I spent a bit of time yesterday afternoon out on the deck watching Corey Haines’ interview with Stuart Halloway. Well, in between telling the puppy to stay out of the garden, that Remy’s toys were not his, etc., etc.. Halfway through part one I realized I should be taking notes and so restarted. And here they are.

  • Agile’s first principle is getting the right people together and getting out of their way
  • Interview process – rotate through team doing pair programming with each for a day
  • To professionalize as an industry, practitioners need to know what they know and know what they don’t know. And not sell stuff in the latter category.
  • Is what you are doing ‘hygiene’ or ‘triage’? Triage is pick a couple goals and ignore the rest. Hygiene is the bare minimum acceptable standards. Without hygiene, the patient gets sick and dies. (Re automated tests and code bases)
  • Caring about what you do and how you do is part of being professional.
  • Avoid islands of self-delusion
  • Code is the instantiation of some part of a business process
  • Code is never done. Its organic
  • Enable success rather than prevent failure
  • Remember, you are the expert. There is a difference between getting advice on how to fly the spaceship and giving over the controls.
  • More than half of the cost of software projects is discovery
  • When velocity changes, it is usually an indication that something ‘new’ has happened or something is not captured in the process
  • The point of velocity is predicability
  • Anything we do, we do because we did something stupid and it hurt
  • The whole industry needs to be going to functional programming.
  • The best idioms are not yet known. There is still a lot to be discovered.
  • B corporations
  • A benefit of pairing: everyone on the team knows the strengths and weaknesses of everyone else on the team
  • ‘Hacker in Residence’ – 6 week-ish visitor to team to inject freshness and new perspectives
  • Small Agile companies should form networks of similarly companies with same philosophies