Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

Pizzazz

It is so so sad, really, that no one can ever use the word pizzazz in
Scrabble. So sad.

Fractal Finishers

We are finishers.

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Fractals are typically self-similar patterns, where self-similar means they are "the same from near as from far"

- from wikipedia.

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Agile's "self-similar pattern" is that we finish stuff.

We finish big stuff: releases, projects, and the like.

We finish small stuff: stories, tasks, tests.

I read today that Ferris Beuller (or, really, the actor who played him) is 50 years old. That's just wrong.

Soup from Stones

A band of travellers arrive at a village just before sunset, looking hungry but carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. 

The villagers - suspicious and poor - are, understandably, unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travellers. 

They just stand back and watch.  They're surprised when the travellers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. 

One of the villagers becomes curious, pops over to the travellers and asks politely what "are you folk doin'?" 

One of the travellers looks up and answer, thoughtfully, "We are making stone soup."

"Stone soup?", asks the villager, having never before heard of such a thing.

"It tastes wonderful - absolutely wonderful! - although, to be honest with you, it always tastes nicer with a a few carrots.  I don't suppose you'd have a couple to spare?"

"Hmmmm ...", said the villager.

"It is a wonderful soup.  We'd be very happy to share some with you, whether you have some carrots to spare, or not."

The villager thinks for a moment, nods then says, "I'll see what I can find."

A few minutes later the soup contains water, a large stone and some carrots.

Another villager walks by, inquires about the pot, a conversation starts and five minutes later a large green onion is diced and added to the soup.

A crowd forms.  The contents of the soup grow.  And grow.  And grow.  

Some left over chicken, Celery, pepper, a dash of salt, some noodles.

Some wine appears.  Not for the soup.  'tis passed around.

Some music.

Some dancing.

Some bread, arrives.  A little stale ... but who cares?

Bowls.  The soup is eaten, shared by the travellers and the villagers.

At the end of a wonderful, fun, night everyone in the village agrees that Stone Soup is indeed a wonderfully tasty dish.  

Why, they wonder, had they never thought before to make it themselves?

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This is an ancient story of, I believe, of European origins.  I copied the wikipedia text then modified it extensively to suit my "voice".

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I think I still have the URL soupfromstones.com registered.  

It was meant to be my follow up to "Rocks Into Gold"  (look carefully and you'll see the similarity in the names), a mixture of the simple story above and my own story where I helped ("forced" is probably more accurate) two waring teams to collaborate using Kanban and TDD thinking, transforming them from bitter foes into friends and making a high-risk project, highly-profitable in the process. 

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The point of the folk story:  You can create collaboration and fun from nothing.  It's a choice.

Just don’t do it.

Apologies to Nike, but I've just got a new Agile slogan.

Just DON'T Do It.

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I just deleted 5,000 words from the last quarter of my business novel Rolling Rocks Downhill.

I replaced it with a brand new 1,400 words.

OMG it hurt.

The deleted stuff was some of my most interesting and best written work. 

But it just doesn't belong. 

I had to kill it. 

For the sake of the book.  And my readers.

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Editors have this expression: kill your darlings.

It hurts ... oh, how it hurts ... but you have to do it to make your product better.

It's a shame I had to write all those words before I killed them.

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That's how we used to rescue waterfall projects - by descoping.  It was painfully costly, inelegant and unproductive - getting rid of a whole lot of half-written code.  It left the code ugly and hard to work with.  No one liked it.  But it was our only option.

Which is why we got rid of waterfall.

In Agile, though, descoping is extremely elegant: 

Just DON'T Do It.

Delete it from your backlog.

Don't start it.

Start the next project instead.

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Don't just "groom your backlog", prune it, thin it, slash it, trash it ... just don't do (most) of it.

Do this instead, now: chop your backlog in half.  Finish early for a change.  Start the next project early.

Then get someone to kill your pet projects for you.  Put them out ofyour misery.

Steve Jobs saved Apple by drawing a 2x2 grid, labelled the rows "consumer" and "pro", labelled the columns "portable" and "desktop", then killing the projects which didn't fit.

Each one of those projects was someone's darling.

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You won't do it will you?