Sept'2014: Giles Bowkett on Scrum. Scrum, the Agile methodology allegedly favored by Google and Spotify, is a mess... Consider Story Points... If it had a name, this informal (Planning Poker) game would be called something like "the person with the highest status tells everybody else what the number is going to be.".. Planning Poker isn't the only aspect of Scrum which, in my experience, seems to consistently devolve into something less useful. Another core piece of Scrum is the Stand Up Meeting... I've twice seen the "15-minute standup" devolve into half-hour or hour-long meetings where everybody stands, except for management... At this second company, virtually everything landed in the parking lot, and it became normal for the 15-minute standup to be a 15-minute prelude to a much longer meeting... Scrum's ready devolution springs from major conceptual flaws... there's a fundamental cognitive dissonance between "sprints" and "sustainable development," because there is no such thing as a sustainable sprint... Another core idea of the Agile Manifesto, the allegedly defining document for Agile development methodologies: "working software is the primary measure of progress." Scrum disregards this idea in favor of a measure of progress called "VelocIty.".. Story points, meanwhile, are completely made-up numbers designed to capture off-the-cuff estimates of relative difficulty. Developers are explicitly encouraged to think of story points as non-binding numbers, yet velocity turns those non-binding estimates into a number they can be held accountable for... If you're tracking velocity, your best-case scenario will be that management realizes it means nothing... I don't think highly of Scrum, but the problem here goes deeper. The Agile Manifesto is flawed too. Consider this core principle of Agile development: "business people and developers must work together." Why are we supposed to think developers are not business people?.. The Agile Manifesto might also be to blame for the Scrum standup. It states that "the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." In fairness to the manifesto's authors, it was written in 2001, and at that time git log did not yet exist. However, in light of today's toolset for distributed collaboration, it's another completely implausible assertion, and even back in 2001 you had to kind of pretend you'd never heard of Linux if you really wanted it to make sense. Well-written text very often trumps face-to-face communication... In addition to defying logic and available evidence, both these Agile Manifesto principles encourage a kind of babysitting mentality. I've never seen Scrum-like frameworks for transmuting the work of designers, marketers, or accountants into cartoonish oversimplifications like story points. People are happy to treat these workers as adults and trust them to do their jobs. I don't know why this same trust does not prevail in the culture of managing programmers. (more)

Music Streaming service

Paul Jacobson: How Instapaper could be an even better research tool (more)

Robert Neuwirth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, Resilience, Self Organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system. It used to be that System D was small -- a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, SystemD is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes. (Gray Market for the Network Economy?) (more)

Writer/coach on Self Organization. (more)

System that lets End Users manage their personal profile in one location, and have Member Sites be able to access parts of that profile (with user's permission) to ease registration and financial transactions (purchases of goods, Micro-Payments for content, etc.) (more)

cf Cybernetics

food-processing company known for its Self Organization efforts (more)

Run Off from rains (more)

*Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Western lifestyle or European civilization is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies that have some origin or association with Europe, having both indigenous and foreign origin. The term has come to be applied by people of European ethnicity to countries whose history is strongly marked by European immigration, colonisation, and influence, such as the continents of the Americas and Australasia, whose current demographic majority is of European ethnicity, and is not restricted to the continent of Europe. (more)

aka in your Own Private Idaho http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Own+private+Idaho. (more)

where people go to escape a BigGov? (more)

see War On Iraq (more)

For that Presidential Election (more)

Wouldn't it be lovely to use Web Services? (more)

Taylor Pearson on AntiFragile Planning: Optimizing for Optionality (without Chasing Shiny Objects) (more)

A lot of software teams rely very heavily on human QA testing still. (more)

*In economics, the invisible hand is a metaphor used by Adam Smith to describe unintended social benefits resulting from individual actions. The phrase is employed by Smith with respect to income distribution (1759) and production (1776). The exact phrase is used just three times in Smith's writings, but has come to capture his notion that individuals' efforts to pursue their own interest may frequently benefit society more than if their actions were directly intending to benefit society. Smith may have come up with the two meanings of the phrase from Richard Cantillon who developed both economic applications in his model of the isolated estate.[1] (more)

when members of a team stop thinking (more)

Karl Marx[note 1] (/mɑrks/;[4] German pronunciation: [ˈkaɐ̯l ˈmaɐ̯ks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Born in Prussia (now Rhineland-Palatinate), he later became stateless and spent much of his life in London. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought.[5][6][7][8] He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The CommunistManifesto (1848) and DasKapital (1867–1894). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx (more)