Digital Dim Sum

Don’t push requirements – pull information

I always struggled to see how what Lean teaches us about pull systems can be applied to software development processes. That was until I had an “Aha!” moment a little while ago helping a client apply lean and agile principles to their delivery process.

The big fat lie

I understand how queuing theory can help identify and reduce bottlenecks in processes and have used finger-charts and kanban-boards to do this for a while, but I still find calling this a “pull system” to be slightly disingenuous. All that’s happening is that more “stuff” is being pushed based on a trigger when certain buckets get too low. This reminds me of my annoyance with early technologies on the web that were touted as being “push” but were really just “repetitive-pull” (but not in a good way). I’ve never seen a software organization where the developers have said to the business or product people “we’ve got nothing to do, can you think up some new projects or features for us please?”.

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Robot rights? My foot!

San Francisco is a wonderful place – I ended up having an interesting discussion last night with a self-styled “geek-at-large” about robots, ethics and unix while hanging out at a not-for-profit who are improving the world one wi-fi network at a time.

The robot maker’s argument was that robots don’t have to be super intelligent to carry out some pretty useful, robotic, tasks. He was suggesting that there’s a blind-alley in robotic research premised on being able to map and track everything in your environment in order to move and interact effectively. His argument was that instead you just needed to be able to identify a goal to move towards and be able to avoid collisions. That is a much simpler goal than understanding your whole environment.

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