Scott’s Comments (group member since Feb 26, 2015)

Scott’s comments from the Berkun reading group group.

Thanks for writing this Ravi. There's a blog post for you to write based on this called "What Programmers Can Learn From Scientists" - you really should write it.

Handdrawing(tm) - it might just be the next big management tend.

(sound of chapter 8 weeping in loneliness)

Ravi: I've come a long way since writing this chapter. When I worked at WordPress.com to write The Year Without Pants we worked without them - instead we used very simple mockups, discussions and notes.

The size of a spec is correlated to the size of the organization - if it's just you and 3 people who get along well, you won't be motivated to write that much down. But if you know your document is going to be read by 100 people, including some with the power to shut your project down, you write differently indeed.

A reference kit of some good specs would be nice to see - I think I tried to do this but most specs are proprietary - companies don't want their internal sausage making shared with the world.

Shiran: Sometimes I wonder if the problem with design so many people never seen it led in the right way. This is probably true for many fields but there are just some things you can't learn from a book or a course - you have to be on a project led by someone who gets many of the little insights and attitudes that make good work possible, especially when it comes to working with ideas.

Hi Ravi:

Fascinating that your chemical engineering background helps you to see something about software that people with software backgrounds don't see.

Most of our experiments were failures but they allowed us to pivot quickly.

Why do you think non scientists have such a misguided idea of what an experiment is? In all of the lectures I give about creativity and innovation this elemental concept is something many people stumble on - the simple idea you have to do things where you are unsure of the outcome in order to learn the information you need to solve a problem.

Ravi: Thanks for going meta with a retrospective on our retrospectives :)

Putting Ideas Into Action is certainly interesting. The hope with the exercises was to help make that happen (ha ha) for readers, but perhaps there's something else here.

Discussion starts here.

Discussion starts here.

I'm not a fan of these kinds of tools and I mean that personally. I've never found them useful for my own thinking or for team projects but clearly other people do.

The biggest problem with these tools is most people aren't willing to learn new ones and they create friction if they're not integrated with the communication tools you already use.

All put together I'd start with the simplest tools we have - a wiki, a blog, a Google Doc - I'd use whatever the team is already using to capture ideas. Organizing can be done elsewhere perhaps, but for capture I want the lowest friction possible.

Hi Kye:

Regarding browsers - at the time it wasn't forward at all as most of my career had been spent building web browsers :)

The open issues list is meant to be for the entire project. I'm a big believe in lists, including a list of things that are somehow important but not on other lists (yet!)

Rachel: glad the chapter was good for you!

The vision statement is good or bad to the degree the leaders of the project take it seriously. Some leaders on projects I worked on at MSFT took it very seriously, and made it part of every leader's thinking. Others, not so much - quality of any "process' always reflects the the leaders of the project, or the company.

Welcome Marjorie! You are in fact reading them backwards, which is totally fine of course. Year Without Pants was written almost ten years after MTH.

A favorite book about finding and working with constraints is Gerald Weinberg's "Are Your Lights On?" - http://www.amazon.com/Are-Your-Lights...

Idea generation is very easy. And the smaller the group of people in the room the less politics you'll have. When a brainstorming session is uptight, it means there were too many people in the room, or the wrong people (or both).

Keeping an idea journal is a fantastic habit. Most artists, painters, musicians and writers keep some kind of sketch book. Anyone who wants to be more creative or productive with their ideas would be wise to follow suit.

Shiran:

It's the job of leaders and managers to make sure that the vision executives have is translated properly down to each team and person. It's a primary part of their job. It's not reconciling conflicts so much as guiding the creation of the vision for every new project to line up well (or lead to a change) in how the higher level goals are defined.

In most organizations each layer of management has a regular meeting where they discuss what their current goals are and conflicts are reconciled. Vision/Goal documents can help with this.

Ravi:

You'll need to be creative in visualizing something not being there.

2. The downstream system for processing my order is unavailable most of the time

How does the user know it's unavailable? Show a screenshot of that sad screen :) In other cases where users have no way to obtain certain information I'd show the screen people *try* to go to to get an answer (a help system?) with their unanswered query shown.

You can also do an informal usability study where you ask a customer to try to do the task, and videotape them trying (and failing) to do it.

Kevin: I've seen teams use Google Docs and Wiki's for similar reasons, in that if everyone can edit it it's still alive in a way a "document" is not.

Rachel: RSS! :) Curiously I don't think there was a time when RSS was all that popular. It might have been on the rise in 2003 but it never became a mainstream term. So much for my ability to predict the future.

The balance of power in most organizations is heavily shifted one way or another and the people with the most power are the least likely to notice.

Discussion and questions on CHP6 start here.

Discussion and questions on CHP 5 start here.