I [...]]]> I returned home yesterday after attending a get-together of retrospective facilitators. Today my head hurts, and I assume it’s because of the intensity of this experience.
Although a lot of participants had to cancel their trip due to the infamous ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajoekull vulcano, it felt very complete, at least from an outsiders perspective.

I would like to briefly recap what I observed and learned during the past week.

First of all, I (re)learned what an amazing ability it is for humans to participate in a community and share fellowship in shared values and beliefs. Although I’ve seen this happen many times at church or camps, it somehow became very powerful to see it happen in a such a varied and normally very dispersed group of people.

This was also my first experience with the Open Space conference model. And at the opening, the four key principles were reviewed:

• Who ever comes are the right people.
• What ever happens, is the only thing that could happen.
• When it starts, it starts.
• When it is over, it is over.

Fairly basic stuff, but also very liberating since it places free-will and self organization in the drivers seat. I will definitely try to use Open Space for future workshops and larger retrospectives.

Another topic that I’m going to dive deeper into is the ‘Art of Powerfull Questions’ as presented at the World Café website. This has learned me not to trust initial assumptions, but always try to go ‘behind the curtain’ and ask questions that prompts people to think and question not only the question but also the answer.

I found it hard not to to become to self-aware in this setting of complete strangers, but a session on bodylanguage actually also helped me to relax more and be more confident in the communication I produce using my body.

Finally…the realization that the topic of retrospectives, which I thought to know fairly well, contains so many levels and related knowledge domains, just make me want to learn so much more in this field. And I hope this nice, warm fuzzy feeling stays with me a long time

It’s that procrastinating feeling, right? The thing you do because it [...]]]> Do you know the feeling you get 2ms after you just convinced yourself that it’s ok to check the news while you’re :

• waiting for your code to compile
• just about to switch tasks
• stuck in a problem
• starting up your IDE/environment/application etc…

It’s that procrastinating feeling, right? The thing you do because it postpones something else that you can’t handle right now. To overcome the guilt you ensure yourself that you’ve got the power to break the cycle at any point in time, but that’s not necessary right now because you can handle it…knowing that I can always pick up work 24 hours a day (if I leave my workstation turned on when I go home that is), I can ease a little at times and multitask during day hours.

Having been in and out of this evil cycle from time to time, I’ve been trying to work out systems which could help me break bad habits, reading several books such as:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Mind Performance Hacks

Skimming these books (yes..I know…attention issues), hasn’t helped me sufficiently in this inner battle. Although the temptation to slack is reduced when you’re working with a task that really triggers your interest, the tendency to try and multitask will creep up on you in an increasing number of aspects in your life. Perhaps you’ll find yourself checking email during breakfast with your family, bringing more books on vacation than you’ll ever find time to read, rarely spending an evening doing absolutely nothing because you feel guilty about not utilizing the time to learn something new.

Eventually I think I’ve come to terms with this feeling, knowing there are always new topics to dive into, new books to read and new technologies to familiarize myself with. I’ve often wondered what factors determine the learning capabilities of an individual. Generally I believe that we are all capable of learning (almost) everything, we just have very different ways of doing so. I finally found what I was looking for in this blog post about developer inadequacy.

Some of the stress I believe is imposed by our constant connectedness which feeds us immense amounts of information and impressions, I end up assuming that a normal person has time to take care of their family while both creating an identity as tech-guru, a hard working determined career and naturally having a plethora of rewarding spare time activities.

Finding a ‘diagnose’

Recently I stumbled across an interesting article in one of the papers I subscribe to. This article debated an increasing known symptom of our time which Dr. Edward Hallowell, had coined as ‘Attention Deficit Trait‘. ).

Basically the vast amounts of inputs, opportunities and available distractions gradually wreaks our brain, or dulls it. So we become increasingly impatient, impulsive and restless, which evidently affects our effectiveness and leads us to underachieve in our job and probably other parts of life as well.

Dr. Hallowell notes:

When people find that they’re not working to their full potential; when they know that they could be producing more but in fact they’re producing less; when they know they’re smarter than their output shows; when they start answering questions in ways that are more superficial, more hurried than they usually would; when their reservoir of new ideas starts to run dry

Either this is the usual coach/therapist mumbo-jumbo telling us that we’re all near unlimited potential…all we need is to live by their patented model, or is the reason I’m getting cautious that he actually points to some of my everyday frustrations?

Where is the medicine at?

You have probably heard of Stephen Coveys book ‘7 habits of highly effective people’? The title alone seemed appealing to me by it’s alluring promise that if I could master these habits, my efficiency would soar and perhaps I could then realise all these professional fantasies.

Post-reading this book, I’ve adjusted by hopes a little (basically it’s the same feeling you’ve probably had as a kid when you finally got that propeller hat…and it didn’t make you fly).

One of the most useful habits/techniques I did find the book was described in Covey’s 3rd habit; ‘Put first things first’, in his Time Management Matrix which quantifies how we spend time into four quadrants:

If you’re good at time management, you’ll do the stuff that can be placed in Quadrant #2, namely the stuff which is important but not urgent, e.g. stuff that prevents future issues, instead of running around stressing about putting local fires out.

Another method that is gaining popularity is the Pomodoro Technique developed by Francesco Cirillo (there’s a free ebook available at his website). He developed this technique in the early 90ties, but during the last year or so it has started hitting the blogs quite extensively. The ebook starts by outlining two aspects on time:

• Becoming; The linearity and volatile nature of time which yields this feeling of time as it being something which inevitably slips through our fingers.
• Time as a succession of events; we don’t necessarily measure all events in quantified time, but instead by what the event is (eating, shopping, washing the car etc etc).

So…what is the Pomodoro technique…well basically it’s just time boxing work to focus on a specific task. The cookbook for the method is as follows:

1. Choose a task to be accomplished
2. Set the Pomodoro(typically a tomato shaped kitchen timer…) to 25 minutes
3. Work on the task at hand until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
4. Take a short break (3-5 minutes)
5. Repeat the cycle, but take a longer break every 4th cycle.

Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro technique is founded on three basic assumptions:

1. It’s a different way of seeing time as it reduces the focus of the Becoming aspect of time. This alleviates the anxiety of loosing time…which should improve effectiveness instead.
2. It gives better use of the mind as the focusedness gives us more clarity and self discipline.
3. It’s fairly simple…thus you don’t need a lot of fancy stuff to use it.

I’m going to try this out in the next couple of weeks, we’ve got a crazy time schedule at work, so if  this helps I’m definitely on the Pomodoro advocate team

We got published in the International Journal of Business Information Systems with the article ‘Agility in a [...]]]> After 18 months of waiting January 2009 finally arrived. Along with all the added personal mission statements, training ambitions and what not, this is also the month where the article written by Lars Matthiassen and me is getting published.

We got published in the International Journal of Business Information Systems with the article ‘Agility in a small firm: A sense-and-respond analysis‘. I’ll post the approved proposal when I dig it out of my mail box.

The largest risk related to the retrospective was the geographical distribution of the participants. We had team members in Iceland and [...]]]> My employing firm have several branches throughout the world, our office is situated in Odense and the company headquarters are located on Iceland. And increasing number of projects are dependent on geographically distribruted teams.

The largest risk related to the retrospective was the geographical distribution of the participants. We had team members in Iceland and in Denmark in a rough 60/40 spread. To overcome this obstacle we needed tools in two dimensions;

• Copresense; to provide a better feeling of sharing the same meeting space despite the large distance between us.
• Collaboration; to enable us to jointly participate in the retrospective and not let one of the parties is subject to a passive participation.

Prior to this moment we have typically just used voice services for our project meetings, but to get a better sense of copresence we tried connecting the meeting rooms with web cameras through Skype. This worked fairly well, there were stream drops from time to time, but on an overall basis the experience was positive. Here on the Odense side we could optimize the placement of web cam and screens to give a sense of immersion.

To enable participation of team members in both locations, we used parallel tangible tools such as pens and paper, but also IT network tools. Prior to the retrospective various collaboration tools were evaluated. Initially Cardmeeting was the prime candidate for evaluating brainstorming results, but due to is lack of zoom/font capabilities we ended up using a shared whiteboard provided by dabbleboard.com. This tool worked well in displaying the many brainstorming items, and provided color coding support. Unfortunately it showed serious problems with multiple user interaction. So for future retrospectives we should seek out another tool that supports this.

So before I hopefully pick up a faster pace (…) and start writing ’serious’ posts, I’d better quickly recap my life from the time of my [...]]]> Firstly…I’m always a bit taken by how quickly time flies by. Its been roughly 9 months since my last post which puts my ‘become-famous-blogger’ plan in a somewhat ill perspective.

So before I hopefully pick up a faster pace (…) and start writing ’serious’ posts, I’d better quickly recap my life from the time of my last post uptil now:

• Still got my wonderful wife, and my son is growing up and becoming increasingly lovable.
• Got a job-title change from ‘Pure Code Monkey’ to ‘Online Community Organizer’, which basically means that I’m responsible for my firms online community @ http://www.certusgames.com (well…it also includes some support responsibility…so it’s not extremely fancy fancy)
• We bought a house…and are enjoying this new status and all the worries that follow in the wake.
• I’ve started working with Betware’s platform which also makes me a web developer (Struts, J5EE and whatnot)…I suppose.

I’m still buying books by the truckload…so in some distant future I’m going to become an expert on the Lego Mindstorms NXT platform, a network security mastermind, Struts Wiz and Agile guru.

Now, let me start by stating that I’ve never considered myself especially gifted when it concerns programming. I know my way around [...]]]> Lately I’ve been working on modifying existing games for a new customer. Each game packs a couple of years of codebase history, one of them even has had multiple developers assigned since its birth.

Now, let me start by stating that I’ve never considered myself especially gifted when it concerns programming. I know my way around the fundamental concepts, and pack a decent analytical skill when it comes to design and architectural decisions. But these recent work tasks as really challenged me in almost all dimensions.

Getting to grips with the original mental model of an application is indeed much more complicated than understanding the problem domain itself (ahem…depending to some extent on the problem domain type…). Unfortunately there is very little documentation related to the games I have been working with. Most application knowledge exists within the head of the firm’s game grandmaster. Luckily he is very friendly and willing to help.

But as the title of this post states, it is easy to feel a bit like an elephant in a porcelain factory. Whenever you have to make a turn, your large behind knocks over something fragile and hard to recreate. So You learn to turn very carefully, and perhaps even get a little paranoid and do nothing but tiptoe around all day. When working within a fixed iteration with defined tasks and deadlines, a though choice have to be made. To continue building on top of existing code trying not to break anything, or to acquire the appropriate resources for rebuilding the program, knowing that it most like would not be backwards compatible and we would end up with parallel codebases for the same application (more or less). I guess that abstraction and modularization would cure some of our difficulties, but such rework would still require unavailable resources.

I guess communication is the golden key to success, once again.