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Links for January 26th through January 27th

A little something extra…

Next Tuesday I’ll be giving a talk about Agile Operations at the Agile Austin meeting. Israel Gat had a nice teaser on the topic.

I was noodling out one part of the talk, the other day and found myself typing up one of those weirdly aggressive mini-screeds I do from time to time:

One meaning of “Agile” is to do less, more frequently. Code is the least of your problems. You have to worry about marketing, fax machines, testing, running the software in a cloud world, etc.. What has development done recently to help the company make money? Is there a unit test for making your quarterly revenue numbers? Don’t be Detroit autoworkers, transit workers in San Diego. Chances are, you can should be doing more, and you’re not going to get paid for it. A tragic tale: good managers are programmers who no longer code.

That’s one of my common software development themes: don’t get comfortable, keep your head out of the sand, keep moving. The silo of “development” is the current sand bank, and forcing yourself to deal with “those damn sys admins” is the current rally cry. And it goes the other way too: often more viciously if the IT staffer isn’t ready to pounce.

I’ll see if I can work out the masculine fightin’ metaphors for the talk, the annoy me too ;>

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