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Steve Jobs retires from Apple...

As Steve Jobs retires from Apple, here is a collection of quotes compiled by WSJ. 

There is enough good wisdom to distill from those quotes.  But, one jumps out at me: 
“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” [Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer Inc., May 1999]

Today, more than ever, this sentiment is not only relevant to Apple, but to companies and even to countries.

And here is a very poignant Stanford commencement address he gave in 2005.  From this speech, you can also say he is a master story teller as well.

I used Macs while I was at college.  But thereafter, I was ensconced in the PC camp, especially since I worked at Compaq and Intel for few years.

Like many, I was re-introduced to Apple when the whole iPod phenomenon launched.  And I now have the iPad2.  Though, I am not an Apple "fanboy", there is much to admire in Steve Jobs and Apple.  When it comes to design and abstracting the complexity away from the users, there are very few products out there that can do what Apple products can do.  And that is largely Jobs' vision - making products that just works.  Working in IT, we always talk about figuring out a way to serve our customer's needs.  But Job's genius is in providing product to the user that he didn't even knew he needed.  But, once he has it, the customer wonders how he lived without it!.  That is what I suppose delighting the customer is all about.  What real innovation is all about, sci-fi, but here and now!

As Jobs leaves center stage, his real legacy will be realized in 2-3 years.  This is when we will know if Apple was one man show, or will Apple continue to thrive and innovate without Jobs.

Rich Communication is Crucial for Agile Teams

NPR recently reported that TSA will now use behavioral profiling called “chat-down” and “require every single traveler to go through a quick interview with security officials trying to spot suspicious behavior.” 

A federal security director, George Nacarra said, “We are looking for behaviors that are out of the norm – some kind of indicators of intent to cause a problem.”  To illustrate this concept, Marc Salem, another expert had the reporter do a simple demonstration: 

"Pick a two-digit number, between 50 and 100, both digits even," he says. He explains that he can't guarantee 100 percent success, since he won't be able to read all of the clues he usually gets from face and body language. On the phone, his only clues are things like voice quality, hesitation, pacing and breathing.

"Say nothing aloud," he says. "I'm just going to work off of breath. Hold your mouth next to the phone," and he begins to count as fast as he can from 50 — until he stops dead at 68.

"[It's] 68!" he announces. He says he heard a faint tongue click right when he said the number.

It's subtle, Salem concedes, but he was listening for something like that; he knew I would try to control my breathing, since he mentioned he was listening for that.

"If you hold up something, if you clog one channel of information, it's got to come out somewhere else," he says.

In agile development process, we have chucked the heavy tomes of documented requirements.  Good riddance!  Instead, we write simple user story and flesh out the details through conversations.  So for agile teams, engaging in rich communication becomes crucial.  An expert like Salem is trained to look for audio and visual cues.  Many of us may not have his level of acuity.

What's more, we're now finding through studies that we engage in attention prioritization and attention management, but we do this at the expense of missing other details.  See the video below.  And count the times the people in white tshirts pass the basketball?

Did you correctly count to 15?  But, did you see the gorilla.  It turns out there are 50% of the people who are so engrossed in counting that they never see the gorilla.  For agile teams, it is important to not only engage in rich communication, but also that we have many of our teammates around when we are having these conversations.  This way, even if one person misses something important, then someone else on the team will catch and remember those details. 

Engaging in rich communications, especially face-to-face ones, can uncover clear intent, quicker clarifications, and has fewer chances of miscommunication.  Co-located teams have this advantage, due to proximity to each other.  There is less need for them to write things down, and instead, all team members can be part of all the communications streams.  But what about distributed teams, which according to State of the Agile Survey for 2010, make-up two-thirds of all agile practitioners? 

With my distributed teams, we found few things that was effective in creating the type of shared space, shared knowledge base, we are talking about.  For you, the answer will depends on your team’s particular circumstances.  From my experience, here are some of the things that were effective (roughly, in descending order of priority):      

• Co-locate for project/release inceptions
• Co-locate for iteration demo, planning, retrospectives
• Use web-cams and video-conferencing whenever available
• Tele-conference when more then 2-3 people need to be part of a conversation
• Use of IM, Chat and use of LiveMeeting or WebEx or other online collaboration tools.
• Brief synopsis of side-bar conversations or chat/IM transcripts posted on team’s common workspace (such as wikis, etc.)

What about your teams, what works for you?

Patron Saint of Unfinished Business

Many agile teams do not finish all their committed stories is at the end of the sprint.  There could be several reasons for this.  It could be that the team members started multiple stories at the same time and many testing tasks remain undone towards the end of the sprint.  Sometimes, a team commits to a story when they didn't understand the story clearly and discovered new work during the sprint.  Or it could be that they didn't have specific skillset within the team and had to rely on outside help to complete their work and that help didn't come through.  Some teams also may not have explicit done criteria, and there is a disconnect between what they produced and what the product owner or the customer expected.


For all those teams who don't finish their stories within a sprint, should consider adopting Pierre de Fermat as their patron saint, whose 410 birthday, Google celebrated with this doodle:



(hover text says: "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, which this doodle is too small to contain.)


Pierre de Fermat, a lawyer by the day and a mathematician by night, is best remembered for Fermat's Last Theorem.  According to an article in Christian Science Monitor:

Fermat's marginalia, which was written in Latin and later discovered by his son after he died, read: "It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."
In other words, aⁿ + bⁿ can never equal cⁿ, as long as a, b, and c are positive integers and as long as n is greater than two.  

Fermat never got around to writing his proof down and his theorem confounded mathematicians for over 400 years, till it was solved in 1994.


As an antidote to all the unfinished business, Bre Pettis and Kio Stark, with a 20 minutes time box, got done with the Cult of Done Manifesto:


The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

The Done Manifesto was brilliantly illustrated by James Provost:



It is a wonderful reminder for agile teams to have your story Done criteria defined and complete your stories in a single sprint, so you are closer to a shippable product.