Category Archives: Leadership

Technical and personnel leadership

Software delivery is fundamentally broken?

A while ago, Elisabeth Hendrickson wrote a piece on endings and beginning. There was one sentence striking out to me:

I believe that the traditional software QA model is fundamentally and irretrievably broken.

I think there is something fundamentally broken in the way we are used to build and ship product. Triggered by Elisabeth I had an eye on stuff while starting to read The Psychology of Computer Programming only recently – yeah, I didn’t read all of Jerry’s books so far. Shame on me. These are my early raw thoughts on what might be broken.

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ALE2012 Lookback

It has been about three weeks right now since the second Agile Lean Europe in Barcelona. Although I had the best intentions back then, I promised to write a blog entry about my experiences there, I didn’t do it until now. It seems the best stuff I take away from the break-out conversations in the coffee breaks these days when at conferences, not so much from the session itself. This also holds for the ALE 2012.

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Dear Management,

Dear Management,

I owe you an apology. I have misled you by listening to someone who misled me instead of building my own opinion based on the sources that someone lied out. That said, I have been wrong by repeating rants, and inventing my own once based on a false premise. As a math teacher of mine once explained to me: Based on a false premise you can proof anything.

I found people willing to challenge my belief system, and I thank these people for that. They made me go the hard path to building my own opinion on the topic, and on the sources that the one who initially misled me pointed to. I was amazed that I came to a different understanding. A similar one in some sort of ways, a different one in the most basic claims of that other person. I am thankful for having the opportunity to learn something from this.

And now, beware alpha animal like betrayer of my thoughts. You not only lost a follower of your rants when I reached my own insights, but you also lost my respect. From now on I will tell others about my perspective on things, and where I think you have been astray. I will provide my own picture, and criticize your ideas wherever I feel it’s appropriate. I will warn others from you, if you cannot back up your claims with references. I can.

Sincerely yours
learning employee, and hardest critique.

An Afternote

I didn’t relate this to any real thing that happened in the text in the hope that you will notice how and where you have been misled in the past. Instead of being depressed about it, recognize your failure, learn from it, and confront the other person with your new insights. The worst thing that might happen is that you find out that this particular person is not interested in debating. In that case make sure to turn your Bozo filter on. Things could be worse.

“How do you do all that stuff?”

I am often approached with the question whether I cloned myself. At least, when taking a look on the amazon pages for my book, this might be the case; yet I more seriously added my amazon accounts as authors for both the German and the American amazon pages.

A few months ago I had an interesting coaching session on whether or not I am burned out (there are questionnaires for this, I would claim these results do not hold for me), I put on too much work, etc. During that session I found myself confronted with the Diathesis-stress model which explains a lot of my thoughts around this topic.

While I write this, I am in Hamburg, Germany. So, imagine a ship. A ship has a keel, an anchor, a loading depth, and how deep the water currently goes. These four factors influence how fast a ship may sail. Let’s take a look on these four factors, and how they relate to the model as an analogy.

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Some surveys on the state of our craft

One of my colleagues made a claim yesterday which I would like to put some numbers on. I raised the question on twitter, and received suspicious answers about the numbers of my colleague. Please forward this survey to anyone you know who is programming: http://www.shino.de/programmer-survey/ It consist of just four question, so you should be able to answer them in a few minutes.

Over twitter I also received the feedback that things are worse for testers. I would like to put numbers on that as well. Therefore I also put up an equally small survey for tester: http://www.shino.de/tester-survey/ Please forward this survey to anyone in the software business that you know of.

From time to time to I will publish some of the results. I aim for end of January for the first set of data.

Complexity Thinking and the MOI(J) Model

Last year I started to dive into the theory behind complexity thinking. What puzzled me ever since is the relationship between complexity thinking and the stuff that I learned from Jerry Weinberg. One sleepless night I stood up from bed, and searched my material from the PSL course. There I learned about a model that helps me leading people in different ways. While thinking over it, it occurred to me, that complexity thinking is a small subset of the MOI(J) model. Follow me on my mind-journey.

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“Say, how many books did you read this year?”

At the beginning of November I attended a conference together with my boss Henning Wolf. While flying back to Hamburg, waiting for our plane, we talked about things, and I mentioned some lessons from a book that I was reading at that time. “Say, how many books do you read within a year?” he asked. I couldn’t answer that question directly, as keeping in mind that this was my seventeenth book would distract me from reading the content. So, I looked it up, and was amazed.

I am sure, I do not exceed the number of books that for example Michael Larsen read this year, but I was still amazed about the number – having estimated it at about ten or twelve. I decided to visit back the books I read, and see which lessons stayed current even after having read them. This list is based upon my notes over at Library Thing, where I looked up which books I finished this year. Some of them I started back in 2010. Some of them are also in German. some have an English translation, others don’t. Maybe time learning some German for some of my readers. :)

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Lessons from complexity thinking

While Diana Larsen was in Germany in July she spoke about a course she was currently taking called Human Systems Dynamics. Since then some of my colleagues started to dive into it. So did I. I didn’t take the course, but decided to go for some of the books on it. The first one I came across is called Facilitating Organization Change – Lessons from complexity science, and deals with a lot of stuff on complexity science, self-organization, and how to introduce changes in a complex adaptive system (CAS). These are some of my first thoughts after finishing the book.

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