Over a year ago, my daughter were walking down a Chelsea sidewalk.

A homeless man walking in front of us froze so suddenly we stopped in our tracks.

He glared at an advertisement showing a human cadaver casually posed it’s skin removed to expose, muscles, tendons, veins, arteries and nerves. Vital organs extending out from its half rib cage.

“not right…”

The man turned to the people flowing past him. “They shouldn’t do that!”

Bodies’ Exhibitors Admit Corpse Origins Are Murky:

“After more than two years of assurances that the cadavers on display in a popular South Street Seaport exhibit were legally obtained in China, the company that runs the exhibit admitted on Thursday that it could not prove that the bodies were not those of prisoners who might have been tortured or executed.” — May 2008 NY Times

In a settlement with the State of New York, the exhibitor has promised refunds to anyone who has seen the exhibit and have changed their policies around acquiring new bodies.

The article quotes a man visiting the exhibit, “When you’re dead, you’re dead. What difference does it make?”

Tag(s): bodies, ethics, news
Comments: none

Kathie on the way to Toronto, August 2008.

Tag(s): kathie, photos
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Steven Doc List and I held a 20 minute presentation and 60 minute open space on software ethics.

I think the format works. Software ethics is not rules or reason, it is navigating essential complexity in building software and in moral choice. Descriptions that “abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence” (Fred Brooks)

We embrace essential complexity using the values and practices of agile software development.

We can become better software developers using the same tools we use to build better software.

We can learn through practice to recognize and accept responsibility for the intended benefit and unintended harm we create.

We can retrospect on our actions and their consequences, engage in a conversation with our peers, learn from, challenge, and support each other.

Tag(s): agile, ethics
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At Agile 2008, I attended Jeff Patton’s talk on embracing uncertainty and Alan Cooper’s keynote on interaction design.

I am convinced it is the role of product owner or customer that needs the most work in our evolving agile practices.

Sponsors express their desires as feature requests. But, as Alan Cooper argues, there is no linear progression from what people need, what they perceive they need, and how they express that in language.

At the same time, supporting departments, customers and management want a commitment to a scope and schedule. And in response, the team wants methodical decomposition to estimatable stories.

And so product owners dive into story writing, decomposing software into smaller bits in order to grasp the whole from the details. But the resulting release backlog looks only slightly more nimble software requirements specification and only slightly better at describing what customer’s really want.

What if regardless of our initial input from customers, product owners took Jeff Patton’s advice and focused our initial backlogs on specific, desired and attainable end user goals — not on interactions but why they are valuable to users? What if themes were something other than a less granular stories?

Could we retain this focus through release planning by sizing these themes not by committing to a single path and simple decomposition but by a more complex matrix of possible implementations, classifying how effectively those implementations might meet the end user goal?

Tag(s): agile, agile usability, product ownership
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By 1920, earth scientists had come to embrace a theory of Uniformitarianism, a world shaped by slow, inexorable forces observable in the present day.

Uniformitarianism fit the evidence of the time and served to separate Geology from Bible scholarship. Glaciers and plate tectonics not God’s miraculous, scourging hand.

The channeled scablands in Eastern Washington State are hard-rock canyons cut by non-existent rivers, alkaline lakes, and house sized boulders scattered on flat plains.

Based on evidence gathered from this terrain, Geologist J. Harlen Bretz came to believe the channeled scablands were, in fact, formed by a catastrophic flood.

The scientific establishment refused Bretz’s claim. Still, over decades, he continued to teach. He continued to champion his work.

Within his lifetime, Bretz’s theory gained wide support based on corroborating evidence of a 2,000 foot deep prehistoric lake over what is now Missoula, Montana and research into ice dams and hydrodynamics.

The channeled scablands were carved out by massive, rapid floods. 500 cubic miles of water traveling 30 to 50 miles an hour draining a lake half the size of Lake Michigan in days.

Recent evidence bridges uniformitarian and catastrophist world views. The scabland floods cycled over thousands of years. Glacial movement would re-establish the ice dam, a new lake would form, water would reach critical height, the dam would shatter.

The origin story of a landscape I’ve loved since childhood from father-son fishing trips, solitary hikes, college road trips and vacations with my wife and daughter, is awe inspiring.

The path to understanding that origin story is both hopeful and cautionary. Science lived up to its ideals though it took the passing of a generation of scientists to get there.

Once an idea hardens into a belief, a belief that supports a deeply held world view, even people dedicated to reasoned debate have trouble hearing evidence to the contrary.

Natural and human events prove unsettlingly complicated. In response, we humans can turn even our most enlightening ideas into weapons of ignorance.

Tag(s): ideas, science
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We celebrated my daughter’s birthday in Montana.

In this picture, a shattered panda pinata. A prize dangling from the tree silent witness to the enthusiasm of small children with big sticks.

Tag(s): photo
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Constraints

(July 2008) “There are some 146,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, down from a peak of 170,000 in 2007″ — Reuters

“Although no decision has been made, by the time President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, at least one and as many as 3 of the 15 combat brigades now in Iraq could be withdrawn or at least scheduled for withdrawal, the officials said. The most optimistic course of events would still leave 120,000 to 130,000 American troops in Iraq.” — NYT

(July 2007) “More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts… The numbers include at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis — all employed in Iraq by U.S. tax dollars.” — LA Times

Goal

“(O)n my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war… ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected.” — Barack Obama

Estimate

“Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month” — Barack Obama

Target

“…that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010″ — Barack Obama

A lot of attention has been placed on the target of sixteen months and whether Obama will stick to it. Obama has said, “I am going to do a thorough assessment when I’m there,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll have more information and continue to refine my policy.” This has been called a “flip flop” or “reversal”.

But this is a simplistic interpretation of both Obama’s position and the nature of a target. The target is informed by the estimate in an attempt to attain the goal. The target should change as new information provides better estimates and if the adjusted target better attains the goal.

It is not the target but the estimate and goal that need to be debated.

Who are the military experts? Does this estimate represent a consensus among these experts? What are the assumptions surrounding this estimate? Does a range of 1-2 brigades per month represent the full range of uncertainty? What are the set of risks that might scuttle this estimate?

What does safety mean in the context of a war? What does it mean to ensure our “interests” are “protected”? What kinds of events would threaten our interests and change the redeployment schedule?

As long as our public debate focuses on positional bargaining around targets we will continue to miss the point.

Tag(s): estimation
Comments: 1

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, begins:

“Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”

The nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations concluded:

“(M)ost of the key judgments have since been debunked as inaccurate, false, or misleading. ”

“According to the Senate committee’s July 2004 report, analysts who wrote the NIE relied more on an assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) than on an objective evaluation of the information they were reviewing. This group-think dynamic, the report states, led analysts, intelligence collectors, and managers to ‘interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program’ and led them to ‘ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have an active and expanding program.’”

A vast majority of senators did not read the whole report but only the summary or how that summary was represented by the administration.

“It’s probably pretty hard to say with 100 percent certainty how many read it,” the senior staffer said. “You can say with 100 percent certainty that it’s less than 10.” — The Hill

The unlikely became possible, the possible became probable, the probable became fact and the “facts” rallied a country to war.

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A product owner describes work. The team estimates it. The product owner sets a delivery target. The team commits to it.

Estimates

People are good at estimating their own ideal effort on well-defined work within their realm of experience.

People are poor at translating ideal effort into calendar days, estimating how long others will take to perform work, and estimating work that is either poorly understood.

Estimation is time consuming with diminishing returns so the effort should be managed to cost, i.e. time-boxed. That is why Agile practices invest more energy and place more value in estimating immediate work than on more speculative work farther out.

All estimates contain uncertainty. Industry research says an upfront estimate can be 25% to 400% of actual performance. The range of uncertainty is deeply dependent on context: how much work is involved, development lifecycle, experience with the particular work, shared experience within the development team and maturity of the management organization.

It is poor practice to “pad an estimate”. Padding doesn’t match the scatter that surrounds upfront estimation. For large scopes of work a developer should express an estimate as a range of uncertainty (i.e. “four to eight months skewing to between six and eight”).

Middle managers should not pad or trim a developer estimate. That is undermining the developer’s authority and making them un-accountable. The estimate is the estimate.

That doesn’t mean that the business doesn’t make planning decisions based on estimates. It means those decisions are separate from, though informed by, the estimate.

Targets

When a product owner or sponsor takes a developer estimate of 4-8 months and sets a release date six months out, they are moving beyond the estimate to set a business target. This is a judgment of what expense and time to market promise sufficient value to justify the work.

The product owner is using the developer’s estimate to inform themselves of the risk they are taking with their investment. An aggressive target within an estimate with high uncertainty is a larger risk than a conservative target on a more certain estimate.

Commitment

Setting an achievable target and owning that decision, communicating the rationale for your decision and having that rationale inform your priorities earns trust and rallies a team to deliver.

It’s the targets, stupid

Don’t set arbitrary targets. Don’t burden yourself with unnecessary risk, demotivate your developers and thoughtlessly constrain the value built into your software.

Do set meaningful targets. Take calculated risks, manage costs, partner with your developers and know what and when you need to deliver to your customers.

It’s not an estimate. The developer cannot assume your risk.

It’s not a commitment. You’ve got to earn that.

At the end of the day, the product owner is responsible for understanding the business climate, understanding the customer, describing and prioritizing the work, and managing the company’s investment to a successful outcome.

Tag(s): agile, estimation, product ownership
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Not to get super preachy on you all, but sometimes I think we’re full bore on the wrong mission.” — ‘Agile Shop’ by Dave Laribee

As people, we embrace change we can ourselves effect. Our conversations about value turn to story writing. Our conversations about competitiveness turn to scale.

But we risk engaging the surface of things and not the things themselves. Means to what end?

As brother bee preaches, I stand before you penitent of the sin of local optimization.

In my last job, I led a development team. We were an agile team in a non-agile company. We were engaged in the effort of years, championing organizational change bottom up.

In spite of everything we’d built — an excellent agile team, a direct relationship with our CEO, visible release backlogs and delivery — the business remained opaque. It was unable to rally to us and unwilling to provide the transparency and focus we needed to effectively rally to it.

As a result, our timeline didn’t match the life-cycle of the business. When it was acquired, our efforts were shelved and we all moved on.

An agile team in a non-agile organization is not agile enough.

Tag(s): agile
Comments: 1