Friday 25 June 2010

Incentives are a bad substitute for leadership


Managers are using incentives in order to achieve things they think are important instead of good leadership, that is, discussing, interacting and collaborating with people, why they should do like this. Money is a carrot. Problem here is that those bonus targets must be somehow measurable and IF people are trying to get their carrot they are trying to get those meters green, instead of focusing on the root causes. People must feel that they own the problem and be motivated to solve them. Also if problems are discussed, instead of stated, there are probably popping up better ideas than the original one man's idea.

Btw. Good video siding the issue by Daniel Pink

Monday 7 June 2010

Our show in XP2010 and more


We had quite a good warm up band. Mark Streibeck from Google introduced us their Continuous Integration system and it was amazing! Everybody always committing to same head and it must be green all the time. Pretty mind blowing if you think that they have 1500+ product, 10000 developers and 60M+ test cases.

Anyway. My feeling about our presentation was pretty good. If you were there, please give me feedback. It was first time for me and Ran to write something for conference and it was an extremely good experience. I must continue with this path little bit further, because my opinion is that companies should do more scientific research.

The conference was facilitated greatly, everything from preparation of the conference itself to evening programs, or what can you say that we had Jazz musicians improvising and telling the theory about that (which is very close to pair programing) and later on there was a gig by an extreme metal band called Keep of Kalessin (you should check out this).

So, thank you very much and see ya!

Sunday 6 June 2010

Viking Laws


I was in Trondheim for the XP2010 conference (btw I had a good and educational time, I'll write more details later) and afterwards we visited Oslo with my wife and daughter. I found this extremely neat postcard. It says:

§1 Be brave and aggressive.
Be direct.
Grab all opportunities.
Use varying methods of attack.
Be versatile and agile.
Attack one target at a time.
Don't plan everything in detail.
Use top quality weapons.

§2 Be prepared.
Keep weapons in good condition.
Keep in shape.
Find good battle comrades.
Agree on important points.
Choose one chief.

§3 Be a good merchant.
Find out what the market needs.
Don't promises what you can't keep.
Don't demand overpayment.
Arrange things so that you can return.

§4 Keep the camp in order.
Keep things tidy and organized.
Arrange enjoyable activities which strengthen the group.
Make sure everybody does useful work.
Consult all members of the group for advice.

In the future I wont refer anymore to the Agile Manifesto, the Viking Laws will be the thing ;)