Author Archives: Ken Judy

About Ken Judy

I am an executive leader, software developer, father and husband trying to do more good than harm. I am an agile practitioner. I say this fully aware I say nothing. Sold as a tool to solve problems, agile is more a set of principles that encourage us to confront problems. Broad adoption of the jargon has not resulted in wide embrace of these principles. I strive to create material and human good by respecting co-workers, telling truth to employers, improving my skills, and caring for the people affected by the software I help build.

The exercise of power over others

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“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”

— Frederick Douglass

“Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

Oops… learning lessons over and over

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Here are agile software development mistakes that kick my ass whenever I let them:

  • Know the assumptions in plans. Recognize when they change.
  • Don’t abuse time boxing. It is a toe hold for over-committing. When the time box ends, the work ends.
  • Doing Scrum means DOING SCRUM. Sloppy backlog. No Scrum. No Product Owner. No Scrum.
  • No iteration boundaries and no commitment doesn’t make me “lean”.

The flying trunk

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So, my wife and I read my daughter Hans Christian Anderson at bedtime. Our assumption is that fairy tales are in some way more hopeful and appropriate than, say, Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica.

The Flying Trunk by Hans Christian Anderson

trunk detail by genericavatar on flickrThe son of a wealthy merchant squanders his inheritance. His friends abandon him. One leaves him a trunk with the note, “pack up.”

But the trunk is enchanted and carries the young man to the roof of a far off tower. Inside lives a princess hidden from the world in fear of the prophecy that “she will be very unhappy about a lover”.

The young man charms the princess with tall tales of adventure. He impresses the King and Queen with claims of magical powers and charms them with an improvised tale of matches who pretend to greatness as they flame and die lighting the kitchen stove.

The king and queen offer their daughter in marriage. In celebration the aspiring prince flies into the night sky showering the town with fireworks.

The next morning, he discovers embers have burned his trunk to ashes. Ruined, he flees the town and abandons the princess.

“she stood all day on the roof waiting for him, and most likely she is waiting there still; while he wanders through the world telling fairy tales, but none of them so amusing as the one he related about the matches.”

Both the innocent and clever live in misery and mediocrity.

The Flying TrunkDespite and because of her parent’s actions, the princes, meets her fate.

The merchant’s son, a flawed person, becomes a flawed artist forever repeating his mistakes and falling short of first creative effort. He is a fairy tale character who invents a cautionary tale which describes himself.

Now go to sleep and pleasant dreams…