Exploration Through Example

I got a nice note today complimenting me on my never-finished A Little Ruby, a Lot of Objects. I get those every once in a while. It’s a Ruby book modeled after The Little Lisper.

I’ve been considering what to do with this, my second midlife crisis. (The first was at 28.) Having bought the Porsche, gotten fit, and gotten divorced in the first one, the customary responses are out. Been there, done that. So, instead, I’ve been thinking that finishing A Little Ruby might be a good use of pent-up frustration and legacy idealism.

Besides being fodder for language geeks, it would also have a practical purpose: I think of it as becoming the best book for those wanting a gentle introduction to extreme metaclass hackery.

Also: having just gotten a royalty check for Everyday Scripting, the idea of publishing the results appeals.

Would you buy such a book? Do you think other people would?

Jeff Patton writes an article on Slow Software and puts it in context on his blog. He asks for reactions.

My off-the-cuff reaction is that he’s letting us ignore reflexivity. “Reflexivity“: a jargon word. What does it mean? Take two statements of Jeff’s:

Before we plan and build, we should
take time to understand what value is.
Make sure the first thing we gather is
how the people paying for the software
will get value from it. […]

We also might want to understand
better the people using our software.
They’ve got goals, too, which likely are
met using other software or manual
processes today.

“What value is” and “their goals” and “their processes” ought to change when the software is injected into the mix. That change ought to reflect back on the product, which will then change its environment again, …, until eventually things settle down because further change is not worth the effort.

But I have to admit that reflexive loop is something that appeals to my personality. A perfectly valid response to the above goes like this:

• The vast majority of products don’t need any high-falutin’ reflexive loop. They’re a CRUD app attached to a database, just like a zillion others.

• I’m overly fond of this reflexive loop because I don’t have the skill to understand its value and user goals until after I dump a product on someone. If I were more skilled, I could immediately get to the same place that I today can get to only after several trips around the loop. Maybe, especially with those CRUD apps, I could even get immediately to the place where further change to decisions is not worth the effort. In that case, the main point of developing in short iterations would not be to allow discovery but to enforce discipline.

I think those are valid points. For that reason, I’ve asked Jeff to let me join him on some consulting gigs, so I can sit at his feet, watch, and learn.

Here. Silly, I thought, before I realized I do something like it.

Mishkin Berteig has a concise list of five reasons to try Agile. Could be useful as a cheat sheet when talking to business people.

Edwin Hutchins is the author of Cognition in the Wild, an influential book on how groups think. If I were closer to Chicago, I’d go. I might still go. Sounds pretty relevant to crossing the cultural divides that often separate, say, the business people from the development team.

Edwin Hutchins (UCSD) will be presenting a colloquium entitled “The multimodal production of common ground understandings” on Thursday, October 4th at 4:00pm. The colloquium will be held at Room 1-421, Frances Searle Building.

For more information on the TSB speaker series (and to sign up for announcements), visit http://tsb.northwestern.edu

THE MULTIMODAL PRODUCTION OF COMMON GROUND UNDERSTANDINGS
Edwin Hutchins

ABSTRACT:
Effective collaboration requires the creation and maintenance of common ground understandings. This is an especially interesting problem in the case of intercultural collaboration, where communicative conventions may not be shared. However, intercultural collaboration often takes place in professionally relevant material settings and among people who share professional competence. In this paper we show how Japanese airline pilots and American flight instructors overcome pronounced differences in language and culture and achieve effective collaboration. They do this by drawing on a rich body of shared professional pilot culture and by exploiting richly multimodality situated communication practices to produce common ground understandings.

A nice summary.

The three seasons of Deadwood are an allegory of the history of Agile. Discuss.

For extra credit, identify which season we’re currently in.

Agile 2008 will be arranged around the metaphor of a music festival. There will be a main stage for the big-draw speakers, the larger tutorials for novices, etc.

I was asked to do a stage about testing that wouldn’t help shunt people into silos. (It shouldn’t be “the testing mini-conference”.) I decided the stage would take seriously the usefulness of explicit, concrete examples—executable or no—in the thinking about, construction, and post-construction investigation of software-ish things. Hence the logo:

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The 2007 winners of the Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice are Naresh Jain, for his work establishing user groups in India and for the Simple Design and Testing conference; and Jeff Patton, for his work helping establish what User Centered Design means in Agile (including the agile-usability group) and for being an example of the usefulness of being fluent in two fields (programming and UCD).

We also broke from our charter to create a new award—the Ward Cunningham Gentle Voice of Reason Award—and awarded it to Dale Emery for what he’s done on the XP and other mailing lists, and in person; and also for his work creating environments where change happens (rather than, as J.B. Rainsberger put it, “inflicting change on people”).

Join me in a warm round of applause…

(P.S. The similarity between this award’s graphic and my own four missing values poster is unfortunate. The Pask Award design came first, and I loved the image of ringing out the news. I hope the similarity isn’t interpreted to imply any other connection.)

I decided to make up a poster reminding people of the four underemphasized values. Here it is:

If you would like one, send me mail. They are roughly one foot by two feet (30 by 60 centimeters). If you will be at Agile2007, I’ll bring one there for you to take back. (I’ll also have “An Example Would Be Handy Right About Now” stickers to give out.)

As always, the offer is good until I get tired of going to the Post Office or my inner cheapskate rebels.

I will mail overseas. I’m tickled that the stickers went to Europe, China, Australia, and elsewhere.