Month: October 2015

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The Agile Katamari: Sticking things together and pulling things apart

Different people have different ideas about the current status of the “agile” movement in software development. Different people have different ideas about what “agile” even means. Having been involved with “agile” development since 2002, I’ve had the opportunity to observe an interesting trend: We’ve been gluing a lot of things onto “agile.” Now it may be time to pry some of those things off and get back to basics.

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An opportunistic coaching moment

At one of those massively-wasteful, multi-day SAFe Inspect and Adapt events, held at an offsite conference center, a couple hundred people were jammed closely together in a line for the lunch buffet. There was plenty of food, but the procedure to get it was very cumbersome and lengthy.

A senior IT manager at my client happened to be quite near me in line. He remarked, “This is crazy!”

I replied, “If they ran this place like an IT shop, they would solve this problem by hiring more cooks.”

“But…but that isn’t the problem,” he said quizzically.

“Exactly!” I said.

He didn’t laugh, but others did.

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NTFS read/write support on Mac OSX

I find it convenient to share files between systems using an external hard drive, including Windows, OSX, and Linux. The challenge is that different operating systems use different filesystems by default. I’ve been using Microsoft’s NTFS as a common denominator. On Linux, package ntfs-3g supports NTFS, and on OSX the procedure described in this article worked fine until recently. One fine day last week after a system software update, my Air lost the ability to write to NTFS. The old procedure to enable write support for NTFS no longer worked.

Apple seems determined to prevent people from having a simple, seamless way to share files with non-Apple systems other than an online service like Dropbox. So, people have to keep coming up with solutions. Here’s how I regained access to my cross-system hard drive this weekend.

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Team practices, code reviews, and lead time

Recently, I watched a webinar that demonstrates a work flow for asynchronous code reviews using a tool from JetBrains called Upsource. The webinar started me thinking about the constraints that might cause a team to resort to asynchronous code reviews in the first place. While the product appears to be well made and easy to use, I wonder whether it offers a workaround to deeper problems that teams might wish to consider solving outright.
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