Self-proclaimed preacher stalking the subway car. Declaiming the wonders of His god.
An old technology, amped up, 3D advertisement showing up rum pirates and dermatoligists. My child plugs her ears.
His god afflicts the wicked with sufferings. His god rewards His virtue with health and long life. Anti-Job like. Touch His brochures and save yourselves.
Informed Consent — “the right of each individual potentially affected by a project to participate to an appropriate degree in decision making concerning that project” (Gail D. Baura, Engineering Ethics: An Industrial perspective
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“(T)he astronauts should have been informed of the possibility of O-ring failure before the Challenger launch…” — G. Baura
Often the people asked to pay down a risk are not the ones who suffer if the risk plays out. For Challenger, this distance contributed to the sacrifice of innocents.
As developers, we must never hide risk for which others suffer the consequences. This is core to Scrum. The team tells the Product Owner anything that may affect the business outcome of a project.
Scrum’s focus on self-directed teams instills the courage informed consent asks of us. Frequent opportunities to inspect and adapt gives it voice.
However, an ethical view obligates us to more than delivering business value and we cannot entirely cede our conscience to our product owners. We have an obligation to each other, our collective reputation, the people who use or indirectly benefit from our systems, and the public good. For the most part, these interests have no informed consent on our projects.
As Agile practitioners and Scrum advocates, how can we expand our conversation and help each other exercise due care?
Last year (2006), my boss Steve Morgan gave me this MBO:
Don’t become like the pointy hair guy and help the Execs to not become like the pointy hair guy
Is there an incremental path to becoming “The Boss”?
Today was a slow. I upgraded our build bunny to a WPA-capable Nabaztag/tag. Good builds make the bunny very happy. Broken builds make the bunny so sad.
Thanks for the idea to The Pragmatic Programmers and their ridiculous lava lamps. My co-worker Kris wrote a custom publisher to integrate CruiseControl with the nabaztag api.
“A little nonsense, now and then, is relished by the wisest men” — Willy Wonka
My company loves Photoshop comps. Way too much. I know this and yet, to some degree, I’ve enabled it.
It’s not original of me to say that static mockups are misleading and often unnecessary. 37 Signals fairly shouts it. It’s also deep in the agile spirit of conversations over contracts.
My team walks this talk. We co-locate our designer to pair with our developers. We present product ideas using hand drawn sketches and narratives.
Still, in a company with design approvals and a history of handing down information architecture to developers it’s tempting (I’m tempted) to ward off complications by cooking up visuals that are irrelevant, obvious or subject to change, “pushing pixels that won’t even exist later.”
At first, you create formalities around your agile process to protect your team but with success you get opportunities to teach by doing — to demonstrate work is unnecessary by not doing it.
All this hit me today like it had never occurred to me before even though I’d read, thought and said some variation of it so many times I should have put music to it by now.
We’ve earned some trust. As my team starts building our first web products for our company, I think it’s time to end our infatuation with 800×600 jpegs.
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