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Brad Appleton | 1 Aug 2004 01:22

Re: Six Sigma and Extreme - Is Agile to ---

On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 06:54:56PM -0400, Ron Jeffries wrote:
> On Saturday, July 31, 2004, at 6:40:49 PM, Bob.Jarvis <at> chase.com wrote:
> 
> > If they're telling us that on-time delivery is the most important thing,
> > then when we get to the last iteration before release, and they want us to
> > deliver a bunch of extra stories, we remind them of their priorities.
> 
> And in fact, if we're really doing agile, and that's really the most
> important thing, it's very unlikely that they'll even ask. After all,
> they've been steering the project for months.

One would certainly hope. On the other hand, if we're really
not doing agile, and if that [high quality plus fast/timely
delivery] really is the most important thing, then they may
very likely ask, and the SigSigma approach is one that carries
a lot of credibility with many of these not-necessarily agile
large shops that can help them get there with real support
and buy-in from their senior mgmt and customers. It helps
move the uncouraged closer to courage in pursuit of the
right things.

--

-- 
Brad Appleton <brad <at> bradapp.net> www.bradapp.net
  Software CM Patterns (www.scmpatterns.com)
   Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration
"And miles to go before I sleep." -- Robert Frost

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Ron Jeffries | 1 Aug 2004 01:27
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Re: Six Sigma and Extreme - Is Agile to ---

On Saturday, July 31, 2004, at 7:22:14 PM, Brad Appleton wrote:

>> And in fact, if we're really doing agile, and that's really the most
>> important thing, it's very unlikely that they'll even ask. After all,
>> they've been steering the project for months.

> One would certainly hope. On the other hand, if we're really
> not doing agile, and if that [high quality plus fast/timely
> delivery] really is the most important thing, then they may
> very likely ask, and the SigSigma approach is one that carries
> a lot of credibility with many of these not-necessarily agile
> large shops that can help them get there with real support
> and buy-in from their senior mgmt and customers. It helps
> move the uncouraged closer to courage in pursuit of the
> right things.

It could be. SixSigma hurts my brain, and the kinds of companies that I
have encountered who were doing it hurt my soul. I'm not saying that it has
to be that way, but I'm glad you're excited about the topic, because it'll
take a lot of 'splainin' on your part before I sign up.

But please do that. Please!

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
How do I know what I think until I hear what I say? --  E M Forster

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Brad Appleton | 1 Aug 2004 01:39

Re: Six Sigma and Extreme - Is Agile to ---

On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 07:27:18PM -0400, Ron Jeffries wrote:
> It could be. SixSigma hurts my brain, and the kinds of companies that I
> have encountered who were doing it hurt my soul. I'm not saying that it has
> to be that way, but I'm glad you're excited about the topic, because it'll
> take a lot of 'splainin' on your part before I sign up.

Its not SixSigma that excites me - its the ability it gives
me to reach/connect with the higher powers in the organization
and speak their language about how/why to steer toward agility.

Its not so much the road itself that is exciting, but the "ride",
and what makes the ride more productive and enjoyable. It helps
me make a difference, and helps me do it better, and broader
than I could before. I hope it won't be the only such thing.
--

-- 
Brad Appleton <brad <at> bradapp.net> www.bradapp.net
  Software CM Patterns (www.scmpatterns.com)
   Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration
"And miles to go before I sleep." -- Robert Frost

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Victor | 1 Aug 2004 05:00
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Re: Six Sigma and Extreme - Is Agile to ---

I like your approach, Brad.

If you have to do it, you have to do it.  It also has the valuable result
that eventually you get meaningful data.

It brings up in my mind two stories that work well as metaphors.

Story 1.  St Paul Academy, St. Paul, Minnesota.  They used to have this
activity where students would be challenged to swim between two spots in the
cold Lake Superior.  That's a tough, long exercise.  The participants would
be blue when exiting the water.  Yet, very rewarding when they either
succeeded or just participated.  This is only one example of the kind of
strenuous activities the students are challenged to do.  I don't know if
this one is still being done.  In general, the challenges are both physical
and intellectual.  Many of their graduates go on to be leaders of important
organizations in the nation and valuable contributors to society.  There are
other factors that help, like money and connections, but by themselves they
are not sufficient to explain those results.

Story 2.  I heard the comment, a number of times, that students and
eventually professionals that come from farming communities tend to be more
productive and successful than comparable individuals coming from other
communities.

The commonality of these two stories is that activities that consistently
require to stretch a person's effort in pursuit of a valuable goal, in a
focused way, also prepare that person to pursue other goals in a focused and
effective way.  It may sound trivial, but for many people it's not, and even
for those that intuitively accept the validity of the conclusion, it's not
an easy path to follow.
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Bil Kleb | 1 Aug 2004 12:45
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Software and the Scientific Process (was Re: Relevant Web Article)

Dave Rooney wrote:
 >
 > Donald F. McLean wrote:
 > > http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=45497
 >
 > It's from Java Developer's Journal.  Interesting article favourably
 > comparing Extreme Programming to the Scientific Method.

So my XPAU2002 Open Space session, SoftwareAndTheScientificProcess, wasn't
completely insane(*) after all?

  http://wiki.objectmentor.com/openspace/wiki.cgi?SoftwareAndTheScientificProcess

Actually, I just presented an AIAA paper "CFD: A Castle in the Sand?" that
is based on the notion discussed in the OpenSpace session.  (The paper is
should be online in a couple weeks at http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/ltrs/
Of course, you can also get a copy from me.)

The paper's premise is that the numerical simulation community is currently
based on an untested foundation, and collapse is eminent if our community
does not start publishing programmer tests along side new algorithms/models.

  AIAA = American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics
  CFD = Computational Fluid Dynamics (see http://fun3d.larc.nasa.gov for samples)

Later,
--

-- 
Bil Kleb, Hampton, Virginia

(*) Using Pirsig's definition of insanity as described in "Lila" -- the sequel
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Bob.Jarvis | 1 Aug 2004 03:19
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Re: Six Sigma and Extreme?


Another presentation that included more of the six sigma (& CMMI) aspects
...

http://nycspin.org/Resources/XPStory.pdf

BJ

                                                                                                                
                    Adam Wildavsky                                                                              
                    <adam <at> tameware       To:     Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries <at> XProgramming.com>                    
                    .com>                cc:     extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com                             
                                         Subject:     Re: [XP] Six Sigma and Extreme?                           
                    07/31/2004                                                                                  
                    12:09 AM                                                                                    
                    Please respond                                                                              
                    to                                                                                          
                    extremeprogram                                                                              
                    ming                                                                                        

At 10:20 PM -0400 7/30/04, Ron Jeffries wrote:
>Fascinating! Is there going to be an article about this? Sure should be!

An article would be grand. In the meantime you may want to have a
look at these slides from a presentation Bob gave to the NYC Agile
SIG. The presentation bowled me over -- the slides were not meant to
stand on their own and do not do it justice.

     http://www.nycagile.org/index_files/res/Bob_Jarvis.pdf
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William Pietri | 1 Aug 2004 22:23
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RE: Re: Is object testing enough? -- in-memory Repository

On Sat, 2004-07-31 at 09:17, Steve Bate wrote:

> The other area of functionality did not require transactions and involved
> a relatively small and simple set of data. We decided to use a random
> access file and achieved a dramatic performance increase over Prevaylor
> or an RDBMS solution.

I'm a little puzzled by this. Could you tell us more? Prevayler reads
are all in RAM with no context switch, whereas reading the file would
seem to require using the OS to do I/O. Prevayler writes just append to
an existing file, whereas file reads involve seeks. How did your
solution work? And do you have theories on where the performance
increase came from?

Thanks,

William

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Steve Bate | 1 Aug 2004 23:26

RE: Re: Is object testing enough? -- in-memory Repository

> From: William Pietri [mailto:william <at> scissor.com]
> On Sat, 2004-07-31 at 09:17, Steve Bate wrote:
> 
> > The other area of functionality did not require transactions and involved
> > a relatively small and simple set of data. We decided to use a random
> > access file and achieved a dramatic performance increase over Prevaylor
> > or an RDBMS solution.
> 
> I'm a little puzzled by this. Could you tell us more? Prevayler reads
> are all in RAM with no context switch, whereas reading the file would
> seem to require using the OS to do I/O. Prevayler writes just append to
> an existing file, whereas file reads involve seeks. How did your
> solution work? And do you have theories on where the performance
> increase came from?

Hi William,

There are several potential reasons for the performance increase. We
maintained a simple write-though cache of the data so read performance 
would be similar to a Prevayler aproach. The write performance was more 
of an issue. Appending to a file is not necessarily a fast operation 
relative to random access in a small file. Both require a disk seek 
but a file append operation generally must update more persistent data 
structures (e.g. a file allocation table in Windows, inode list in 
Unix/Linux) which might require multiple disk seeks. We didn't need 
to store transactions so the file append was unnecessary in this case. 

I'm actually puzzled why MySQL is 3x faster than Prevayler in their
transaction processing benchmark. I can believe that a network write
with a fast network and controller would be faster than a disk write
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Ron Jeffries | 2 Aug 2004 00:02
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Re: Re: Is object testing enough? -- in-memory Repository

On Sunday, August 1, 2004, at 5:26:00 PM, Steve Bate wrote:

> There are several potential reasons for the performance increase. We
> maintained a simple write-though cache of the data so read performance 
> would be similar to a Prevayler aproach. The write performance was more 
> of an issue. Appending to a file is not necessarily a fast operation 
> relative to random access in a small file. Both require a disk seek 
> but a file append operation generally must update more persistent data 
> structures (e.g. a file allocation table in Windows, inode list in 
> Unix/Linux) which might require multiple disk seeks. We didn't need 
> to store transactions so the file append was unnecessary in this case. 

> I'm actually puzzled why MySQL is 3x faster than Prevayler in their
> transaction processing benchmark. I can believe that a network write
> with a fast network and controller would be faster than a disk write
> but it seems MySQL would have to write the data to it's transaction
> log before acknowledging the transaction commit. I'm curious
> how the network write plus the disk write is faster than just the
> disk write. We definitely saw similar results when we ran
> the benchmarks. Any ideas? Java serialization overhead in Prevayler
> might be a candidate hypothesis.

> Hmmm, we're kinda drifting off the topic of this thread aren't we?
> If I didn't mention if before, we do conventional mocking of our 
> repositories for unit test purposes.

We might be drifting off, but it's very interesting. I hope that folks with
the right tools will dig into this. On the face of it, it's not clear
what's going on. Most peculiar, mama.
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Carl G. Alphonce | 2 Aug 2004 02:45

CFP: "Killer Examples" workshop

Dear colleagues,

Do you use OO design patterns?  Do you teach an objects-first CS1?  Do
you have some nifty examples you'd like to share?  If so, read on!

Below is the second CFP for the third "Killer Examples for Design Patterns
and Objects First" workshop, to be held at OOPSLA 2004 in beautiful
Vancouver, Canada.  Previous workshops were held at OOPSLA 2002 and OOPSLA
2003.  New this year, there are two ways to participate: you can either
submit a killer example to present, or you may apply to attend as a
discussant.

The deadline for submissions/applications is September 3, 2004, but
earlier submissions are encouraged.

If you have questions about the workshop, do not hesitate to contact me at
<alphonce <at> cse.buffalo.edu>, with subject line "OOPSLA-2004 Workshop Query".

Carl Alphonce
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University at Buffalo

                   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
                                    Second
                             Call for Submissions
                   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

     3rd "Killer Examples" for Design Patterns and Objects First workshop
    http://www.cse.Buffalo.EDU/faculty/alphonce/KillerExamples/OOPSLA2004/
               A workshop at OOPSLA 2004, Vancouver, BC, CANADA
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