Next Meeting

Our next meeting is this coming Monday, February 4. Arlo Belshee from Portland will be presenting a talk on the fascinating work he is doing. A full description is below.  His talk will probably give you a few mere questions about how software projects could be done...

Who:      Arlo Belshee

What:     Naked Planning – Taking the Open Kimono Principle to one Extreme

When:    Monday February 4, 5:30pm - 7:30pm

Where:   Avanade Inc. ( 2211 Elliott Avenue, Seattle, WA)

Please RSVP to Dragos Dumitriu (dragosd at avanade dot com).  If the door is locked call Dragos (425.260.9283) or David Socha (206.418.8201).

Description:

What happens if we try to be completely honest and transparent while producing software? What are all the places where we automatically and unintentionally lie to ourselves? How can we be completely honest if we lie to ourselves?

 

Estimation encourages lying, because people want answers at higher precision than is actually available in the universe. So does cost-benefit analysis, or even detailed benefit-only analysis. Serial processes and iterations stack up more little lies – “we’re going to release the Foo on Wednesday,” “we’ll do Bob’s foo task, and then start Jamie’s task,” “we have some idea how many bugs or other distractions will happen, so we can account for that.” Legacy code causes huge lies – “we believe this code is safe to ship,” and “we’re going to work on task Foo today.”

 

However, there is a real, legitimate need for planning. Even more, there is a need for prioritization – for choosing the 90% of our great ideas that we are simply not going to do. How do you accomplish this without the lies? Is there any advantage to doing so?

 

Naked Planning is an attempt to eliminate all the places where we can’t help but lie. It draws strongly from other Kanban and continuous-flow-of-value approaches, using a small number of simple activities performed continuously. These satisfy the needs addressed by the former, self-delusional activities. We seek a ground where intuition guides us in the right direction, and physical constraints guide our intuition. 

 

My current team has been planning naked for about 8 months. It has significantly improved our ability to get control of our legacy code and cooperate with the rest of the company. Naked Planning provides a simple way to empower everyone – from Sales to Dev to Accounting – to do what’s right.

 

Bio:

Arlo does a little bit of everything, but what he really does is inspire courage. He has gone back and forth several times between management and in-the-trenches development on technically sophisticated products. He challenges every assumption he can find, and helps people learn to change – always and continuously. He has been involved in Agile since 1999. Yet in the middle of that period he worked for 2 years in a rigorous, effective, and pro-people Waterfall development shop. He’s a strong believer in discipline and the agility that comes from it, in punctuated continuity, and in change as the only constant. Don’t do anything he says, but learn why he says it and come up with something better. The best compliment he’s recently received was when a co-worker termed him the Company Jester – because Arlo always has permission to laugh at the King.

 Create your own educational wiki!Support CommunityPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS