-
This is an interesting idea sent over by JC. Implementing definitely requires the right combination of culture.
Cauvin – The Time Boxing rule
-
Breaking requirements down seems to be one of the biggest hurdles for teams converting over to Agile.
Netflix Musings
As most of you know, I’m a diehard Netflix fan. Besides a really simple and cheap method for watching movies, some of the really addictive aspects of Netflix include the ratings and friends features where you can rate movies and see what your friends thought. I really enjoy the “most similarity” rating, which shows which friends have the most similar taste in movies. While the rating could become self-prophesying, it definitely provides a good means for deciding what to watch in some situations.
Over the past couple of months a couple of friends have mentioned the new service that Blockbuster is providing, which is effectively trying to put Netflix on the dead company list. In addition, I’ve noticed that the Netflix turnaround on movies over the past 6 months has fallen off significantly. Since there is a shipping hub in Austin, I would typically get 2 day turnaround on a returned movie, but now, this time has increased to 4-5 days, which has left me dry on more than one occasion. Is this competition with Blockbuster starting to have an effect on Netflix? Has anyone else noticed the Netflix slowdown? I would think Netflix would want to do all it can to fend off its market share from Blockbuster; thus, saving a few dollars by slowing the movie return process seems like a bad trade off.
On a completely different note, why hasn’t Netflix integrated with Rotten Tomatoes? Before investing 2 hours of your life on a movie, it pays to do a little research, and Rotten Tomatoes includes excellent overall ratings from a large number of critics as well as users. Netflix has some critics involved with the online system, but having the power of aggregation of all critics would be a much added bonus.
The goal of school via Graham
-
It’s hard to disagree, even though this wasn’t the original reason public schools were created.
Scrum & XP from the trenches
-
See the PDF in the opening sentence. Personally, I like 2 week iterations over 3 week. Also, while the backlog is VERY important, I see equal, if not more, benefit from the “keep releasable” iterations.
The virtualization platform for software?
The technology trade rags are filled with all the latest new products allowing virtual machines (VM) to run on varieties of platforms and chipsets. For many of us, this means running many versions of Windows or Linux on one machine simultaneously; however, it could be just about any OS supported by the VM software of your choosing. While the obvious solutions this could fill would be centralized management of the workstations within a company, there are some more subtle ideas that appear to be taking hold. (Duh disclaimer: It’s possible that I’ve ignored these ideas in the past, but as my confidence slowly grows with VMs in the test lab, these ideas don’t seem as farfetched as before.)
Instead of shipping software to customers for installation, imagine shipping a VM with the software already installed on the OS. If the customer was running compatible VM server software, they could just load an instance of the new OS with software already installed, configured and ready to go. In fact, as this article eludes, the customer could ship a production copy back to the software company for maintenance and/or an upgrade, which could be tested before being shipped back to the customer.
Granted, there are some hurdles to overcome just as the introduction of multi-threading and multiple CPUs had issues, which means the hardware to support all of this will have to be faster and more robust than ever. Hard disk I/O and resource utilization will be an issue for the foreseeable future, but the more time intensive problems of debugging environmental software problems could be minimized. In some cases, the changes to a customer’s environment might be as easy as updating to a patched VM.
While those of us in the enterprise software industry know that the customer’s actual environment is more often a contributor of a problem than the software itself, the approach does provide some advantages in supportability. Does anyone know of software vendors using this approach yet? I wonder how many years away we are from seeing software vendors only support certain VM server software, which would be just the opposite for most vendors today? Are VM standards being set, or will we see the same compatibility problems that occurred with J2EE?
Software Test Tools
-
A comparative review of four open source continuous integration tools
-
Web Site Test Tools and Site Management Tools
You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t want to know
-
Why innovation is lacking in large companies…
The Specialization Ambush
As someone who has performed in various leadership roles over the years, one career killer remains evident year after year: The Specialization Ambush. When did this fundamental requirement for capitalism become obsolete you may be asking yourself. As someone who has spent years learning about computers and software, I would have argued a strong case for learning every bit and byte there is to know, but now, I propose a different position.
The Specialization Ambush is a trap that workers of all occupations are lured into by exploiting existing skills at the cost of learning new skills for the future, and doing so will likely result in major distress at some point in time. Triggers for detecting too much specialization are the thoughts: “that’s not my job” or “I’m not trained for that”. As employers look for employees to do more with less, it’s worthwhile to consider learning more about other parts of the business, even if little bits at a time, because today’s craft is tomorrow’s bygone.
Dogs and their owners
As a lifetime dog owner, I recently sat down to investigate the answers to a couple of questions that rose during a conversation with some good friends, who are also long time dog owners. During the conversation, a lively debate ensued over whether it made sense to have leash laws. While the various stances taken on this subject are interesting (and quite intense as I found out), I thought I would instead set out to research some of the sticking points which surfaced during the conversation.
What do dogs and kids have in common? One answer that could be given is they are both typically shorter than most adults and can be behave impulsively at times. Actually, the real question was whether friendly dogs could and have bitten children. The really hard part in answering this question was defining the subjective ‘friendly’ aspect. While there’s little debate that very few people die from dog attacks in the US, there appears to be a number of dog bite claims in any given year. While most of the statistics I could find pointed to the majority (> 60%) of dog bites occurring to children, it was hard to determine how many of the bites occurred from the teeth of a friendly dog, otherwise known as a dog with a responsible owner. So, while the ultimate question can’t be certified with statistics per say, the bottom line seems to be each reader’s belief in whether the opening question and subsequent answer is truly fact or fiction.
What is the safest thing to do when running past an unleashed dog? As a devoted runner, I have a vested interest in knowing what the experts recommend, and while the first question left some grey area to be explored, I was unable to find much variance while researching this question on the Internet. The unanimous suggestion by runners and dog owners alike all pointed to slowing down to a walk or stopping, if pursued by a dog while running. Most articles on this subject suggest doing things to make the dog uninterested if the pursuit continues or becomes aggressive, such as looking away and rolling up into a ball on the ground.
Leaving the original debate for the local representatives to hash out, the research resulted in some fascinating information on this subject, and knowing that many of the regular subscribers of this blog are dog owners, I’m curious to see if any comments surface on this subject. As for me, I’ll be sleeping sound knowing the king (or just Joe, as we like to call him) is protecting the house.
Continual Improvement 
You must be logged in to post a comment.