Next Tuesday I’ll be giving a talk about Agile Operations at the Agile Austin<\/a> meeting. Israel Gat had a nice teaser on the topic<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n \nOne 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<\/a>. 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n I’ll see if I can work out the masculine fightin’ metaphors for the talk, the annoy me too ;><\/p>\nThe Links<\/h2>\n
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Full text of McNealy's good by email.<\/li>\n
Austin-based SolarWinds buys into storage for $42M.<\/li>\n
“his perspective is often unusual – and unfailingly makes me stop and think. ” -@merv<\/li>\n
Hey, I don't like software patents as much as the next guy. It'd be nice to see how much money the patent holders made off these "preventions of progress": was it a lot, zero? Was it worth it for the individuals, the lawyers? Who's winning if "progress" is stalled? That's the annoying philosopher's trick: up-level the context and then run away.<\/li>\n
Sounds like an unintentional rally cry for the old WTO days. You know, get your black hanky ready and track down your nearest Starbucks or McDonalds type stuff: "We’ve been taught that our government, ostensibly a representative democracy, is effectively neither. We’re powerless. We’ve had the civic engagement beaten out of us. Friedman’s assumption that we think our job is done is condescending and incorrect. We’ve been shown by all three branches of the federal government that they’ll do whatever they want regardless of popular opinion, that common sense and the people’s best interests don’t matter, and that there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it."<\/li>\n
Go learn about Azure, Hyper-V, and Windows 7 in Austin on March 9th. I'll be going if I can.<\/li>\n
"The favored agile methodology, scrum, was used by nearly 11 percent of respondents."<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n