Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“A performance evaluation can never be entirely objective. There will always be subjectivity.” – Bjarte Bogsnes

“I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor” – William Gilmore Simms

“Cost budgets tend to be spent, even when the initial budget assumptions changed (which they almost always do).” – Bjarte Bogsnes on the budget as a ceiling on how much to spend yes, but is also a floor in that it has to be spent no matter what.

“CEO opened the workshop. He described the cost budget as '… this cage we build. We know it will constrain us. When finished, we squeeze ourselves in, lock it, and throw away the key. It all happens voluntarily, no one forces us.'” – Bjarte Bogsnes on the traditional use of a budget

“But do not worry; there is more than enough left for you to do in the backseat: setting direction, coaching, motivating, and assisting when needed. Just do not become a backseat driver” – Bjarte Bogsnes on what management should do

“Exceptions must not be generalized” – Bjarte Bogsneson the idea that you should manage for the norm, not the exception

“By the way, who actually hired all these people that can't be trusted? Someone must have done a pretty bad recruitment job!” – Bjarte Bogsnes on whether you should be able to trust the people you hired

“Focus on the problem, not the people” – Basic conflict resolution advice

“When an answer to a question might change the path forward in a non-reversible (economically) way, then it’s worth estimating/forecasting.” – Troy Magennis

“Let’s not underestimate our Execs/stakeholders by assuming they aren’t willing/capable of understanding the new paradigm” – Efrem Lirtzman on team’s tendency to assume that management won’t change

“The other thing to realize about our economic decisions is that we are trying to improve them, not to make them perfect. We want to make better economic choices than we make today, and today, this bar is set very low.” – Don Reinertsen

“Almost all of the methods typically employed [for prioritisation] in large organisations end up resembling the Eurovision competition. This is essentially prioritisation by politics, horse-trading and to some extent popularity” – Josh Arnold

“No, you don't hold each other accountable. You hold each other up.” – Ron Jeffries

“Attack the problem, not the people.” – Unknown

“The Product Owner has authority over the product, not the people.” – Unknown

“Chance favors the connected mind” – Steven Johnson in “Where Good Ideas Come From”

“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” – Harvard Business School definition of leadership

“Make a difference, not just a point” – Troy Magennis

“Never show data unless you show it compared to something else” – Edward Tufte

“If anyone adjusts a stable process, the output that follows will be worse than he had left the process alone” – W Edwards Deming - you can do more harm than good. Don't panic

“Testers don't break the code, they break your illusions about the code.” – Maaret Pyhajarvi

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw

“We are working on much bigger failures now” – Jeff Bezos, when asked to why Amazon Phone failed

“If you have a culture of fear none of your fancy practices and processes are going to help” –Joshua Kerievsky

“The problem is we don't know what the problem is” – Paul MacCreedy

“The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed” – William Gibson

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin

“Preventive mediation is the ultimate in simplicity: 'Mediation without an event.'” – Daniel Dana, "Conflict Resolution"

“We can’t fight our way out of conflict, but we can think our way out of it.” – Daniel Dana, "Conflict Resolution"

_“Every tree was once a sapling, every adult was once a child, and every formal dispute was once an informal conflict.” – Daniel Dana, "Conflict Resolution"

“The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware…. The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, all the people say, 'We ourselves have achieved it!'” – Lao-Tzu writing about servant leadership in the fifth-century BC

“There's a big difference between 'it can't work', 'I haven't gotten it to work', and 'I'm conjecturing that it couldn't work'” – Tom Limoncelli. To which I would as another difference “let's try it before we form a conclusion”

“Two programmers in tandem is not redundancy; it’s a direct route to greater efficiency and better quality.” – Larry Constantine

“I say an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. I say an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless. Bottlenecks govern both throughput and inventory.” – Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal

“A programmer’s wife tells him: go to store. pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen. The programmer returns with 12 loaves.” – Unknown

“Time triage is actually the most important decision we have. What are we going to spend our time on?” – Kurzweil

“Is it the 'sunk cost fallacy'? Or should it be the 'sunk pride fallacy'” – Hans Samios

“The information you have is not the information you want. The information you want is not the information you need. The information you need is not the information you can obtain. The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.” -– Finagle’s Laws of Information from “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk” by Peter Bernstein

“Uncertainty cannot be eliminated by any [organizational change or improved process or] estimation methods. It arises partly because of imperfect knowledge of what to do and how long it should take, and partly because of unpredictable events.” – Kevin Thompson, Ph.D., PMP

“There is more room, in a mathematical sense, for work to grow beyond expectation than to shrink below expectation.” – Kevin Thompson, Ph.D., PMP

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.” – Aldous Huxley

“People are more important than process, but good people with good process will outperform good people with no process every time.” – Grady Booch

“Integration without branching = knowledge sharing” – unknown

“Treat defects as evidence of missing tests” – Mike Scott

“As formality increases, tests and requirements become indistinguishable. At the limit, tests and requirements are equivalent.” – Uncle Bob Martin's equivalence hypothesis

“The most important information in a requirements document are not the requirements, but the phone number of the person who wrote it.” – Ron Jeffries Agile 2008

“Describing how and what but not why left the success of the project to pure chance.” – Gojko Adzic in "Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing"

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realise till you have tried to make it precise” – Bertrand Russell

“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build” – Fred Brooks

“Effective communication is the key to successful software projects.” – Gojko Adzic in "Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing"