It’s been a while since I last wrote something on here and much has happened in the intervening time.
Top of the news is that Cerys and I are engaged to be married. She’s posted a photo of the ring with which I proposed on flickr. I also made a box for it with pick-a-brick from the Lego online shop. A more traditional ring (made of platinum with shiny rocks) is on its way. Wedding date is set for April 17th 2009. The original ring came via etsy.com, a site which I had never heard of before.
On now to matters of less significance: I’ve bought a car-cosy from this lot to try and reduce the amount of time I spend scraping ice off the windscreen in the mornings. So far it has worked well, and I’ve been lucky in that when I’ve chosen to fit it everything else has frozen overnight and when I’ve elected not to (or forgotten) it’s not frozen. The cats like the process of fitting the car-cosy; they get to sit in a warmish dark place while I throw things under it (the securing straps) for them to pounce on.
Speaking of the cats, they seem to be fairly well (although not necessarily well-behaved). Eclipse seems a bit paranoid since we’ve tidied the living room; he keeps scratching at things he shouldn’t (like guitars) and generally looking a bit less happy than before. Kimahri doesn’t seem to be worried by anything much.
Cerys has painted the kitchen walls brown and the kitchen cupboard doors grey. I am assured that the walls were four different kinds of yellow before. Hard to know what the cats think of the new colour scheme; since they’re both male they very probably haven’t noticed.
At work, we are adopting ‘agile’ development processes across the entire department. Other teams are doing more of the processes we’ve been asked to consider: (at least) daily ‘scrum’ meetings, using IBM Rational Team Concert to decompose tasks and track detailed progress, etc. Our team hasn’t done so much of that, but we have changed from doing 1/8 of each of 8 things each month to doing all of 1 thing each month. It makes much more sense for the business to operate in this way, as after 7 months we can choose to ship 7 complete features rather than having nothing completed and usable.
I don’t really see the point of daily ‘scrum’ meetings: they’re a way to communicate ‘status’ of work and to talk about blocks etc. This is a wasteful polling model which could easily be replaced by a more efficient event-driven model. A piece of work has only 4 meaningful states:
- Not started
- Blocked
- In progress
- Done
In ‘agile’ as we’re employing it, work can only be introduced at the start of an ‘iteration’; at which point it is in state (1). When that piece of work becomes the most important non-yet-done thing it moves to state (3). It can then become impossible to make progress because of something else (2). Or it can be completed (4).
The only states which matter to anyone are (2) and (4). Time spent determining the status of anything in (1) and (3) is wasted. Only the blockers need to know if your work is in state (2). Only whoever wanted it needs to know when it is in state (4). So you are using an event-driven model if you:
- Ask anyone blocking your work to sort out the blockage
- Tell whoever asked for what you’re doing when you’ve done it
The only reason to prefer the polling method is if you don’t trust your people to do the above; in which case your distrust is likely to be repaid in kind.
