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Chris Wheeler | 1 Jul 2006 01:28
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Re: Apologetics (was Convincing the business)

>
> Perhaps not, but you can certainly say that there are over 5000
> people on the XP list and lots of people on the other Agile lists,
> and projects ranging from two man shops to NASA and embedded medical
> devices, all doing Agile and reporting success. There will be over
> 1000 people at the Agile conference this year ... and so on.

I haven't seen many of those companies publishing studies concerning thier
bottom line - did agility produce cash? Which is too bad, because
intuitively it is felt as though it does.  Boardrooms don't care about
agility or care to be persuaded - they care about creating value for
shareholders.

This can be done - create studies that show X (agility) affects Y (business
output).  It just hasn't.

Second, I hold that most decisions are not based on logic or data at
> all: they are based on emotion.

What if emotions could be supported by data?  What if there was a way to
show that 'I feel our process stinks and isn't capable of serving our
customers' could be supported by data?  Would there be value in that?

>
>
> But that's just me. Since I hold a black belt in logic, I feel
> pretty confident that I'm right, but if you, or anyone, want to try
> to apply logic and data to the issue, I welcome it.

I think it sorely needs to be done, not just in agile, but for software
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yahoogroups | 1 Jul 2006 02:18

Re: Re: Convincing the business


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "igouy2" <igouy2.at.yahoo.com <at> yahoogroups.at.jhrothjr.com>
To: "extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com" 
<extremeprogramming.at.yahoogroups.com <at> yahoogroups.at.jhrothjr.com>
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 4:29 PM
Subject: [Moderator] Re: [XP] Re: Convincing the business

--- In extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com, "Steven Gordon"
<sgordonphd <at> ...> wrote:
>
> I find myself agreeing with aspects of both sides of this argument.
>
> For three years, I had the privilege of working with a team of
> accomplished social scientists and computer scientists collecting
> recording, observational, interview, survey, project management, and
> source code repository data from a software development lab at a major
> university (http://sf.asu.edu/).
>
> Just about everyone involved agreed it was obvious that the agile
> approach was producing better software, but nobody could find
> statistically significant data to prove it or even provide a good
> explanation of why it worked better.

Is it possible that those people, who agreed that it was obvious the
agile approach was producing better software but were unable to find
any significant difference in the data, were simply wrong and there
really was no difference?

[response]
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Ron Jeffries | 1 Jul 2006 04:03
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Re: Apologetics (was Convincing the business)

On Friday, June 30, 2006, at 4:28:50 PM, Chris Wheeler wrote:

>> Second, I hold that most decisions are not based on logic or data at
>> all: they are based on emotion.

> What if emotions could be supported by data?  What if there was a way to
> show that 'I feel our process stinks and isn't capable of serving our
> customers' could be supported by data?  Would there be value in that?

I don't feel that there would be much value. ;-> Requests for data
are used primarily as an objection, not as an actual statement that,
given the data, I'll jump on board with your idea. The ability to
present data, therefore, has value in getting by that objection to
the next, generally more real objection.

But there are other ways of getting past that objection without
providing the data, by finding out what the person's real concerns
and hot buttons are, and addressing those.

On the other hand, I could be wrong and all the stuff that happens
is based on the numbers. But it doesn't look that way from here.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
Hold on to your dream.  --ELO

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Bill Kelly | 1 Jul 2006 02:06
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Re: [Moderator] Re: Re: Convincing the business

From: "igouy2" <igouy2 <at> yahoo.com>
>
> Is it possible that those people, who agreed that it was obvious the
> agile approach was producing better software but were unable to find
> any significant difference in the data, were simply wrong and there
> really was no difference?

What about QWAN?  :)

Well, I can relate from firsthand experience it made a huge
difference on _our_ project when we switched from waterfall
to XP.

We even had names for the differences it made:

  Delivered on time
  No death march / crunch mode
  Bug-tracking software no longer needed for software bugs

In contrast, our previous releases had:

  Schedule overruns
  Massive overtime death march / crunch mode
  Heavy reliance on bug tracking software

Regards,

Bill

(QWAN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_without_a_name ,
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igouy2 | 1 Jul 2006 04:10
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Re: Convincing the business

-snip-
> The '01 MacCormack study was based on 29 projects at 17 companies
> (real software, real customers, real projects), their findings were
> statistically significant.
> http://www.sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2001/winter/6/
> 
> [response]
> 
> The article is too short for me to regard is as anything other
> than a publicity piece. See my comments on the SACWIS
> project on a different list.

That isn't the article, it's a page from which you may buy the article ;-)

-snip- 
> Let me be clear, when Chapter 6 says "The study identified four
> practices that were statistically correlated with the most successful
> projects: 1. An iterative lifecycle..." that is categorically untrue -
> an iterative lifecycle was not one of the four practices that were
> statistically correlated with the most successful projects. That is
> not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact.
> 
> [Response]
> 
> The referenced Georgia Tech study above seems to indicate
> that an iterative approach wasn't important for either of the
> final models; it had seemed to have a positive correlation early
> on but the significance vanished in the face of other, aparently
> more important practices.
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Chris Wheeler | 1 Jul 2006 05:07
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Re: Apologetics (was Convincing the business)

>
> I don't feel that there would be much value. ;-> Requests for data
> are used primarily as an objection, not as an actual statement that,
> given the data, I'll jump on board with your idea.
>
<SNIP>
>
> On the other hand, I could be wrong and all the stuff that happens
> is based on the numbers. But it doesn't look that way from here.

Acknowledging your point of view, and the fact that you've been around, I
haven't experienced that.  I have experienced showing how something affects
the bottom line, and people jumping on or off based on that -> 'Pair
programming will increase your profitability 29% based on ...'  That kind of
stuff is eaten up by business folks that I have experience with.

But it's late, let's talk tomorrow.

Chris.

--
Chris Wheeler
chriswheeler.blogspot.com
coach, programmer & practitioner

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Ron Jeffries | 1 Jul 2006 05:12
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Request for Survey

Dr. Gary Templeton at Mississippi State University
(http://misweb.cbi.msstate.edu/gtempleton) is conducting a study on
Internet Social Groups and has asked for our participation. He's
promised to provide us with individual and group results that will help
us better understand our personalities and values. One respondent has
said that this process is 'transforming,' so perhaps we can benefit in
the same way. It is voluntary, but I'd appreciate your thoughtful
responses to the following survey (should take about 5-10 minutes to
complete):

https://misweb.cbi.msstate.edu/gtempleton/YahooGroupSurvey-members

All responses are completely anonymous. I'll keep you posted as soon as
results are available.

Thanks,

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
  -- Albert Einstein

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Phlip | 1 Jul 2006 05:52
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Re: XP for third party component vendor

escamoteur_burkhart wrote:

> Our products are most of the time sold to govermantal organisations
> and there a roll out is not so easy, because we have not a web based
> application, but one that has to be installed at a lot of locations.

That means, once a week, you will install a new version to a lot of
locations, each running a previous version, and you will automate the
test which confirms each install.

(You might also >cough< manually test each install.)

Any bugs you find installing should get unit-test fixes. Capture such
bugs with tests. If a bug was in an installer script, you will write a
test that parses that script with Regex looking for the bug.

> But thats only one problem, the second one is more critical. We also
> sell a lot of our products to system integrators that have to rely
> on defined interfaces to integrate our components into their
> products.

Then each time you acceptance test, you will integrate with mockups of
all those pre-defined interfaces, and many more.

> When using XP it can be exspected that also public interfaces will
> change often. Thats something that won't be accepted by the customer
> because we can't force him to adapt their systems every month and do
> a new deployment to his customers.

An internal interface is subject to refactoring. A published interface
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Phlip | 1 Jul 2006 05:47
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Big CORBA Up Front

eXtremists:

ACM Queue magazine invited one Michi Henning, a leading CORBA
architect and author, to summarize its status. He named his article
"The Rise and Fall of CORBA", indicating its status to be rapid
decline.

http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=396

[ http://tinyurl.com/nrlbf ]

Our jargon here makes the reasons easy to describe. CORBA tends to
oscillate between two extremes. Sometimes it's the ORB to beat all
ORBs - the inspiration for ActiveX and SOAP. And sometimes it's a
crippled and unimplementable disaster. We easily recognize the cause
as the biggest possible Big Requirements Up Front.

As a background, CORBA 1.0 was spec-ware. CORBA 2.0 was a major hit,
before other ORBs arrived. CORBA 2.0 permits one object to expose
methods to a network, and another remote object can access it by
reference and call its methods. The architecture is simple; an IDL
file describes the object in language-neutral terms, and an IDL
compiler converts it into empty skeletons and remote stubs suitable
for one language. Applications that share the IDL can reliably
interoperate, across a network and between languages.

ActiveX, by contrast, started as OLE. That used a similar IDL to
generate a binding between two objects within the same process.
Microsoft wisely ate their own dogfood. They first made this humble
system useful, in early Office and Visual Basic offerings, before
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Phlip | 1 Jul 2006 06:11
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Re: XP for third party component vendor

Phlip wrote:

> escamoteur_burkhart wrote:
>
> > Our products are most of the time sold to govermantal organisations
> > and there a roll out is not so easy, because we have not a web based
> > application, but one that has to be installed at a lot of locations.
>
> That means, once a week, you will install a new version to a lot of
> locations,

Just a note: These locations are in your lab. Get a bunch of dead
Pentium IIIs, wire them up, install your customer's environment on
them, ghost their hard drives, and install install install.

> each running a previous version, and you will automate the
> test which confirms each install.

This way, when the time comes to really install to a real customer,
you have much higher confidence that stuff will work.

--

-- 
  Phlip
  http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ZeekLand  <-- NOT a blog!!

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