Weekend reading

A bunch of good articles worth reading. Topic covered – testers in agile team, patent monopoly, buccaneer learning, good and bad manager patterns and improcing your restrospectives (and other repeated things)

Agile Testing: Key Points for Unlearning – straightforward post about common mistakes and misunderstandings for testing in agile process. Testers should be part of the team. Test strategy could be highlevel and lightweight. V-model approach is not possible, instead document and design reviews, focused demos and tight communication happen continuously. Automation is essential and stabilising, testing sprint before final release is a good idea. Automation and cases for new found bugs are essential.

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas – a good and inspiring post from Paul Graham. Just read it.

How patent monopolies work in reality So you want a patent, or patent monopoly, on this wrench. (Patents are usually referred to as exclusive rights).  The first shock comes at the price of the lottery ticket. To just apply for a patent monopoly in Europe, the typical cost is 50,000 euros. The venture capitalists themselves, however, hate the patent system as a whole with all their guts and call it a cancer in the economy and say things like “I can’t understand why our government allows this shit to go on”.

US ISPs to launch massive copyright spying scheme July 12 Sad if it’s true 😦

There’s no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.) – useful life story of fast learning and quality of modern higher education. “Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” – that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than “just anyone” – you can do so much more than anyone expects. And this applies to ALL of life – not just school“. And that’s true – both Einstein and you have the same amount of hours in 24h.

Where Do Bad Managers Come From? Jack complained that his bosses never supported his requests for management training, but when I asked him about training his own people, he said: “Why invest in training them? They are going to leave before I get a return on my investment. IT managers like Jack cannot have it both ways. If they want to become “real” executives, they will have to start acting like real executives. That means taking responsibility, rather than blaming their employees. It means developing good people, not trying to pirate them from other companies and then griping about how other companies are pirating from them. “Real” executives take the long view.  IT managers who think that fast moving technology requires short-term quick fixes are stuck in a middle management mentality. They will never become real executives.

Beyond Blaming a rather lengthy (very VERY lengthy) post on blaming nature, effects and avoidance both in general life and software development project.

Most things work…until they don’t There is nothing in any of the agile frameworks that was meant to be an empty ritual that we just do again and again.  Everything should be fresh and real every time.  People should be interacting with one another, aided by your facilitation, from their minds and hearts. In the facilitation chapter in the Coaching Agile Teams book, I offer the “why” of common recurring agile meetings. Just reveal the “why” to them and then ask,”Are we getting these benefits from this meeting?  How would we rate ourselves?  How would we get more of the benefits we’re supposed to be getting?”