Hot Needle Of Inquiry

My son Ron's brewery, Jolly Pumpkin, is getting some great press, and deservedly so. Buy some, drink some. You'll be glad you did! (Now! Even more articles!)

I fully agree that terrorism is a serious matter, but when people are frightened of cartoons, it's a sign that terrorism is working, not of agencies that are working.

The "Status" line, in the announcements on my home page, is linked to my status on http://www.twitter.com. It can be updated by a phone text message. I have absolutely no idea what this is good for, unless you were planning to meet us for lunch. If you have any ideas, including "Delete that!", drop me a note.

In these days of on line everything, you would think that it would be pretty easy to get a copy of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" on your music player. You'd be wrong. And so would the music companies.

Recent events in the news gave me an insight into why people throw good money, or good resources, or even good human beings, into an obviously lost situation.

Where do you want to write today?

Alistair Cockburn "rants" on iterations vs deliveries, the difference being "running, tested, features". He raises some darned good points, on which we mostly agree. Here, lightly edited, is my list-posted response.

This really happened.

A master has passed away. Godspeed.

If your life is like mine, you're always in need of additional hardware, especially in that hard-to-supply process monitoring area. Adrian Howard points to this marvelous Device, so far beyond the dull and boring lava lamp!

I'm surprisingly bummed by Steve Irwin's sudden death. Who ever loved his job more than the "Crocodile Hunter"? There's a lesson there.

I'd like to give the community a place to talk about the things that matter in Agile today. In the next day or two, I'll be opening a community forum with just that purpose. I'll be seeding it with a few topic areas that have been on my mind, namely the conferences, the forces around advancing agile through extention or through sticking close to our simple roots, and the forces around adapting to existing corporate cultures or changing them. But those are just seeds. What Agile needs ... is you!

The GreatLakesSoftwareExcellenceConference will be held in Grand Rapids, MI, October 25 and 26. There will be some excellent sessions there, and I recommend you take a look.

The Agile 2006 conference was very good, and the reviews from the attendees are mostly favorable. I've got some concerns and issues, and I'm soliciting feedback, input, ideas from people who have them. As an Agile Alliance board member, I might be able to get some things done. Tell me what to do.

A Seattle client has opportunities for Agile-focused people. Inquire within.

Recent reports of plans to blow up planes support the idea that a "war on terror" may not reduce terrorism. On the other hand, terrorists need to remember what they learned after 9/11.

In January 2005, I wrote AlienInvasion, a note relating our nation's fine endeavors in Iraq to various science fiction novels. I spoke of how we like to think that we Americans would fight back forever against any technologically superior invaders, and implicitly invited readers to extend that thought to the world as it stood in January 2005. I invite you to think about that again, now. I hope I don't get dixiechicked for these thoughts, but if I do, so be it.

I've been taking more heat than I'd like regarding my position on automated testing for Agile projects. I'm sure this all my fault, but that doesn't make me like it any more. Here are some thoughts.

My new business creating "completely functional" software has really started clicking along. Revenues are up!

I received today a posting to the Ann Arbor Computer Society list, asking for contract programmer help. In part it said: "The program is completely functional, however, the numerical results do not appear to be correct."

Agile 2006 is coming right up. The conference hotel is booked, sessions are filling up. Seats next to me at the bar are going fast. Time to set up your travel plans if you haven't already. Here, for no reason at all, are mine.

I've become bored with my C# blogging code and updating it is getting very low priority. If you're a Blogger expert and would be interested in helping to convert HotNeedleOfInquiry to Blogger, drop me an email.

... are the three topics that are off limits in Dale Carnegie classes. The idea is to keep the talks interesting, personal, but not controversial or difficult for everyone in the class to appreciate. I've usually lived by that same topic guideline here on line, with rare exceptions. Today I stumbled onto the "Out and Proud" parade here in Seattle. Religion, sex, and politics, here we come.

Added SqueezeBox to the BlueMeanie family. Nice little product!

Faithful readers have seen my rants on the not-so-good computer I got from Cyber Power Systems, and the not-so-good service. I liked the basic idea of the machine, and had the gang at dundee.net, whom I trust, build another one.

Excerpts from the Jeffries brothers mail box... (I found this while cleaning up the file directories. Made me laugh. Hope it does so for you.)

Too much messing around messed up my Windows Explorer context menus. Kelly's Korner sorted me out after a week or more of Googling around. I sent him a donation, and some props here.

My son Ron, owner and brewmaster at Jolly Pumpkin Brewery, will be hosting a dinner at Evans Street Station in Tecumseh, Michigan, on March 20.

Crosstalk (The Journal of Defense Software Engineering) publishes an article by Dr Randall W Jensen, describing an experiment in pair programming resulting in very substantial improvements in productivity and reduction of defects.

Unbelievable! These people really do not want my business, or else there is some new low in customer support that I wasn't previously familiar with. Avoid Cyber Power like the plague -- a pox on them and their houses!

Ordered a really cool computer from CyberPower. They sent me a not so cool non-computer. So far, "We are not amused."

My wife recently signed her parents up for the new Medicare drug insurance. They got a letter contining this quote: "Although our monthly premium is $24.49, we will only collect $24.40 per month via your Social Security benefit, due to a minor computer processing issue. This small difference $1.08 requires no action on your part, absent further notice."

Another in a long list of honors! I've been invited to give a keynote address at Waterfall 2006! My topic: Extreme Programming Uninstalled. (No matter what picture is displayed, I assure you that it isn't me. Some kind of typo. Yeah, that's it.)

Vic Uzumeri wrote to the scrumdevelopment list: "I am now on the quest for the holy grail - the true essence of project management that can be explained in 20 minutes to a less-than-respectful 21-year old :-) If I find it, I'll let everyone know." Inquire within.

I'm starting my fifth year of taijiquan (T'at Chi) in January. It's good for the body and the mind, and I'm beginning to get the hang of it. A new class starts January 5th -- join me!

Microsoft responds, taking down erroneous TDD posting. Congratulations to them for stepping up, and to the community for cracking down.

A woefully unsatisfactory Microsoft posting on new .NET features and how they assist with Test-Driven Development has caused a lot of consternation. It's just plain wrong.

Pat Robertson, "intelligent design", and acts of God.

A brief reflection on Jim Shore's entry on "Hustle", part of a thread of ideas on SenseOfUrgency. To hustle, we need energy, which needs to be sustained and rebuilt somehow.

Found an ad for this lovely math-based art in this month's SciAm. Check it out: I think it's lovely!

Delivery of the running, tested, features the customer wants is the purpose of the development team. Sometimes the work we signed up for won't quite fit into the iteration. What should we do?

I got a happy note from James Wagner, pointing to his blog entry called "TDD Really Works". It cheered me up to see someone having some success, and with him, I hope that more will have the same discoveries.

It seems like every development project begins with the date, and we're held responsible for "making the date". Making the date is not a development responsibility. Here's why.

Jeff Nielsen, in the October issue of Software Test & Performance, draws a lovely analogy between Agile software development and making hand-dipped candles.

I'm getting renewal offers from magazines, offering a "free" subscription for someone else if I renew now. That would be fine, except that my subscription is not expiring.

New venue, a quiet study room at the Brighton Library. Topic, Jim Shore's "stake in the ground" reminding us to get back to the basics. Result, a new podcast.

Chet and I got together at Borders in Brighton yesterday, and talked about teams going "off the road" and what a process should do to address this concern. We recorded the chat and have put it up as a sort of podcast. We hope you enjoy it, and request your help.

Often my email exchanges tell me something about myself. Here's something I noticed this morning: I consciously choose to imagine that I have rather a lot of influence over the things that happen to me.

There's a recent thread on the Scrum list about how an executive or highly-placed manager could get Agile going. I've been one of those guys, and I know a bit about Agile, and here's how I'd proceed. First, focus management attention on cyclic delivery of running tested software. Second, provide the resources to learn how to do that.

Apparently psychologists are also speed readers.

Can Test-Driven Development and Programming By Intention play together? Or do they annihilate each other, like protons and antiprotons, or XPers and CMMers?

An odd experience with my Borders discount card ...

Bob Martin describes a couple of hours of pain that most of us have brought ourselves at least once. Read and heed!

Real? Or Memorex? Either way, really odd.

Whining about a new product that didn't work.

Things are progressing on the site design. At least one thing needs to be programmed, in C# or possibly Ruby. I have a mild leaning toward C#. Advice and help wanted ...

Chet and I were at Panera and wanted to try Skype. So in order to talk to each other, we had to leave Panera and go to our homes. What's wrong with this picture?

Here's an update on what's happening with the XProgramming update, for those who have been interested in helping!

When Manfred Mann first recorded Bob Dylan's song Quinn The Eskimo, my son Ron, in his snowsuit, reminded us of a little eskimo. It's very cold here, indoors and out, and I'm reminded of mighty eskimos, and that song.

Letter to my carrier and the circulation manager of the Ann Arbor News, relating to the interesting delivery habits they have developed for Sundays and holidays.

Dale Emery said, "Finding a bug doesn't decrease badness. It increases goodness." Herein, musings thereupon. (* see apology.)

XProgramming.com downloads page updated with C++ for SmartPhone, and a new planning tool. Site now has "About Us" navigation page with contact info, thanks to a suggestion by John Schulz, whose own reply email doesn't work. Thanks, John!

Dear FBI: The most important thing wrong with a $170 million project done as you did it is that it is possible to make a $170 million mistake. Next time, consider doing your project interatively and incrementally. The other kind rarely work, and the statistics are clear. Whoever was in charge of it ought to be tried for felony ignorance.

Work really isn't all that serious, even if we do spend much of our lives at it. Truth be told, most of life itself isn't really all that serious, when you get down to thinking about what's important. Lighten up, get a little whimsical, appreciate the odd things going on around you. If you let your sphincter get too tight, your gaseous expulsions will only be audible to bats. What good is that?

New article in XP Magazine: Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to "spike" a map drawing program. We know nothing about maps or drawing, and very little about programming. How might we proceed?

Article in XP Magazine: To really take an important role in practice, ideas need to get built into people's heads. Since most practitioners don't read much, they get most of their ideas from people they talk to, things they can read quickly, and most of all, from ... practice.

What if Earth was invaded by a technologically superior alien race, who were evil and who didn't share any of our values and morals? The story has been told time and again in science fiction.

Where's the Spec, the Big Picture, the Design? These questions were recently asked on the XP group, in the context of a review of Mike Cohn's User Stories Applied. The answers are a function of the whole project, not just User Stories.

Introducing a new series of articles.

I got up at 3:30 to tell you about this dream.

We've been talking a bit about frequent releases, the notion of "deployed" vs "deployable", the "cost" of deploying, and so on. I'd like to bring out just two points: (1) The most common reasons given and used for infrequent deployment are evidence of poor software development practice; (2) Infrequent shipment is evidence of poor business practice.

One of my interests is GPS, and another is the PocketPC. So Street Atlas 2005 Handheld and the new Blue Logger GPS seemed like a sensible acquisition. I may not have been quite as right as I might have been.

The XProgramming downloads page includes software intended to support planning and tracking of XP and Agile projects. Herewith, some thoughts on that.

Please don't miss this posting on Andy's Weblog. It's rather thought-provoking.

It wasn't a surfboard, but the credit card people did find an invalid charge. Now I'm on a new card.

An interesting quote from Walter Benjamin, from Trevor of kaleboel, found on Language Log. Kind of thought-provoking.

My son Ron has built and opened a craft brewery in Dexter, Michigan. I'm proud of what he has accomplished, and provide here some information and links. If you live in Michigan, ask your store for it. If you live in a state bordering Michigan, do the same.

So I have this cool car. I paid sticker for it. Now they are being discounted as much as $8000 under sticker.

Send it through the x-ray. Your bag. Your computer, out of the bag. Your jacket. Your shoes. Your shirt. It's not about safety. Maybe it's something else.

Brian Marick, in a blog entry that is quite interesting on its own, points to a very provocative article about group think, German philosophy, and the old Saturday Night Live gang. It got me thinking about Extreme Programming and the "Agile" methods. Have I mentioned passion lately?

At the Great American Beer Festival this year, my son's Oro de Calabaza won the gold medal in the French and Belgian category!

There is no such thing as "good enough". There is only improvement or decline.

Possible deep messages from the spam files. Attempted partial interpretation.

I gave two presentations to the XP West Michigan group in Grand Rapids last night. Slides for the first one are up on my site.

It's important to take grammar seriously, even if she has been dead for years.

There was a lion on the lake tonight.

This is too good to miss.

Brian Marick writes: "Is there a way to let loose of understanding and still perform well?"

Avast, ye'll not want ta be forgettin' that today be International Talk Like a Pirate day. Shiver me timbers, yer old cap'n nearly went aground on this himself.

Sometimes access to the interesting web sites is a bit slow. Using this link, you can download the internet to your hard drive, for faster response after the download is complete.

People keep saying things like "In the late 1990s, three software visionaries named Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries pioneered Extreme Programming." It just ain't so.

An article of perhaps some greater significance than one about programming or the turkeys crossing the road.

As popular as blogging is, there are some things not to like about it.

There are only two effective control actions that management can take when a project is coming in later than planned.

There's a move afoot to embed Radio Frequency ID tags in products, pets, and people. Some folks are up in arms about this. (NPI)

What would happen if all projects were cancelled the moment they went over time or budget? When you're an XP project, today is a good day to die.

A study, published by two groups concerned with economic inequality, found that average CEO compensation at the 50 firms outsourcing the most service jobs abroad increased by 46 percent in 2003. CEOs at the 365 large companies surveyed by Business Week only saw an average raise of 9 percent, according to the report from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.

Friendster employee fired for blogging. And she didn't even say anything particularly bad.

There's a perennial thread in XP and Agile discussion about "religion", "zealotry", or "orthodoxy". Various correspondents use this kind of "argument" in response to what they perceive, one imagines, as religion, zealotry, or orthodoxy. Makes sense, perhaps, but honestly I think it's a bad rap, and a bad argument.

If schedules were honest then there would be as many underestimates as overestimates. People who work on my house sometimes take more time than they predict and sometime take less. They stay in business because their prices take that into account. They make mistakes, but are honest estimators. If almost all projects are over budget then it shows that estimating is not honest. -- Ralph Johnson

I had the pleasure of attending Don Wells' talk at the Michigan XP Enthusiasts meeting tonight, at the Menlo offices. Very thought-provoking.

William Pietri posted an interesting link on the Extreme Programming list, about the SnowflakeWritingProcess, described by Randall Ingermanson.

Like a lot of concerned Americans, I get most of my news from serious programs like Jon Stewart's Daily Show. It's important to stay on top of things.

In DirtyKitchen, I spoke of our desire to refactor the blogging code, even though our advice would be to work on stories. Today we worked on stories, and don't feel very good about what happened.

Jake Scruggs mentioned in his blog that Object Mentor had begun using Jetbrains' Resharper, a code tool for Visual Studio C#, so I tried it out.

Hot Needle's new RSSCapability is up and running as far as our tests can tell us. So I shipped it. But at lunch, Chet and I discussed an interesting dilemma. I'm having to take my own medicine, and I don't like it.