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.

I can until I can’t

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I just came back from a work-related trip to Belfast and Paris. I learned these things:

Cúpula by Edgley Cesar on Flickr

I hate being away from my family.
I don’t adjust quickly to timezone changes.
For that, I’m not a bad traveler.
I approach the world with humility
And a sense of humor.
And I truly enjoy myself
As long as I make time for lone walks,
Share meals with other people,
And the destination itself offers wonders.
I function okay on lack of sleep – until I can’t
And then I lose things like my camera.

This photo of Galeries Lafayette, Paris is like one I took on my lost Nikon P5100

What difference does it make?

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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?”

Agile 2008

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toronto_skyline
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.

Owning uncertainty

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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?