30 Jun, 2008 | Written by Frank Carver | under Information
A fairly comprehensive Wired article about Google Android
Frank Carver ~ Convergent Visionary
Success where web, mobile, media and location blend.
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A fairly comprehensive Wired article about Google Android
All teams have their ups and downs, and sometimes it seems as if a team would just be better without a particular person. A recent article from InfoQ discusses this situation in the context of the Survivor TV show, popular in the USA, where contestants repeatedly get the opportunity to “vote someone off the island”.
InfoQ: Voting Someone Off the Island on an Agile Team
While I can see that in some situations the ability of a team to decide together that it’s just not working for some team member is useful and valuable. However, I can’t help worrying that there is a hidden dark-side to this.
As well as making rational consensual decisions, groups also exhibit other, less desirable, characteristics. It’s easy to imagine someone being “voted off” because their ideas challenge the status quo, because they threaten the complacent assumptions of the rest of team, or simply because they are different.
A mob, even a small mob, can be a dangerous thing. “Reality TV” such as the above-mentioned Survivor, Big Brother, The Weakest Link, and many more have shown us this again and again. Do we really want to encourage the mentality of conspiring to “vote off” the most challenging competitors in software development?
I just found this link in my drafts. Still worth looking at if you are interested in a holistic view of agile development.
Nice to see that some research is backing up the common sense of letting people access the internet to help improve happiness and effectiveness at work.
Study shatters myths on ‘Net use at work – Internet- msnbc.com
A nice analysis of the benefits of some key agile practices. This generally aligns with my experience.
InfoQ: Agile Practices with the Highest Return on Investment
Social and connection aspects of web software are becoming progressively more important to the success of the applications and businesses which create them. Here’s an article looking in particular at the idea of “widgets”.
Technology News: Social Networking: Widgets and Social Apps: The Rules of Engagement
Intuitively it makes sense (to me at least) that investing in staff skills, knowledge, training and qualifications is not only a good investment socially, but also financially. After all, each person will be responsible for a huge number of tasks and decisions during even a short stay with an employer; if investing in improving that person improves the speed, quality, appropriateness or overall cost of even a few of those tasks and decisions, the benefits to the employer could be enormous.
So it’s nice to see that a financial study has agreed with this understanding.
In my training and experience as a teacher, it was often emphasized that the presentation of subject matter should adapt to suit the learning styles of students. Now here’s a bunch of researchers from MIT looking at how to apply this to adapting the presentation of web sites.
As with any other form of personalization, it’s guaranteed to make things tougher for support staff, though 
A lovely, literary article about the effect whereby the abundance of excerpts and highlights which comprise the web are affecting our ability to immerse ourselves in longer, deeper writing.
Of course, this blog post is just such a staccato, short-attention-span snippet. Go read the whole article.
I’m sure we have all encountered the situation where supposedly-helpful automated user-interface tests become a weight which drags down the agility of a project. The usual upshot of this is that either the project stops being “agile” or the offending tests are “temporarily” bypassed, and never run again.
Manish Kumar has written an article about this: Agile Testing ,Lean principles: Why Testing is perceived as least agile: What needs to change
Interestingly, in his choice of solutions he does not include my personal favourite – writing/changing the tests before implementation, and letting the new tests be the specification for the work to be done. This way the effort of changing the tests is in itself valuable, particularly as it might lead to a reduction in excess documentation of specifications before work can start.
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
