patkua@work

The intersection of technology and leadership

Category: Management (Page 5 of 8)

What is Failure Demand in Software Development

May 23, 2013 / / 4 Comments

The idea of “Failure Demand” comes from systems thinker, John Seddon, who describes it as “unnecessary burden on the system.” By looking at removing failure demand on a system, you free up more capacity to focus on value added work. Much of failure demand also maps to the lead concept of “waste” although not all “waste” is the same as failure demand.

Some classic examples (and tell-tale signs) I see with companies include:

  • Poor quality work – Features that are not tested, or well designed end up generating bugs. A smell to look for is lots of issues reported by end users. Lots of errors in production logs are also another great smell for detecting this.
  • Features designed without thinking about User Experience – Without putting the end user of a system in mind, many organisations build functionality without exploring how/why an end user of their system will end up using it. Working with an effective user experience capability means simpler, clearer interfaces that help end users get the job done. Smells to look out for include interfaces that have too many additions or features added to it.
  • Requirements solely driven by a Product Manager – Many organisations rely solely on the HiPPO (the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) to drive requirements. Although a Product Manager role is still useful for other reasons, faster experimentation and data collection of testing hypothesis is of use. Look out for smells like long release cycles, date driven requirements, or large backlog requests of detailed “user requirements” specified by the Product Manager without real involvement or feedback from end users.
  • Misunderstandings – As a software organisation grows, the communication channels significantly increase. When people do not validate their understandings with each other, they end up doing more rework than necessary. Depending on how complex the problem space is, using visual models, workshops that explore a certain approach and simply showing progress constantly (daily or weekly basis) help to resolve this.

What other examples of failure demand do you see? Please leave a comment.

Reflecting on Feature Leads

January 17, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Last year, I wrote about trialling the idea of Feature Leads. I think the idea worked out and I would encourage more teams to adopt this approach. It helped devolve some of the responsibility and made the work more engaging for developers. Looking back at the list of things to consider, I would now add more items.

What is missing list?

  • New environment needs? – Do we require new environments to support business stakeholders in their own testing, or do we overload an existing environment? If we rely on external dependencies, can they support the number of environments that we need.
  • Identify external dependencies – If we are working with external vendors, we need to probably be a bit more upfront in working out when key dates are so that we can co-ordinate
  • Has the business made any external/internal commitments – As much as teams get frustrated by arbitrary dates set by the business, it’s useful to know if a) any have already been set, or b) business stakeholders want to communicate dates because that means you need to manage expectations and ensure that those commitments are balanced with other priorities going on.
  • Is the solution simple, but evolvable – Does the approach make any anticipated work harder than it needs to be? Does it balance out time to market? Can we go for an even more lightweight solution and substitue a more complex one later if needed?
  • Do we need to build anything for the feature? – Is software even needed, or can some lightweight business process take care of the need? If we build this, how long will be used, and therefore how much effort in maintaining it/adding automated tests around it?

Looking back at the list of responsibilities, I think these elements help add to a standard list of what things to consider when designing any sort of software solution, and not just the building of it, but thinking about the long term effects of it (who uses it, who’s going to run it, who’s going to maintain it).

Looking back at a year with a client

December 7, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Over the last twelve months, I’ve worked with a client to rebuild a digital platform and a team to deliver it. It’s now time for us to leave, and a perfect time to reflect on how things went. The digital platform rebuild was part of a greater transformation programme that also involved the entire business changing alongside at almost all levels of people in the organisation. The programme also outlined, before we arrived, outlined a complete change in all technology platforms as well (CRM, CMS, website) to be rebuilt for a more integrated and holistic service offering.

Our part in this program turned into building the new web digital platform, working against a very high level roadmap, and a hard marketing deadline. We ended up building the site using Ruby on Rails serving content driven by a 3rd party decisioning platform (much like Amazon recommendations) guided by the business vision of better tailored content for end users. We didn’t have much input into the final choice of several products. I’m very proud of the end result, particularly given the tense and short-timed framed environment in which we worked. Here are some examples of constraints we worked with:

  • 4 Product Owners over the span of 11 months – From January this year, through to the end of October, the business was onto its fourth Product Owner for the digital platform. Building a consistent product is pretty much nigh impossible with changing product hands, and trying to bridge work from one Product Owner to the next was definitely a challenge.
  • Constant churn in the business – The 4 product owners is one instance, but we would often be working with people in the business to work out what should be done, only to find that the following week they were no longer with the business.
  • 3 Design Agencies engaged resulting in “reskinning” approved by the board before the 6 month public launch – We saw several “design changes” done by firms well stocked with people capable of generating beautifully-rendered PDFs that were signed off. However often these would imply new functional work, or be impractical to the web medium.
  • Marketing deadlines announced well before the development team had been engaged – A common pattern in the business was marketing launching a press release announcing a date, well before the people involved in delivering it were made aware, or even consulted on it.
  • PM Explosion – At one point, it felt like we had more Project Managers on the group planning out work with budgets and timelines that would be approved well before the development team had been approached.

Even with these constraints we’ve been able to deploy to production 37 times in the last three months and more since the original MVP go-live in July. Part of what I’m particularly proud of is the team where we were able to achieve the following:

  • Building an Evolvable Architecture – We questioned the original choice and need for a CMS but with a constraint that a decision had been made on buying these tools, we architected a solution that would hide the implementation details of the CMS via a content service. With our TW experience and pain dealing with CMSes that are shadowed by business need, we wanted something that would not constrain what the business could achieve (hence the decoupling). We even had a chance to prove this out when the business requirements quickly hit the limit of the CMS’s built in categorisation module.
  • Responding to Change – The business roadmaps seems to change on a daily basis, and our team was able to quickly tack to accommodate these business changes. We changed the team structure as the team size increased, changed the team structure as we went live, and again as people in the business changed. Whilst our process felt similar, it would look nothing like a textbook XP, Scrum or Kanban process.
  • Improving the Process – Our team has been constantly trying to change the process not only internally to the development team, but also helping people in the business find ways of improving their own way of working. Progress has been slow as the change that starts falters as people leave. Retrospectives have been a key tool but also has the ability for the team to feel empowered with recommending and pursuing improvements they see fit.
  • Setting an example of transparency – Showcases are key to the business, and we would offer fortnightly showcases to the features built to the entire organisation. Huge numbers of people came along and I found it fascinating that it was one place where people had an opportunity to talk across silos. This sometimes slowed down our ability to show what we had actually done, but I felt exposed missing communication structures that people still needed.

At a technical level, I’m really proud of some of the principles I wanted to achieve at the start and that the team lived throughout (I’d love to hear what their experience is). Some of these include:

  • Fast developer setup – Getting started on each new machine should be fast without complicated installation processes
  • Developers rotating through operations – There’s nothing like supporting the code you wrote to help developers understand the importance of logging, test cases that are missed and just experiencing what production support is like
  • DevOps culture – Everyone on the team is capable of navigating puppet, knowing where to look for configuration changes and ensuring that applications are configurable enough to be deployed without special builds across environments.
  • Continuous Delivery – Our second product owner (the first transitioned out the day we went live) actually asked for us to release less often (i.e. it is a business decision to go-live) so that they could work with the rest of the business to ensure they had their non-IT dependencies in place.
  • Devolved Authority to Feature Leads – I blogged previously about Feature Leads who could help shape the technical solution and drive the knowledge for the project.
  • Metrics Driven Requirements – Though not completely successful, we were able to stop the business from implementing some feature by showing them production metrics. In this case, we were able to avoid building a complex search algorithm to show that we could achieve the same result by adding to a list of synonyms on search.
  • Everyone grows – If I look back at the project, I think everyone on the team has experienced and grown a significant amount in different ways. I think we struck a good balance between being able to work towards individuals goals and find ways they could help the project at the same time.

Other particular things I’m proud of the team:

  • Taming the Hippo – Worthy of its own post, Hippo CMS has been one of the least developer friendly tools I’ve had to deal with for some time. The team managed to work out how to run an effective functional test around its poor UI as well as deploy and upgrade the beast in different environments without the 12 step manual process outlined on their wiki.
  • Rapid team size – Management wanted the entire team to start at the same time. Even being able to push back, we ended up with a very aggressive ramp up and we still managed to deliver well.
  • Diverse but co-operative – We had something like 17 people and 14 different nationalities and it’s one of the strongest teams I’ve seen who were able to work through their differences and forge ahead.

Things that I would like to be different:

  • Find a way to code a lot more – Due to the circumstances, many elements drew me away from coding. At best, I can remember pairing with someone for at most two days a week (for a short time) and I would like to find a way to do that more.
  • Implement more validated learning – Although dependent on a product owner willing to do this, I would have liked to work more on trying to build and experiment a lot more.
  • Have a stronger relationship with decision makers with authority – I believe development teams work best when they are connected to people who can make decisions, not just organisational proxies who provide answers. Unfortunately I felt most of this cascaded very far up the organisation and due to the constant flux and organisational change, this wasn’t possible in the timeframe. I’m hopeful that as the business matures and more permanent people find their place, this will be more possible.

Reflections on Agile 2012

August 19, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Another year, another agile conference. It’s time for reflecting on the conference and uncovering lessons learned. Dallas, Texas hosted this year’s Agile Conference. More accurately, the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine hosted this year’s Agile Conference. Loved by many at the conference (notably less so by Europeans) the resort reminds me of the Eden Project and a weird biosphere (see picture below) that is self-contained and fully air-conditioned. Although maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing with a West Nile virus outbreak in Dallas.

Needless to say that I stepped out quite a bit to try to get some fresh, if not, refreshingly humid air.

Onto the conference. It was very well organised, very well run and even rapidly responded to feedback (such as moving rooms when demand proved too much for some of the anticipated sessions. Food came out very promptly in the different breaks. We didn’t have to queue too long and the variety was pretty good. The only breakdown was probably the Tuesday lunchtime where it wasn’t clear we had to get our own food and with a limited number of on-site restaurants in our self-enclosed bubble world, proved to be a bit of a tight squeeze in schedule.

The people at the conference seemed to be a bit of a mix. Mainly lots of consultants like myself sharing their experiences, but as one person noted, an extraordinary number of agile coaches all apparently looking for work. On the other extreme there seemed to be lots of companies adopting agile and lots of people selling tools and training to help them.

Lots of parallel tracks meant lots of choice for many people but I often found it hard to find things that worked for me. I’m less interested in “enterprise agile adoption”, and more interested in the practices pushing the boundaries, or the deep insight offered by people. The few technical sessions I went seemed to be aimed at a bit more of an introductory audience. I particularly avoided any of the “do this with scrum” or “do this with kanban” as these appeared by be pushing.

In terms of keynotes, I thought they did a great job of assembling some diverse and interesting sessions. Although Bob Sutton (No A**hole Rule author) felt like he didn’t do much preparation for his keynote from the text heavy slides that jumped at different paces, he had some good anecdotes and stories to share. My biggest takeaway from that session was thinking about taking away practices just as much as adding practices, something that I think I do implicitly but should try to do more explicitly. The other keynotes were pretty inspiring as well, with Dr. Sunita Maheshwari behind Telerad talking about her accidental experiment moving into doing remote radiology to support the night-shift need of hospitals in the US and the interesting growth of their business. The other really inspirational keynote was by Joe Justice, the guy behind the amazing Wikispeed project taking sets of agile practices and principles back into the car-making industry. I felt he really knew his stuff, and it’s amazing how you can tell someone who really understands the values and trying to live them in different ways and then translating them into a different world. Very cool stuff that you should check out.

In terms of other workshop sessions, I left half way through many of them as the ideas were either too slow, or not at all interesting (such as one on Agile Enterprise Architecture that spent 30 minutes trying to go back to the age-old debate of defining Enterprise Architecture.)

Two of my most favourite sessions was one by Linda Rising who gave a very heart-felt and personal Q&A session that left many people in tears. Her stories are always very personal, and I really admire her ability to look beyond someone’s words and really uncover the true question they are asking with a usually insightful answer as well! The other session was listening to the great work that Luke Hohmann of Innovation Games has been doing with the San Jose government to change the way they make decisions about where the money goes through the use of games and play. Very awesome stuff.

I had my session in the last possible slot on the Thursday and had a large number of well known people in competing slots such as Jeff Sutherland, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. I’m very happy with the turn out as we had a lot of fun playing games from the Systems Thinking Playbook including a number of insightful conversations about systems thinking concepts and how they apply to our working life. One of my most favourite exercises (Harvest) that demonstrates the Tragedy of the Commons archectype played its course and we finished in just three years (iterations) only due to a constraint I added early into the game. I love this exercise for its potential for variation and the insightful conversations about how this applies to agile teams, organisations and functions.

You often can’t come away from conferences without new references, so here’s the list of books and web resources I noted down (but obviously my summary is without actually reading into it, so YMMV):

Talking Feature Leads

July 15, 2012 / / 11 Comments

On my current project, I’ve tried something a little bit different inspired by the work of Feature Driven Development (FDD). Although sometimes cited as an agile methodology, my perception is that it is one of the lesser talked-about methodologies. On my current project we have been trying the idea of Feature Leads for the last four to five months, and I’m pretty happy with how it has turned out.

Feature teams versus Feature Leads
FDD often talks about Feature Teams – or a team that works on the design and implementation of a feature area. Since FDD heavily emphasises more modelling up-front, these tasks also often talk about Feature Teams leading the UML modelling and design documentation that goes along with it. In our circumstance, I didn’t think it made sense to have any real Feature Teams, namely because it was a greenfield project and there wasn’t any clear way features stayed independent of each other. I favoured the XP practice of Collective Code Ownership over what specialisation a Feature Team may bring together. I wanted the best of both worlds, so I introduced the team to the idea of a Feature Lead.

What does a Feature Lead do?
Our team had a good mix of experience, and introducing the “idea” of Feature Lead without communicating some of the responsibilities would definitely lead to some trouble. When I first introduced the Feature Lead term, I outlined a list of responsibilities that would come with it. I even printed a list to give to each Feature Lead to act as the starting point for a Standard Work checklist.

I included the following activities:

  • Explore all the use cases – Arrange workshops with the business owner to understand all business objectives the are trying to accomplish. Design a solution with that stakeholder, balancing business process supported by technology. Challenge assumptions about technology constraints and solutions, and avoid building software if there isn’t a clear need (i.e. we don’t want to build the wrong thing faster). Work with me (as the overall Technical Leader) to validate the solution. Consider the end-to-end flow including business people who need to be involved in set-up, on-going maintenance or business support as well as expected outcome.
  • Explore the impact on deployment and architecture – Does the business needs/technical solution warrant a change in architecture?
  • Identify spikes as early as possible – Are there any investigations we need to explore to create more options, or to validate assumptions before committing to a solution? Separate work that is not estimable into a spike and a story (and highlight the dependency on the spike).
  • Consider external configuration – Will this work require new configuration work? How often will it change? Where will we store it?
  • Who/where is the authoritative source? – If there is new data, or a new data store, be clear about which system is the authoritative source
  • Does it make sense to re-write the backlog items? – We had already been given backlog items broken down, but often we found them with an assumed solution in place. After exploring what the business really wanted to do, the nature of the stories would most likely change.
  • Verify assumptions against new stories – With the set of stories identified, work to validate all assumptions with the business stakeholder.

How I worked with Feature Leads

After the pair iterated over possibilities and designs, I would review their solution and stories with them, ensuring that cross-functional requirements such as security, performance, etc were all taken into account and represented. I would also work with the Feature Leads to ensure the overall design worked with the other Feature Leads and that we never diverged.

Once validated, I worked with the different Feature Leads to organise a Feature Walkthrough, talking about the business problems, the outcomes and how the stories fit together to make a comprehensive solution. This Feature Walkthrough distributed knowledge to the entire team so that they had enough context to pick up a story in any feature area and understood how it worked.

Feature Lead + 1
To ensure that we never had a bus factor of one, we always identified two Feature Leads (a primary and a secondary). Both needed to involved in the design and discussions as well as the story identification process so that if one went away on holiday, or was ill, that feature area would not come to a halt. As a fallback, I would also pick up the solution if both were away.

How has it turned out?
I am personally really proud of the team, and the way that the Feature Leads lead the design. We had some great solutions and ideas, and their outputs allowed the entire team to continue to own the codebase as a whole. There are so many other dimensions to talk about, but will get around to writing about them separately.

XP2012 Continued

May 24, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The morning started off with a keynote from Sally Spinks of IDEO talking about design thinking and their wholistic design approach to organisations and service design. From what I understood, her role involves “Organisational Design” which is an interesting concept that I initially balked a little at. How can you “design” an organisation and just expect people to play it out. Fortunately she answered that later in the talk about preparing for people to surprise you and to make sure you plan for that change. She talked a little bit about the history of IDEO moving from product design to service design to organisation design and describing how business models are the new units of design.

Being effectively a “change agent”, her most compelling message hit home for a lot of us. Set purpose. Do small stuff, tell big stories. Iterate on the purpose, do more stuff and tell more stories and keep going.

Another highlight for me was a short speech by a well known Swedish chef (in Sweden at least) called Jan Boris-Möller. He’s famous for a TV show going into people’s homes and cooking a three course meal in a a short time based on everything they have in their kitchen. He talked about leadership (setting direction for the kitchen), adaptability and understanding your constraints (e.g. catering for weddings on a farm where you limited access to power sources) and balancing personal creativity with customer success. He talked about understanding your customer and the contraints they work in. He gave the example that it is extremely rare for Swedish people to drink at lunchtime, but often drinks wine at dinner. This means that if you serve the same soup at dinner, it needs to probably be more intense in order to compete with the acidity in the wine.

He even prepared the wonderful evening meal for the conference dinner including wonderful creations including ceviches, foams and an intensely flavoured shot of soup. He

I also hosted an open space session called, “Succeeding as a technical leader” and had some really great conversations covering topics such as what makes a technical leader different from other leaders, their key responsibilities, their challenges and growth paths or how organisations help (or don’t) help them grow. We discussed items such as dealing with conflict, whether or not the role was needed and heard some great stories from the other open space participants.

I also later participated in the workshop, “Combining Usability and agile” involving both a little exercise and a healthy discussion on the different ways that teams integrate usability with agile. It was a small group but lead to some great examples and discussions.

Book Review: Liftoff

February 28, 2012 / / 1 Comment

At this year’s OOP Conference, Diana Larsen gave me a copy of her latest book, “Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects” and I promised to write her a review. I found myself with some time on a flight to Chicago and finally got around to reading it. I’m pleased that I did. It’s not a very thick book, but it’s definitely packed with great advice for teams from both Diana and her co-author Ainsley Nies.

Roughly broken into two sections, the book covers why teams should do a Liftoff and great recommendations on how to go about doing it. I agree completely with their premise at the start of the book – a lot about the productivity of teams and organisations often get set in the beginning. Whilst there is great value running a Liftoff even in the midst of a project, if one hasn’t yet run, it offers an opportunity for working relationships to start right at the beginning.

Liftoff Book

It many ways, the Liftoff overlaps with several of the activities we often run during a ThoughtWorks Inception (covered a lot in the Jonathan Rasmussen’s Agile Samurai book). During these periods, we try to help businesses shape the project, and even help them question whether or not the project should even run (fail fast!)

The book offers even more value by focusing on, given a project vision, helping align everyone in a way that helps them work towards that vision. The authors often refer to the trio of elements to cover including Purpose-Alignment-Context to which they describe some very practical advice on planning and running a project liftoff.

I like the way that they’ve also used a number of examples, including one for their own book, that shares examples of the positive impact that liftoffs done well can have for organisations. The book is dense with lots of advice such as detailing who should be involved, what sort of activities you might run, and a set of principles to plan and run your liftoff with.

The second half of the book focuses on agile chartering, making it relevant for teams working today in an agile environment, and who will most likely pick up a copy of this book. I see it as a useful example of applying the first section (liftoffs in general), to a particular working environment and making it more concrete as a guided walkthrough backed by even more real life stories throughout.

I see a lot of value in this for many teams. So many initiatives often get started that people forget about spending time on establishing a real sense of culture and purpose. The result is clear – a group of people that constantly “step around” issues, or a group of people all pulling in different directions clearly visible in the final solution.

What I also like about this practice, is that it doesn’t even have to be about software initiatives and is relevant for any group of people working towards a common purpose.

I think a lot of people will like the fact that it is such a short book. If you’ve read Diana’s other book, Agile Retrospectives, you’ll be familiar with a set of activities that are useful in a different context. This book doesn’t detail the activities that you might choose to run – I see this as too much for a book like this, but covers the important aspects around the thinking behind the activities you might run for your project liftoff.

Drive by Dank Pink

June 6, 2011 / / 2 Comments

I finally picked up a copy of Drive to read. The book looked ominously big, however I found out the two hundred (ish) pages had been printed on fairly thick paper and was pretty engaging to read overall. Pink focuses on a topic close to my heart, describing the way that people find engagement and what drives people. It’s quite relevant to the way that I like to work, and what the company I work for strives to achieve.

Pink covers a lot of interesting material, including many references and backed up by a lot of research. In it, he compares classic management techniques (financial incentives) and details research that describes why they fail to achieve what they need to do. He talks about interesting research that shows that a small financial incentive helps boost short term performance (in work that requires no thinking) at the cost of long term performance and detriment to creativity. For today’s information worker, and the chaordic environments we work in, this should really be raising alarm bells. To me, it’s akin to the systems thinkers that know that measuring and rewarding workers on the wrong incentives causes lots of problems. It also rings anecdotally to what I’ve seen some really talented people who work in these financial institutions driven into strange behaviours due to “bonus schemes” and loops.

Pink reiterates over points such as once we hit a certain wealth, happiness is no longer correlated with wealth. We seek, instead greater things. He gives many examples about how money isn’t a motivator for many people citing the achievements of Wikipedia, open source communities that build software such as Firefox and many more. He talks about once this is achieved, people are driven to solve problems, and be creative. He gives examples where people are driven to complete puzzles and games, not because they are paid to do it, because of some intrinsic drive.

Pink continually describes what gap there is between research and business and provides a way forward describing a number of elements necessary to satisfy this intrinsic drive. He talks about the need for autonomy, the idea of achieving mastery, and developing a true sense of purpose as well as providing a toolkit for people and managers to achieve this. I like to think that the agile values help businesses to focus on creating environments that help satisfy this new style of management. The idea of Software Craftsmanship emphasising lifelong learning and mastery, a common theme in agile teams to be autonomous in task completion and done right with lean thinking, building the right thing for a good purpose.

Above is a wonderful RSAnimate video helping to summarise the book.

Summary of XP2011

May 16, 2011 / / 5 Comments

First full day of XP2011 was a pretty full schedule as I had to prepare for two lightning talks on different subjects. Fortunately both of the topics were very close to my heart, one about learning using the Dreyfus Model (slides) and the other about Systems Thinking (slides). The second day started off with a great breakfast selection at the conference hotel before kicking into the keynote by Esther Derby. Clearly jetlagged, Derby used a set of hand drawn slides to explain her topic, “No Silver Bullets”.

Her presentation style was very conversational and I can’t say that the crowd responded very well to this. Perhaps it was their jetlag as well, or the way the room had been set up. Nevertheless, through many of her stories, I still saw many heads nodding and a really great response on twitter to the things that she was saying.

I’ve followed Derby’s writing for years and could only wish more people would be exposed to them. As a result, I found many of the topics and opinions I found interesting reinforced, such as failing to address the management layer inevitably means agile adoption hits a hard ceiling. Or the oscillating behaviour that results when managers attempt to react to a system with long delays in its feedback cycle. I appreciated the very vivid term, “Bang! Bang!”-management style describing the style of managers who seem to have only two distinct and opposing reactions to a system, unable to moderate their use and wait for systems to find a new equilibrium. If you imagine these two opposing reactions the result of a huge iron lever being flipped, hopefully you can imagine where the noise comes from.

Derby covered lots of different areas, quoting a few people like Donella H Meadows, “The original purpose of hierarchies was to serve the sub systems, not the other way around.” And the work that George Lakoff does with word association with metaphors in our everyday use. Raising self awareness of your own in built biases and metaphors is another key thing she emphasised focusing on the judgements, habits, feelings, thoughts, mental models, beliefs, rules and values we tend to be intrinsically governed by. I particularly liked the phrase she uses to help people uncover their own and others’ mental models, “In what world would this make sense?”

She told one great story about the dangers of measurements as targets, using the example of the manager who decided to “Grade developer estimates”. This manager decided to give A’s to those who estimated on time, B’s to those who estimated over time, and C’s to those who estimated under time. Of course, you can imagine what magically happened as people’s grades mysteriously improved.

She also reminded me of the work of Ackoff, who I need to revisit, and the great work that he’s written about Systems Thinking. I have only been able to refer to the Fifth Discipline as a Systems Thinking book, but I really need to read his other ones to see if they would be of use, or are more accessible.

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. A couple of highlights included seeing Marcus Ahnve take the work Luca Grulla and Brian Blignaut did with TDDing javascript to the next level and doing a demo of BDD.

David J. Anderson also reminded me of the importance to think in terms of the languages executives speak in order to better get our message across. He reminded me of all the great things that Ross Pettit has to say, although I think Anderson’s analysis on accounting for software development costs doesn’t seem to match with some of the data I’ve heard from Pettit.

There was so much more to the conference. Always the way great conversations emerged and the wonderful atmosphere of the hotel adding to the uniqueness to this event.

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