So, Allan Kelly has picked up on something that I kind-of pretty much did say at XpDay this year—but not quite. I certainly am "part of the UK Agile set", especially if we emphasize the "UK" bit. What I'm not is part of the gang of independent consultants in London who are many of the high-profile early adopters in the UK, and it's true that I never worked for Connextra or any of the other highly-publicized, London-based "Agile" shops. Why is this worthy of note? Only because it relates to a sign of un-wellness in the community that I perceived at the session where Allan heard me say that. It was a double-header, a somewhat strange work-shoppy type of thing, followed by a panel. It was while speaking on this panel that I said what Allan noticed.
The point that I was, perhaps unsuccessfully, trying to make was that the disenchantment with the current state of the Agile world is perhaps more to do with the geographically constrained, hot-house world of ex-Connextra, ex-another place, folks circulating around the same bunch of clients in London than with anything wrong with the community at large.
In particular, this idea that any "mojo" has been lost, or that by accommodating corporate culture in amongst Agile adoption some "compromise too far" has occurred seems very off base to me. We pretty much agreed on the panel that the question "Have you compromised your Agility?" is a silly one, since "Agile" is primarily a marketing buzzword and it labels what is pretty much a bag of platitudes. How can we tell that these are platitudes? Well, they don't help us choose between reasonable alternatives: the hardest-core hard-core SSADM, PRINCE-2 wonk around, if asked in those terms, would probably tell you that working software is more valuable than comprehensive documentation (and probably add "you idiot" under their breath). They might not necessarily behave in a way aligned with that judgment mid project, that that's a whole other story. Fretting about whether or not you've compromised a platitude doesn't seem like the way forward.
There was a lot of talk about "Excellence", too.
And all of this (along with "wither the Agile Alliance?" and "what can we do about Scrum?") may seem like a topic of crucial import, if you spend a lot of your time inside the echo-chamber. Are we Agile? No, I mean, are we really Agile? Truly? Are we Excellent? Is this the real, true, expression of the Principles? I've seen long-lived Agile teams tie themselves in knots (and tear themselves apart, and get—rightly—caned by their business sponsors) over this sort of self-absorbed stuff.
Now, I have in mind a team I know that adopted some (not all) Agile principles. Are they purely Agile? No. Are they living the dream? No. Did they have to make compromises between textbook Agile and their corporate culture to get where they are? Yes. Might they do better if they hadn't to? Yes. But...
Are they three times more productive than they were before? Yes! Is the internal and external quality of their system hugely greater than before? Yes! Do their management revel in being able (for the first time ever) to believe, trust and make intelligent decision based on their status reports? Yes!
I am most reluctant to embrace, in fact I absolutely repudiate, a model of what it means to be Agile that demands that I call them failures because their (ongoing) improvement required compromise with their corporate culture. I'm not terribly interested, these days, in fine-tuning some on-going Agile adventure. I'm interested in taking what are now increasingly well-tried techniques and using them to get the big wins, the big increases in quality and productivity that so many shops are crying out for.
Showing posts with label grumpy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grumpy. Show all posts
What "Ivory Tower"?
Strange rumblings on the Ruby front.
I recall walking through the grounds at Imperial, heading for the first XpDay in the company of Ivan Moore. As we passed by he noted that there was an ivory tower for me to move into. Now, I am prone to a little bit too much theoretical musing on things, it's true, but I though this comment was a bit rich coming from someone with a degree, MSc and PhD in Computer Science.
Anyway, this "ivory tower" notion is an curious one and seems to be very much a Yes Minister sort of thing: I pragmatically balance theory and practice, you pay too much attention to unnecessary detail, he lives in an Ivory Tower. The phrase has strong overtones of academic detachment. Strange, then, that this posting should suggest that Smalltalk was ever in one. Smalltalk was developed in an industrial research lab paid for by a photocopier company. An early (maybe the earliest) adopter of Smalltalk, where some of the folks responsible for spreading certain ideas from the Smalltalk world more widely worked, was an electronic engineering firm.
Currently (mid 2007) Smalltalk is (still) being used commercially in the design of gearboxes, it's being used in the pricing of hairy financial instruments, it's being used to do hard stuff for money. I've even earned money for writing Smalltalk myself, within the last 5 years.
Lisp, now, Lisp did have to escape from an ivory tower. And that didn't work out too well, so it tried to get back in. But the door had been closed behind it. Ouch.
Well, if, as is suggested, "Ruby is a unix dialect of Smalltalk" then it would seem that being unixified is not such a completely good thing. Really, spelling blocks with {}s instead of []'s is neither here nor there (although having that invisible magic parameter for them is really bad). the theory is that being being now outside the "VM" (I think that Giles probably means "image") then Ruby-is-Smalltalk plays much better with others. That's true enough. Like certain other refugee systems taking shelter in the unix world, Smalltalk really wants to be your whole world. But we kind-of know, and certainly the unix way is, that that's not a great model.
What's a shame, though, is that if Ruby is Smalltalk then it is Smalltalk with the most important thing taken out: life. And life comes with the image, and not from objects (or worse yet, merely the instructions for buliding the objects) being trapped in files. Sorry, but that's the way it is. So, until there's a ruby environment as lively as a Smalltalk image, with all its browsers and such, I can't see the ruby-is-smalltalk metaphor doing anything but spreading confusion and disappointment.
I recall walking through the grounds at Imperial, heading for the first XpDay in the company of Ivan Moore. As we passed by he noted that there was an ivory tower for me to move into. Now, I am prone to a little bit too much theoretical musing on things, it's true, but I though this comment was a bit rich coming from someone with a degree, MSc and PhD in Computer Science.
Anyway, this "ivory tower" notion is an curious one and seems to be very much a Yes Minister sort of thing: I pragmatically balance theory and practice, you pay too much attention to unnecessary detail, he lives in an Ivory Tower. The phrase has strong overtones of academic detachment. Strange, then, that this posting should suggest that Smalltalk was ever in one. Smalltalk was developed in an industrial research lab paid for by a photocopier company. An early (maybe the earliest) adopter of Smalltalk, where some of the folks responsible for spreading certain ideas from the Smalltalk world more widely worked, was an electronic engineering firm.
Currently (mid 2007) Smalltalk is (still) being used commercially in the design of gearboxes, it's being used in the pricing of hairy financial instruments, it's being used to do hard stuff for money. I've even earned money for writing Smalltalk myself, within the last 5 years.
Lisp, now, Lisp did have to escape from an ivory tower. And that didn't work out too well, so it tried to get back in. But the door had been closed behind it. Ouch.
Well, if, as is suggested, "Ruby is a unix dialect of Smalltalk" then it would seem that being unixified is not such a completely good thing. Really, spelling blocks with {}s instead of []'s is neither here nor there (although having that invisible magic parameter for them is really bad). the theory is that being being now outside the "VM" (I think that Giles probably means "image") then Ruby-is-Smalltalk plays much better with others. That's true enough. Like certain other refugee systems taking shelter in the unix world, Smalltalk really wants to be your whole world. But we kind-of know, and certainly the unix way is, that that's not a great model.
What's a shame, though, is that if Ruby is Smalltalk then it is Smalltalk with the most important thing taken out: life. And life comes with the image, and not from objects (or worse yet, merely the instructions for buliding the objects) being trapped in files. Sorry, but that's the way it is. So, until there's a ruby environment as lively as a Smalltalk image, with all its browsers and such, I can't see the ruby-is-smalltalk metaphor doing anything but spreading confusion and disappointment.
How web 2.0 will cost us money
I'm writing this on a 1GHz G4 Ti PowerBook with 1Gb RAM. It's so old, I finished paying for it some time ago.
Until about a year ago I had no desire to upgrade: I don't edit video, I rarely gimp huge images. It's travelled half-way around the world with me (and survived the plunge out of a 747 overhead locker with great aplomb). The machine compiles code of the size I can write by myself fast enough for me not to care about it, it can even do that while playing back music. It can just about drive a 1680x1050 monitor (so long as noting too visually exiting happens). But these days, browsing the web with this machine is increasingly painful as the 2.0 sites get more and more JavaScript intensive, and as that trend spreads to more and more sites. Try doing some general browsing with JS turned off and see how many plain old websites--not a social tag clound in sight--just don't work at all without it. This is a sad state of affairs.
I might add that editing this blog posting is slightly more painful than I'd like, firefox's cpu usage is peaking at about 50%, which is ludicrous.
When I started my professional programming career I was well pleased to have a SPARCStation 5 as my desktop machine. Check out those numbers: 110 MHz! You'll still see those boxes occaisionally today (they're very well built), hidden away in data centers running some admin demon or other. For a while Sun sold headless SS5's as web servers, imagine that. At the time the thought of a "super-computer" grade laptop like the pb I have here would have been laughable. And now it's a crying shame that all this capacity is being burned up in the name of this sort of thing (95% CPU), clever as it is. Which is why I salute Ted for this little investigation, and find this survey of the art rather dismaying for its implications.
Until about a year ago I had no desire to upgrade: I don't edit video, I rarely gimp huge images. It's travelled half-way around the world with me (and survived the plunge out of a 747 overhead locker with great aplomb). The machine compiles code of the size I can write by myself fast enough for me not to care about it, it can even do that while playing back music. It can just about drive a 1680x1050 monitor (so long as noting too visually exiting happens). But these days, browsing the web with this machine is increasingly painful as the 2.0 sites get more and more JavaScript intensive, and as that trend spreads to more and more sites. Try doing some general browsing with JS turned off and see how many plain old websites--not a social tag clound in sight--just don't work at all without it. This is a sad state of affairs.
I might add that editing this blog posting is slightly more painful than I'd like, firefox's cpu usage is peaking at about 50%, which is ludicrous.
When I started my professional programming career I was well pleased to have a SPARCStation 5 as my desktop machine. Check out those numbers: 110 MHz! You'll still see those boxes occaisionally today (they're very well built), hidden away in data centers running some admin demon or other. For a while Sun sold headless SS5's as web servers, imagine that. At the time the thought of a "super-computer" grade laptop like the pb I have here would have been laughable. And now it's a crying shame that all this capacity is being burned up in the name of this sort of thing (95% CPU), clever as it is. Which is why I salute Ted for this little investigation, and find this survey of the art rather dismaying for its implications.
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