Minimal

Yesterday morning, while the rest of the country grieved at the loss of a former footballer with a drink problem, I sat in shock at the news that Richard Burns had died. I’m still devastated. I’d always thought surely it was only a matter of time before he recovered from the tumour and made his comeback. Alas, it didn’t work out like that. Man, life can be so random at times. :(

Rest in peace, Burnsie.

6 months I’ve been anticipating this moment. Finally, my bank statement has something significant in the “money in” column. No more do I have to watch my savings dwindle away. At last, I can relax a little.

Right then... back to the endless indecision over what car I’ll get next. Evo Knowledge, here I come. :)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Looks like my plan to go and see Ghost in the Shell: Innocence at the Tyneside Cinema tonight was somewhat flawed. Its run ended last night. I can’t believe I’ve been waiting for this film for so long and still managed to miss it. Gutted. :-(

Yet another former colleague joins the ranks of those with a weblog. Please welcome Duncan Graham. :)

While he works in the same software development company as Gavin, Dave and others, Duncan offers a different perspective on agile to balance most of what you’ll read around here. Not sure how much he’ll be blogging on the topic, but it’s always been an interesting debate when he’s commented on my posts in the past.

Three weeks in and I’m royally sick of the formal clothes policy. My iron has even packed up in shock (seriously, I’ve killed it). My razor, too, is becoming alarmingly blunt. And, to cap it all, I’ve just discovered that the semi-fashionable formal pants I bought the other week are dry-clean-only. Feck. How I wish every day were a dress-down Friday.

...is the name of a new hot chocolate drink from the coffee shop at work. By god, it’s gorgeous. And spicy—it’s your regular hot chocolate, but infused with cinnamon, various other spices a dash of chilli. A killer combo. I suspect I’ll be getting one or two more of these puppies as the winter closes in. :)

Ooooh... controversial! ;)

I’ve just booked my place at the XPDay 2005 conference, happening in London at the end of the month. It’ll be my third year in a row, but it’s the first time I’ve struggled to find stuff in the programme that will maintain my interest throughout. There even seems to be an unfilled slot in the schedule at the end of the second day. It’s making me wonder, “Has the agile bubble burst?”. [more...]

If you’ve read this blog at all in the past couple of weeks, you’ll know I recently moved from a development job using agile methods to one using a much more traditional BDUF approach. It’s slowly helping me figure out what was good about agile and, perhaps, what wasn’t. Here are a couple of the things I currently miss:

Teamwork and having help available in the form of a pairing partner

Granted, in my last job, we didn’t always pair program. We told ourselves we should do, but we didn’t. However, if you were to suggest pairing on a particular task or request assistance via pairing, the help was always there. In my new job, it’s back to the old “you’re interrupting my work” school of thought. In my eyes, it’s everyone’s work. Yours is mine and mine is yours. Now take one for the team and get over here.

Daily updates

Monday morning, 10am, is when I now get my weekly dose of updates from my team mates. It’s a truly dull affair. The team leader buys us all a coffee from the in-house Starbucks-a-like, but it feels like a trade for your attendance. We all grab a seat (yes, it’s a sit-down affair) and jabber for 5 minutes each about what we’ve been doing while everyone else’s brain switches off. We’re then told what we’re working on in the next week and on to the next person. It’s boring and there’s no energy to it. No passion at all.

At least with agile’s daily stand-up meetings it felt like there was a purpose. The meetings were far shorter, punchier, more topical and, of course, more frequent. This meant they could be a lot more useful in terms of highlighting and managing risks. It also gave the project a feeling of momentum that I’m not getting right now.

As hinted above, this is, of course, only one side of the coin. I suspect there are also things about agile that I don’t miss as much as you might expect. Maybe I’ll blog about them another time.

For me sins, I’m still in the office at ten to ten. It’s kinda spooky. The lights in here keep on going out when they detect no significant movement for a while. I have to keep on waving my arms around like a fool every ten minutes or so. Weird.

Actually, I’ll confess: I quite enjoy it. I just hope no-one in the block opposite me notices. :-)

Last week at work, I was passed the company’s coding standard for C# and .NET. It was a Word doc, 28 (twenty-eight) pages long. It was supported by two other documents, one of them 10 pages and the other 18 pages long. Is it just me, or does 56 pages of coding standard / best practice sound a little OTT?

Worse than that, I found it disrespectful. Its excessively prescriptive nature implictly credits the developer with no common sense. How is that meant to build mutual respect, trust and team spirit? A 28 page document’s good for little more than rolling up and using to bash people over the head, IMHO.

Incidentally, I only found out there was a standard after having submitted my own. Mine was 1 page long. It said stuff like “Use FxCop,” “Turn on XML documentation” and “Format things the way Visual Studio does”. I know which standard I’d rather be maintaining, but I guess I wasted my time. :-/