Posts by elmarm

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Agile Customers

Having been in quite a few "Agile" projects over the past decade or so I have found the MAIN problem is the customer/end user and their requirements.

Easy example: Finding the current state of a process to analyze it for the new/improved (mutually exclusive terms btw) process.

What they SAY they currently do, what they ACTUALLY do, and what they are SUPPOSED to be doing are 3 VASTLY different things. Add into the mix years of "I have been doing it this way for decades for reasons LONG forgotten" and of course the "I'm retiring so I'm only going to teach the new kid WHAT to do and not bother to explain WHY I'm doing it" and then the poor new kid is thrown in with the poor BA (who is usually an outside hire specifically for the project and who has NO clue about the actual business) .

You know you're in trouble when your code monkey (That would be ME) gets the "specification document" and has to go back to the user and BA and tell them "But what about XYZ scenario" which completely blows the current solution out of the water. Of course this only happens if your developer has been around a while and actually has a fairly good understanding of the business and its processes (usually much to his/her disgust). If you have a bunch of relatively new/young hot shot developers, they will dive headfirst into the code based on the specs, deliver what is asked for and then get my favorite quote of all time "Yes, this is what we asked for, but it is not what we want".

Personally I like the "horses for courses" approach. Regular feedback is important. Daily standups (no more than 15 minutes), while a bit of a pain do add value in the sense that everybody is now aware of where we are/what any holdups are BEFORE they become mission critical. MOST of the other "ceremonies" in agile are just a waste of time. But if you don't have a clear and DEFINED endpoint in mind then working rapidly towards that ever moving goal is just going to cause frustration.

My 2c (Given the current exchange rate, worth even less)

Samsung: We will remotely brick smart TVs looted from our warehouse

Remote Bricking

Is this the same Samsung that pushed out a faulty .xml file and bricked a ton of Blu ray players worldwide? I had to take my one in to our local Samsung repair shop and they had to replace the one pc board, thats how bricked it was.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?....

Always remember folks: its like the old army saying. If the enemy is in range, so are you... In this case. If you can see their servers, their servers can see you.

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

Floppy's and stiffies

Strue. Floppy's were the old 360k disks. Stiffies were the 1.44MB disks. And yes, we do refer to traffic lights as robots but I have NO idea why :)

Overload: A one-way ticket to a madman's situation

Please kill our machine, it can't be done... Challenge accepted

I'm known in my office for being a "bit" of a cowboy but I also tend to be the "panic manager" that gets called in when things go to hell. But thats another story.

Many years ago we had just gotten new development and production machines that had "GASP" 2!!! CPU's so there was no way the machine could be killed by a runaway process... I was asked to see if I could do it (on the development machine obviously). Easy peasy. Code a 10 million entry string array and write a bubble sort algorithm and put all that in an infinite loop. Within seconds it had 100% utilization of the one CPU and was chowing RAM and swap space like the cookie monster on speed. The DBA managed to kill the process and I was asked NEVER to throw that process in twice as it would totally disable the machine. Oddly enough I've never been asked to stress test anything again. Can't imagine why....

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: Ah, customers.

A few years ago the powers that be had another bee i their bonet about "Silos" or some nonsense like that and they decided to put me with a new boss in the technical ops dept (never mind that I'm a systems programmer...). The "getting to know you" interview with new boss and director went as follows "Whatever you have been doing the past 20 years.... keep on doing that" (And I mean that was LITERALLY what they told me).

I called my almost ex boss and pleaded to remain with him and he managed to convince them that he actually had a vague idea of what I do every day.....