Agile Quotes (from Twitter), Third Set

Back when I was writing my Old Blogs, I saved Tweets that, at the time, struck me as interesting when they appeared. The list was originally published in pieces as the total became quite long. long. So I’ll be reposting these in pieces to avoid posting a single list of dozens of pages.

Some quotes are not from Twitter users, but quotes other Twitter users thought were interesting from authors, philosophers, etc. There’s even a few here of my own. In some cases, there are follow-ups combined with the original.

This third set goes from “J” through the “L”s.

J.B. Rainsberger — I find it hard to value Customer Collaboration without valuing whatever the customer decides is value.

J.B.Rainsberger — I find a fine line between “follow blindly” and “follow strictly, expecting to learn something”. I do latter; looks like former.

J.B.Rainsberger — I find that the more authority I have over my own habits, the more I care about outcomes over dogma.

J.B.Rainsberger — Irony alert: Most organizations learning Scrum are actually practising Waterfall in a manner quite similar to what Royce intended.

J.B.Rainsberger — Perhaps if more craftspeople worked more closely together, the narcissism would subside.

J.B.Rainsberger (via David Hussman at Agile 2009, not Twitter) — “Drive the cost of failure to 0, so we can fail a million times.”

J.B.Rainsberger (via yorufukurou) — Also: before you give advice, ask yourself, “Do I follow this advice myself?” If you don’t, then keep quiet. :)

Jack Dixon (via @tinybuddha via Rob Myers) — If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.

Jacob Yip — Stop the line != stop and fix. Stop and contain. Fix when you understand why, which may require longer analysis.

James Bach (and Michael Bolton) — We think a check [as opposed to a test] is “an observation with a decision rule that can be performed non-sapiently” example: junit asserts. So, a lot of what Agilists call testing, we would call checking. But to create checks and react to broken checks requires testing skill.

James Bach — 3-word critical thinking process: Huh? Really? So? (question meaning, then question fact, then question significance)

James Bach — A lot of my choices are about arranging life so instead of having to control my anger, I don’t have anger that needs controlling.

James Bach — If a scrap of paper has value to you, then it has quality to some degree.

James Bach — If you don’t have a clear goal in life — then watch out! — you might wander and learn cool things that no one anticipated. Payson Hall (replied with this from Tolkien) — Not all those who wander are lost.

James Bach — Saying ISTQB certification makes a tester better is like saying a chefs hat makes you a good cook. I had a woman in my class who studied for two years to be a baker. Then she studied for a few days to get a tester certification. Why are donuts worth two years of school, and testing worth no training at all? Because testing is easier to fake than donuts.

James Bach — Testing under no circumstances shows that the product will work. So we test mainly to discover how it will not work.

James Bach — They way to kill curiosity is to *force* other people to learn what you think they will someday need to know.

James Bach — When you see someone “resist change”, realize from their point of view they are just applying self-discipline to do things right.

James Bach (at #accu2010 via Tom Gilb) — ‘it is Testers Job to not be fooled by What is fooling everyone else’. ‘testing is about discovering the significance of the requirements’. ‘The spec is a rumor! Wouldn’t you like to know what the code ACTUALLY does before you ship?’

James Bach (at StarEast via Matt Heusser) — “bad rigor is following instructions without understanding them”, or “pathetic compliance”

Jamie Flinchbaugh (not really a Twitter quote, but pointed to from there) — waste doesn’t get eliminated until someone asks why is it there!

Jared Richardson — Overheard: Jenga development. You’re not sure which piece will bring it all down, so you resist any changes no matter what.

Jason Gorman — 1. Hire good programmers. 2. Give them clear goals. 3. Give regular constructive feedback. 4. Stay out of the way!

Jason Gorman (via Hannu Kokko & Kent Beck) — Knowledge of languages and APIs no more makes you a developer than knowledge of anatomy makes you a doctor.

Jason Yip — A car is a system; individual parts are not. Extreme Programming is a system; individual practices are not.

Jason Yip — Crisis is required to provoke deep change only if top management has a monopoly on setting strategy.

Jason Yip — If you had to scale down Agile to a few core skills that can be learned and applied without a huge commitment. What would that look like?

Jason Yip — Isn’t it kind of weird that Japan has a Deming prize and the US has a Shingo prize?

Jason Yip — Paradoxically, if you truly value people, you tend to focus on the work, not on the people.

Jason Yip — The problem is not concentration of power; the problem is thinking based on authority rather than responsibility.

jasonlittle ‏@jasonlittle jasonlittle Retweeted David Denham true for *any* team, not just ‘agile’ ones.https://twitter.com/cobrakaiagile/status/745157427167793152 … jasonlittle added, David Denham @cobrakaiagile #Agile teams who experiment with their process are more likely to innovate with their product.

Jay Arthur — At one time, customers wanted you to be better, faster and cheaper. Now, they want everything free, perfect and now.

Jean Tabaka — Scrum vs Kanban vs other systems/certification debates distract vs focus. Continuous systems improvement jazzes me. Pick & focus.

Jean Tabaka asked about 100–130 chars to describe Kanban and some responses were: Karl Scotland — Map value stream, visualize, limit WIP, establish cadence. Reduce WIP to improve value flow & individual fulfillment. David Anderson — visualize flow, limit WIP to encourage evolutionary change towards lean outcome, high maturity culture.

Jeff Bezos (via Jason Yip) — There are two kinds of companies, those that work to charge more and those that work to charge less.

Jeff Patton — agile people: is iteration process iteration- repeat the same steps in cycles, or product iteration: reconsider and rework prod decisions?

Jeff Patton — Agile-resistant teams hate all the meetings. Experienced agile teams love all the collaborative work.

Jeff Patton — Is the “definition of done” actually a “definition of built”? “Built” is when I get software, “done” is when I get benefit.

Jeff Patton — popular quote at yesterday’s agile round table [Colorado somewhere] on good management: “organize their goals, not their work.” — can’t remember where I got it.

Jeff Patton — Requirements are the boundary between what I get to decide and what you get to decide. It’s a fuzzy discussion, or DMZ.

Jeff Stevens (from a LinkedIn post) — Three things you can do: 1: Make a good decision. No need to change anything 2. Make a bad decision. You can always change it. 3: Make no decision. This stagnates everything.

Jens Ohlig — pizza with the radius z and thickness a has the volume pi*z*z*a [Life is good]

Jerry Weinberg — Baking a cake has 23 steps, only after the last step does it look like a cake. every intermediate step looks like a mess.

Jerry Weinberg — Those who know “how” will always have jobs, but the one who knows “why” will always be their boss.

Jerry Weinberg — When managers don’t understand the work, they tend to reward the appearance of work. (long hours, piles of paper, …)

Jim Highsmith — Agile managers understand that demanding certainty in the face of uncertainty is dysfunctional.

Jim Highsmith — Agility is the ability to think and learn rather than blindly following a recipe. Brian Marick — No, agility is not “the ability to think and learn rather than blindly following a recipe”. Let’s not equate “agility” with “good”. The ability to think and learn is part of Agile and 8 zillion other things. Joshua Kerievsky — @marick You’ve focused on the think/learn part while the important part is not “blindly following a recipe.” (even an Agile one). Brian Marick — @JoshuaKerievsky I suppose it needs saying. But I think it would be good if Agile thought leaders thought more about software.

Jim Highsmith — Calculating value points. If the product mgr has no time to calculate value, the dev team has no time to calculate cost.

Jim Highsmith — Documentation is often the solution to a communications problem that can’t be corrected with documentation.

Jim Highsmith — The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner.

Jim Knowlton (at PNSQC via Matt Dressman) — “date, but don’t marry, your framework.”

Joan Koerber-Walker — Why Do We Ignore “Best Practices”? Scott Duncan — ’Cause we don’t think they are?

Jochen Schuchardt — We sometimes equate project mgmt with the visible planning artifacts. But the heart of it is people and relationships.

Johanna Rothman (from her blog, ptd to from Twitter) — good interviews should make a candidate (and an interviewer) think, not sweat [preceeded by “Good interviews do not surprise people. Good interviews build rapport with a candidate, learn about a candidate, preferably with behavior-description questions and auditions. Maybe with hypothetical questions. Maybe with a meta-question.”

John C. Maxwell — People change when they: HURT enuf that they have to; LEARN enuf that they want to; & RECEIVE enuf that they’re able to.

John D. Cook (actually from his blog pointed to by Jurgen Appelo) — I’ve said that someone has too much time on their hands, but not since I read Meyer’s post. I see now that the phrase is often a sour grapes response to creativity. I don’t want to do that anymore.

John Goodsen — Iterations are the dogma and waste of Agile. Flow and pull make iterations irrelevant. Are you certified to manage waste?

John Seddon (via Bob Marshall) — Less of the wrong thing is not the right thing.

John Seddon (via Bob Marshall) — Measure what is important to customers, not auditors.

Jon Bach — FB is an album for friends, Twitter is a coffee shop for colleagues.

Jonathan Bach — As a manager, my mantra always is: “You may report to me, but really, I work for you.”

Jonathan Bach — Scrabble analogy #1: Rarely can your most valuable test ideas (letters Q&Z) be easily put into words. Scrabble analogy #2: Sometimes a test (a word) has more value when it’s placed on the boundaries (triple word score). Scrabble analogy #3: You get a bonus if you use all 7 letters to form a word (diverse techniques in one test is powerful).

Jonathan Bach — There are no certified musicians, but we know skilled ones from unskilled ones. Still, execs just want sheet music, not the sound.

Joseph Angel Alcala — Apologizing always doesn’t mean you wrong and others right…means you respect relationship more than your ego.

Josh Nankivel — Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.

Joshua Kerievsky — An improvement is something that “enhances value or excellence.” Don’t ship features. Ship improvements.

Joshua Kerievsky — Faster velocity != better software development. Velocity metrics are a powerfully distracting illusion. Story point estimation is a confusing waste of time. Discussion, feature fat removal, bargain hunting are way more useful.

Joshua Kerievsky — Low-grade sausages contain stuff you don’t want to know about just like low-quality software.

Joshua Kerievsky — To release frequently, discover and build “acceptably incomplete” features that can ship today and evolve tomorrow. re: “acceptably incomplete” — one Customer deferred a good number of stories (8–10) that would “flesh out” a feature. In the end, those stories were never implemented — Customer realized that they didn’t really need them after all. Dave Rooney — So, “acceptably incomplete” was actually “perfectly acceptable”. Joshua Kerievsky — Completeness is overrated. We get more done faster by finding what is acceptable in its incompleteness. The core issue may be that we don’t know what “complete” really is all the time (perhaps ‘most’ of the time). That’s why the hardest and perhaps most valuable skill to master is Evolutionary Design.

Jurgen Appelo — Introverts are not shy. Introverts just prefer low-noise communication. [Added by Dave Rooney in a retweet — Introvert == shy is common misconception]

Jurgen Appelo — Separating process (Scrum) from development (TDD etc) is a fine example of loose coupling. Developers should appreciate that.

Karl Scotland — If your process is designed to expose dysfunction, what do you do when your process becomes the dysfunction?

Karl Scotland (asked) — Are retrospectives a form of Schewart/Deming Cycle? David Anderson (replied) — I find most retrospective guidance to suggest subjective, anecdotal feedback rather than objective data-based Deming style info. SEI classifies OID based on subjective, anecdotal evidence as low maturity even though OID is a ML5 process area. Deming’s method would be considered high maturity OID/CAR ML5 by the SEI. Typical retros are a low maturity precursor to PDSA. meanwhile, @kjscotland and I are only reporting facts from field. High maturity kanban teams tend to drop retros as waste.

Kathy Sierra — “self-promotion” need not be literal. Want people to see you’re good at X? Promote “learning X” or “others I helped do X” or simply BE… X

Kathy Sierra — Clarification on word “useful”: it does NOT rule out entertainment or tweeting your lunch menu. Making my day even .0001% better? Useful.

Kathy Sierra — Good directions to your house include how to know I’m on the right road and how to know recognize when I’m not (& what to do about THAT).

Keith Braithwaite — No. I’d call src ctrl a good practice so good that it’s mandatory until something better comes along — and I hope for something better. Ron Jeffries — so your concern with “best” is that someday something might be better? Keith Braithwaite — My concern is that a stated belief in the current way being best will lessen the likelihood of a better way being recognised.

Ken Schwaber (in a recent podcast, reported by Tobias Meyer) — Scrum is less a silver bullet and more an enema.

Kent Beck — by “aspirations” i mean “who we are trying to be”: software will improve when we aspire to be accountable, transparent, reliable. Ron Jeffries — well, yes, that and when we act in accord with those aspirations.

Kent Beck — Disagree that xp1e glorified programmers. Talking code when addressing the industry built on code isn’t glorifying. The kind of thing i notice is when i say “the team” in 1e i mean “the programmers”. In 2e we meant everybody influencing dev. “respect” as a value hasn’t been widely accepted. Michael Feathers — The thing that was key in XP1E was the emphatic message “with these constraints, this works.” Up to that point, everyone was trying to solve the “general problem” of software dev. Rachel Davies — for me — XP1E was about listening to customers without compromising code quality — a way to achieve balance.

Kent Beck — i would be very glad to see a dramatic increase in aspirations for outcomes accompanied by a dramatic decrease in dogma.

Kent Beck — not quite a definition but… “quality results in a steady flow of value” or “a steady flow of value indicates the presence of quality”.

Kent Beck — shu ha ri is generally a power trip for the teacher. empathy, engagement, and modeling work much better if you can deliver them.

Kent Beck — there’s a world of difference between telling me what to do and helping me learn by telling me what to do

Kent Beck (via Jon Udell) — There’s no difference I can see but there’s obviously a difference the computer can see. I hate that.

Kent Beck ‏@KentBeck Big difference between needing to learn social skills and needing to unlearn anti-social skills

Kent Beck ‏@KentBeck Sometimes working extra hours makes a big difference. Don’t work extra hours if this isn’t one of those times.

Kevlin Henney — Use of “general” and “flexible” are design meeting smells.

Lao-tzu (via Bob McNeal) — Different perception?… What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.

Larry Weidel -There are LAWS, PRINCIPLES, and PREFERENCES. LAWS are ALWAYS true. PRINCIPLES are USUALLY true. PREFERENCES are up 2 U.

LinusTorvalds — Real men don’t use backups, they post their stuff on a public FTP server & let the rest of the world make copies.

Luke Hohmann — Surveys are about getting answers to questions. #innovationgames are about shared exploration of complex issues to gain insight.