July 2017

Defining Agile Sooooo, I saw a couple folks arguing earlier about what is or isn’t Agile. That’s okay. People do that. Analytical people thrive on doing that. Anyone who’s gotten to the level of journeyfolk in any arena will seek to define that arena. All very healthy stuff. Nowadays I tend to avoid these arguments. I have my reasons. First, there is no definition anywhere on earth of anything that can’t be abused or misused willfully or not. There is

User Stories If you are concerned about how you write a user story, you have missed the entire point. A user story is a little card that reminds us of all the actual conversations we’re currently actually having. If the words "bathtub farting" are enough for the team to actually converse about what they signify, they’re enough for what they’re for. The very first step you take that’s away from "user story is a marker" is the road back to

I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting to sleep lately. I go to bed cuz it feels like it’s time. Sometimes my body won’t settle, itching and twitching and such like. Sometimes my mind won’t. Usually it’s a mixture of both. So I get back up. But then I’m tired as hell, and it seems like I’m sleepy again, so I go back. Rinse, lather, repeat 3-5 times. Eventually one of two things happen. Either I finally manage to

Assumption-Boxing I’m thinking of maybe a new geepaw coinage: something like "assumption-boxing". This is when we frame a problem with an assumption that narrowly limits (boxes) the range of solutions. A real-world example we’re all familiar with: "Optimize meeting structure to exchange status reports on individual’s sub-projects". Do you see that "meeting structure" is a built-in assumption in the problem, & that it greatly boxes in the kinds of solutions we can have? Long before most current geeks had seen

What are preasons? A remarkable amount of geekery-advice comes in the form of rules & slogans accompanied by appealing. intuitively correct, theoretical reasoning using simple logic applied to pre-existing abstractions. I’m gonna pull a GeePaw-ism here and relabel "appealing, intuitively correct, theoretical reasoning using simple logic applied to pre-existing abstractions". I’m gonna shorthand these to "Preasons". So. We get a lot of preasons in our trade. And they’re applied at every level, including but not limited to Coding, Designing, Tool-Using,

Have you ever noticed how much children love to help? Modern motivational theory offers us a triplet: purpose, autonomy, and mastery. (PAM) children helping surely excites P and M there. As adults we’re all slightly less desirous of helping. I attribute this to two factors. First, there’s a lot less M in it for me usually nowadays. I already know how to, say, sweep the floor, and I’m less driven by mastery. Second, we bring more of our own P