Saturday, July 29, 2006

"How not to get bored" or "XP is about social change"

Sorry again, I promised I'll write and I didn't, my only excuse is that the people that are finishing off you apartment also didn't make it on time, and as for the moment the sky gently but steadily lowers itself towards my head. Next weekend I'm supposed to move, this weekend I was supposed to paint the walls etc, but I can't because other work is not finished yet.

To summarize, when you feel a bit bored, or you feel your life is too predictable, or feel otherwise odd please do yourself a favour and buy a new unfinished apartment and then set a firm unmovable date by which you have to move to that place. Then 3 weeks before that deadline have your wife buy a new dog, and then have a team of "talented"(past tense as in "maybe there were times when they were talented") pros start working to finish this apartment. Don't forget to fasten your seat belt and hold on tight (and be sure to take your heart pills) ...

It that's not enough please try this:
Measure the place for your new kitchen, put the numbers all over the blueprints, but many more numbers there, measure every detail and put the numbers as close together as possible. Then after a week cursorily read that blueprint, put it aside, never look at it again and then carefully design your kitchen. Go to IKEA, buy that damn kitchen, bring it over, unpack, put the LEGO parts together, and have your friend carpenter come have your kitchen put in place. Then at the beginning of a brand new week, when you stand with him and explain where you wish which part to be realize that one of the walls doesn't have 355cm but 315. Remember the blueprint part of this exercise is the key part, otherwise you'll find your mistake soon enough to change the plans in the planning phase.
Unfortunately this is not a software project, and kitchen parts are not Java classes. Unfortunately in the real physical world it's not easy to apply such changes. But feat not!. Life shows that even then if you have a master carpenter at your side he'll find a way to seamlessly shirk a few parts here and there and after a few hours of looking at your life passing before your eyes you see a bright light that illuminates your brand new kitchen.

So actually this is a case study of an agile technique put to use in the real world that seemed very BDUF-like :). My friend, if he wasn't my friend, could say: "Hey dude, get lost! I have better things to do than to cover for your mistakes, call me when you have all the parts fit the plans". But he didn't say that. Instead he said "OK, so let's see what we have here, this part has 50cm not 60, we can shrink that other part another 20cm, and the one over there we can also rebuild a little".

So all you agile non-believers this is hard evidence that this kind of work style actually works, the key thing is the state of mind and the attitude. "XP is about social change".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

First of all, let me thank you for writing these interesting articles. Please keep up the good work.

Alistair Cockburn has an interesting article about lean construction and his house. Many people have used the construction metaphore as a way to defend Waterfall and BDUF, while construction have been lean/agile all the way.

A mistake is cheaper to fix when it is discovered at planning time, but the mistake is not always easy to spot.

The lesson I see in your mistake, is to always verify what I have before I execute the next step: In your case, see if your kitchen parts fits before you mount them.

My kitchen, by the way, is not completed yet. I have only had 11 months to do that, so no wonder why the kitchen sink is still missing and there's no electricity.

I guess that's a lesson on not choosing the right people to do the job. I'll fix that on Monday and hire a professional.

ilfrin said...

Thank you Thomas for your appreciation, voices like yours help me find time to blog :) and it just feels plain good to read some feedback :)

About Alistair's agile constructions did you mean this? http://www.agileadvice.com/archives/2006/06/interview_with.html
because that's the first thing I found when I googled for "cockburn construction house" :))

Yes mistakes usually surprise us, the least we can about it is admit that...

Checking the kitchen parts might have helped, but the best thing for me to do was to double check the measurements for the whole project before I went to buy the parts the in first place. But yes that is exactly your point, check everything I have before the next step, i.e. run the test suite :D

To paraphrase it was a manual test and manual tests tend to be executed once (or never). But I see no easy way to automate that ;)) Anyway it was my stupid laziness.

11 months, huh? that must a pretty darn hell of a kitchen you got there? :)

Yeah, a pro is really worth a lot, without my friend doing that kitchen I would still be standing there crying my eyes out...