We don’t seem to be hosting regular user group meetings. Our sporadic events seem to attract mostly new people each time. Next meeting we rarely see them. Huge number of people sign up, but only a fraction show up.

Its not just the Agile community, we’ve tried many other communities like .Net User Group, TechCamp, GeekNight, BarCamps, etc. Except the Linux community (FOSS now) I don’t think any other software community has really sustained itself.

This is very contrary to what I saw when I used to facilitate the Agile Philly User Group and the Philly GeekNight. People used to drive 2 hrs to attend the meeting. We had the same set of people coming every meeting. We all had this sense of learning and growing together.

What do you think is different in India?

IMHO the biggest problem I see is that there is so much “mediocre job opportunity” available, that frankly software professionals can be in demand for many years without learn anything new. With many people I sense a ”there-is-no-need-to-stretch-ourself” attitude. Necessity is the mother of innovation and action. People don’t see the necessity. Period.

There are very few people I know who care about learning and exploring and growing.

Some other problems I see:

• For most people, there is no end to mediocre opportunities and they are happy with it. “This job sucks, but its OK, I get a decent salary.” kind of attitude. The ones who want to purse big dreams mostly move to US or other places. (There are always exceptions to the rule.)
• With all the personal, social life & society obligations and working late to catch up with counterparts in other countries, there is very little time left for user groups and other initiatives. Even if one is interested, the traffic and other logistics make it next to impossible to motivate people.
• There is country culture, but the biggest culprit is the Organization culture. At certain places I’ve worked, if you are not learning new stuff, you feel like a piece of shit. But in many other companies I’ve visited, that’s not the case.
• Indian Software Industry is unfortunately very “brand conscious“. If its a big name speaking at an event, people will walk a whole day to attend the event. But if its a local speaker presenting, it doesn’t appeal.

I’m sorry if you find me ranting, but I’m disappointed with the attitude. I’ve almost lost hope, but may be you can show me the light.

The problem I see is, teams are doing all the process stuff, as they are told, except that, post demo they don’t actually release the software (deploy it into production). Most teams are very happy showing the demos at the end of the sprints. They start thinking that this new process they are following is magical. Until 6 months later, their so-called “Product Owner” comes backs saying I didn’t quite expect “this” this-way and I thought “that” would be “this” and not really “that”. That is when it hits the team that what they were really doing was building inventory and basically doing a compressed-waterfall.

Until you actually release your software and see your end-users actually use it in real life, you don’t have the most important feedback. Hence you are not “done” until you really see you users use the feature you just released (and probably you are not even done after that. “Done-Done” was a cute concept, get over it). There is no better means of feedback nor is there a better risk-reduction strategy other than releasing software to production frequently (at least every week).

Remember code that is not yet deploy and just sitting in your repository is a liability. So is, all your fancy product backlogs and grandiose plans.

• Everything (soda, water, lemonade) has a ton of ice in it. Just think of the amount of energy wasted having those coolers running 24/7.
• Central Air-conditioning: Every conference room, hall way, lobby is set at 60F (15.5c). You see people wearing full sleeves, pullovers, etc.
• Stair cases have been replaces with escalators everywhere.
• I have hot water in the taps 24 hrs a day
• People using treadmills instead of going out and jogging.
• The list can go on…

While the world is crying about Global Warming, Energy Crisis, and so on. Here I find energy being wasted wasting senselessly. I’m not sure if people don’t care or they are ignorant or they simply not aware of the implications.

P.S: I’m also annoyed by the amount of waste (plastic and paper) generated. The funny thing is, everywhere you have these different color dust-bins with recycle logo on it. But you’ll find people use 5 different plastic glasses if they want to drink 5 glasses of water. I don’t think they get the whole point.

Few months ago I started doing readiness assessments before my trainings. (I’ve also started doing assessments after my training so see if the training was effective.) But I have realized the assessment is not enough. So I’ve started asking the following questions even before the assessments:

• What kind of issues your organization is facing currently and do you think Agile will help you? If yes, why so?
• What is the current strength of your development team? How experienced is the team with software development? Does your team understand all aspects of software development?
• What is the current process you follow? In other words, from the inception of an idea to the delivery of the same, what are the various steps and people involved?
• What is a day in life of a team member (one per role please)?
• How do your stakeholders (including customers) perceive your team/organization? Currently how do you gather feedback from them?
• How would you rate the technical know-how of your team? Are they able to quickly resolve technical challenges and respond to changing priority of the business?
• Is your team/organization open to trying out things that might seem non-intuitive/illogical? For Ex: Letting the requirements evolve during the project, not freezing them? Letting tests drive your design?
• And so on …

Luckily a lot of organizations don’t get back to me with answers for these questions. This is really good for me, because this acts as a filtering criteria. I feel I would have wasted my time training/coaching this team. There are others who are in much more need and are more receptive to what I’ve to contribute.

We’re going Agile. This will solve all our problems. Our software products will be delivered faster than light.

Hand picked set of managers are sent to the near-by, favorite Scrum Certification course. And from that day onwards, the army of software slaves wear their Agile uniforms and start marching. Starting with those pre-pre-pre-pre-poker; sorry planning meetings to the re-re-re-review meetings to the daily (ouch my legs hurt) scrums. And of course the wet-row-spectives.

After doing all this, your company don’t even see the light, forget delivering products at lightening speed. Then of course you hire a X-Stream black-belt consultant to explain you why you need another Engineering process to succeed. So you start doing TDD, no BDD, no TDD, no RDD with automagic retractoring and revolutionary markitecture. Knowledge of resign patterns is mandated. You also instill the promiscuous rare-programming with sustainable mace and so on.

You continue down this path cursing yourself that you are not good enough. Only if you had the right set of people perfectly following the process, you could see fluffy bunnies jumping all over the place.

If something is good, do it all the time OR as they say, push the nob to 10.

• We realized that integrating early and often is good, hence we started doing Continuous Integration.
• We realized that we cannot plan once and then just follow the plan, we need to continuous keep planning and prioritizing work.
• We realized that code reviews are helpful, hence we started Pair Programming.
• We realized that testing early and often is good, hence we started Test Driven Development.
• We realized that one cannot think of all scenarios and design software upfront. Since software keeps evolving and software degrades (bit-rot) over time, we need to refactor code all the time (mercilessly).
• And so on.

This is what I mean by flow mode (activity) rather than an episodic mode (event).

In Agile, we’ve tried to apply this principle in various places like

• Product Visioning
• Managing Product Backlogs (Requirements)
• Release Planning
• Iteration Planning
• Retrospective
• User feedback
• Daily Stand-up meetings
• And so on…

But what I feel is a lot of it is still very episodic. For example,

• If a developer hits a road block, they sit on it till the next day’s stand-up meeting. Because stand-up meeting is where we discuss roadblocks.
• If we find something is hurting us, we wait till the retrospective to discuss about it.
• If we discover some acceptance criteria cannot be met or is flawed during the iteration, we wait till the demo to communicate that with the customer/product owner.
• If we discover a new killer feature during an iteration, we wait for the planning meeting to discuss that and prioritize it on the backlog.
• We wait till the end of the release to do Performance testing, Hallway Usability testing and other important tests.
• And so on….

The Lean community is trying to address a lot of these issues. As long as we think of software development activities as episodes and not as continuous flow of activities it would be very difficult to really implement kaizen and evolve.

But for a large number of members, for some reason, all their messages are moderated. On checking their setting it shows:

“Posting Messages: Override: This member’s posts are always moderated”

I don’t understand why YG is behaving this way.

Solution: Edit the user’s membership. Under the edit membership page, there is a small edit link next to the “Override: This member’s posts are always moderated”.

Once you click on the edit link, it takes you to Edit Message Posting Privileges page where you’ll have to select the “Use current group message posting setting” option.

Save the settings and you should be good to go.

Wonderful, Self-explanatory Error Message!

Come on guys, test your bloody software. Don’t use us as guinea-pigs.

Then why do most companies try to imitate other successfully company? They expect that doing what other successful companies did, will also make them successful.

If my company builds a search engine like Google, we’ll also be successful is bullshit. For 2 reasons. Google was not successful just because of its search engine, it was their business model around traffic monotization that made them a lot of money. Secondly there are enormous other factors that play in this context. Things like timing, market condition, skilled resources, vision, etc also play an important role.

For a sec if we assume that we can reproduce all these things, can we then be as successful as Google? My take is No. The rationale behind my answer comes from understanding that we live in a complex adaptive system. Which means the system adapts over time. So if we give the same input the system will not necessarily produce the same results. By now the system has adapted itself.

Sure there are important lessons and ideas to be learnt from others. IMHO, just following what they did will not take a company anywhere. In some cases it will do more harm than good.

A good example of this phenomena is, software companies trying to imitate Toyota production system and its lean manufacturing process. Toyota production system is out in the public domain for at least over a decade now. Forget software companies, why don’t we have another car company as successful as Toyota?

Simply because imitating some other company does not make you them.

Another exmaple comes from the Agile community. A lot of companies are trying to imitate the standard Scrum process or are trying to do XP by book. Unfortunately in-spite of doing everything as defined by the book, they are not seeing the desirable results. The problem is companies fail to understand that its the company, its people, its policies, its attitude, its culture, its market, etc that has a huge influence on the desired results not the process alone.

I’m just tried of companies who want to do a 1 or 2 day course on XP or Scrum and become successful.

From an end user’s perspective it looks like they use their first thousand users as their manual testers.

I’ll give you an example, today LinkedIn launched a new set of Applications like SlideShare, Amazon, WordPress, TripIt, etc. When I try to use any application by installing it, I keep getting random errors.

There was a problem installing My Travel.
Fix this by reinstalling the application.

Sorry, unable to fetch your blog. Please try again later!

The server did not respond. Please try again.

Its the Web 2.0 companies or the Microsoft’s of the world who can get away with this attitude. If this was a high-end competitive market, such broken applications would result in significant loss of reputation and business.  The Web is certainly changing this. Not sure for the good or bad. On one hand, I like the fact that I can quickly release features and improve it over time. But on the other hand, I don’t like the fact that in the urgency to release new features, we compromise on quality and release dysfunctional stuff.

All I can think is, companies still struggle trying to strike the right balance. They are caugh up in tyring to have the cake and eating it too.

This is the end
International Travel, the end
This is the end
Flying International Airlines, the end

Policies and Invitation letters, the end
Long Visa application queues, the end
Customs and immigrations, the end
I’ll never live out of a suitcase…again

Forex and conversion fees, the end
Jet-lags and sleep-walking, the end
Bland food with Tabasco, the end
I’ll never lose days traveling…again

Lousy long flights, the end
Living at your mercy, the end
Delays and surprises, the end
I’ll never live through this…again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Never in need of some stranger’s hand
In a…strange land

It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to fly

After a very rough year with international travel, I’m glad to say, no more international travel for me. (not at least for work or conferences).

* Altered lyrics from “The End” by The Doors. Long live Jim Morrison.

Yet another cancelled flight and change in my travel schedule. What crap? Is it a problem with the airlines or with me. Somehow this year has been really really bad. Pretty much every international travel this year has had some change in schedule. Either the flights are delayed by few hours/days or are completely cancelled.

I’m so glad, I don’t have any more international travel planned.