Last night CharJUG had the priviledge of having Pragmatic Programmer Andy Hunt speak. Though I was sorely disappointed in the turnout (19 people of 60 some odd who I had talked or had expressed interest in going) I was not in the presentation.
The talk started at 6:45pm and went until nearly 9:45pm. I took lots of notes, and I’m hoping he sends me the powerpoint so I can put it up on the site, but here are some highlights:
– The “Broken Windows” theory. The story is that these researchers put a nice car (Jaguar or similar) in the South Bronx and left it for four days. Nothing happened to the car at all. So they went over and broke one window. Within four hours the car had been stripped, burned and flipped. The moral? Don’t let little things like broken builds pile up – fix them immediately. If you build up too much “technical debt” you may not be able to get back out.
– Processes have to be easy. In 2000 Romaine lettuce consumption went up 162%. Why? Because American’s started eating healthier (“No”, says Andy, “American’s still eat crap”)? Because McDonald’s started selling salads? Nope! Because that was the year they introduced “Salad in a bag” making it a no brainer for people to get some pretty, prewashed lettue and shake it on their plate. Even though it is much more expensive, people want things to be easy.
– Stand up meetings should answer three questions, and three questions only. What have you accomplished? What are you working on? What is in your way? And the answers should be in term of that day. Saying that you are working on getting validation working for your login page is good. Saying you are working on “your app” without specifics is bad.
– Don’t let any of your apps have a Bus number of “1”. Your bus number is not your position in the computer as an ISA card, it is how many people can get hit by a bus before you are in trouble because no one else understands the app.
– The worst words you can hear from a team are “We’ll try.” That means that they know that they are subject to failure, and that they also know they aren’t going to make it, so they are just going to march%2