AGILE IN ACTION

This post is really a sidebar to my musings about purpose and vision. It's reference information rather than any real thoughts of my own, which I've pulled together because I wanted to touch on the theories behind the positive feelings we experience when we have a sense of purpose and do meaningful work.

Forget about economies of scale. Reduce complexity. Find flow.

Bruce Webster, Byte Magazine 1996:

Defects are waste. User stories with known defects aren't done and can't be released, they're partially complete work or inventory, and they are waste too. If you're using a defect tracking tool you're queuing up waste and you're inspecting for quality after the code's been written. Eliminate waste . Avoid queues because they prevent throughput of released software and block the flow of value to the customer. Build quality into the code from the start by fixing defects as you go. To help improve the quality of code, developers should use test-driven development and testers should perform exploratory testing as developers complete vertical slices of user stories . If a defect is found, stop the line and fix it immediately. Don't queue it up.

One of the great undiscovered joys of life comes from doing everything one attempts to the best of one's ability. There is a special sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work, a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in its parts, which the superficial person who leaves his or her work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition, can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns any work into art. The smallest task, well done, becomes a miracle of achievement. - Og Mandido

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes:

Timeout - when play is temporarily suspended at the request of a team to discuss strategy