2006

Great people and Great tools

I've been working with Lu and John on our help system. It's been amazing to see what people can do when they discover a new tool to help them solve a problem and they are empowered to solve that problem.

A good (great) Alistair Cockburn article: (Courtesy of Joseph King)

http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Characterizing_people_as_non-linear,_first-order_components_in_software_development

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Usability Cobwebs

Having fun with Lu and John on the project sorting out how to make our help more usable. Building paper mock ups, figuring out our users, identifying core tasks and generally having lots o fun.

Having done usability 20 years ago (Psych degree as well as Comp Sci degree) there a quite a few cob webs in my brain. Oh well, just figure it out as we go along.

Smalltalkers

Having been reminded that I'm an old dude

http://www.josephmoore.net/2006/05/visual-studio-ruby-on-rails-and-old.html


Courtesy John Duimovichs Blog.

Monday, July 17, 2006

It's a different safety net...

XP has a different safety net than traditional approaches.

Written spec -> functional tests
Written Design & Architecture -> refactoring & mentoring
Change Control -> Malleable code & visibility
Detailed writing ->oral communication
Everything thought out -> just in time
Look to the future and prepare -> look to the past and improve

Is this why combining Agile and Waterfall methods is the worst of all possible worlds? In both cases the safety nets are tightly woven (coupled?), one piece depends on all the others. Mixing and matching from both sides looses that "weaving".

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Mistakes

If you aren't making mistakes you aren't trying hard enough.