The Regenerate Web

Grind It Out!

How do you assess a candidate's attitude toward work during an interview.  Once on the job, and employee may exhibit an eagerness to deliver value, or a sense of urgency.  He or she may may get bogged down in details or decisions.  He may have expectations that he will be provided with tools, and have questions answered satisfactorily, in short, that he will be spoon fed.  She may have a tendency schedule more meetings than are necessary.  

Glen Alleman of Herding Cats has been blogging about "agile project management" - and mostly I would agree with him.  Agile project management is mostly wrapped up in a software development lifecycle, and doesn't really apply to projects dealing with in the domains of construction, engineering, or the like.  I also agree that agile project management is a misnomer, because it misses many of the aspects of project management altogether.  On the otherhand, it is more than a means of fulfilling certain project

In my last post, I used an analogy between software development tools and religions.  I found the analogy amusing, and illustrative, and wanted to blather on for a bit about it.  Not all developers are religious, some developers do it for the money.  In this analogy, there are two breeds of software developers, mercenaries and zealots.  

I just read Bob on development's post On Software Development Fashions  which is a riff on this post  from "Ed Johnson" the Hacknot blog.  The basic idea of the original post is that there is no evidence of one programming language engendering higher productivity than another, with the specific issue that the current crop of dynamic languages (Ruby,

Dave Thomas asked a question about mastery, especially regarding agile practices, in his PragDave blog.

Have you ever been part of a requirements process that stalled?  Sometimes this happens because the requester or delegate parties responsible for providing requirements were unable to provide complete sets of what ultimately would become the business rules that your solution would need to contemplate.  Perhaps it is because the policies are in the process of changing, and are not defined today.  Perhaps the request is dependent on other changes that are being made in related business processes which also are not finalized.  Perhaps it is

Skip Angel (of Random Thoughts of a CTO)  has a new blog called Leaning Towards Agility.  His recent post about making things more difficult was quite amusing.

At the end, he asked a question about products.  

Lisa Haneberg over at Management Craft provides this insight about Improving Pace at Work.

Since I had been thinking about this topic all weekend, and had already threatened to post about it, I am going for it.

My original thoughts came from my experience with the martial arts.  I started a program at the beginning of the year (for the first time) primarily out of my need to exercise.  I wanted an exercise regimen that would occupy my mind as much as my body, because the running, cycling, lifting, cardio-machining that I had been doing were somewhat mindless.

There are two unkind words that derive from the farm - manure from a bull (BS), and manure from a horse (HS)?  I have a working assumption around colloquial language that says HS is used to describe something of poor quality, questionable value.  HS ususally is the result of poor workmanship, poor raw materials, poor process, etc.  BS, on the otherhand, is deceptive.  BS is usually used to describe something passing as something else; a deception, an "error" masquerading as truth.  The fable "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a story about BS.  When you call BS, you are saying that you "see" the emperor, and he is naked, and ugly!  

OK! So everyone who has had received requirements for a project that were inadequate please raise your hand.  What about requirements that were difficult to determine if they were adequate without rewriting them from scratch?  What about requirements that primarily describe the current situation, and not the desired future state?  How about requirements that are written more as a functional specification (I need a report that has these data elements with this sorting grouping and formatting)?  Sometimes it is hard to