Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“It is intentionally not too technical or suited only for programmers, because agile acceptance testing is not a programming technique: it is a communication technique that brings people involved in a software project closer.” – Gojko Adzic in "Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing"

“Quality has to be caused, not controlled” – Philip Crosby

“For acceptance tests to be effective, they have to be automated but also have to be human readable. And ‘human’ in this case also includes those who cannot decrypt the Matrix code on the fly.” – Gojko Adzic in "Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing"

“Unit tests will insure the code is built right, and acceptance tests insure the right code is built’.” – Andy Dassing

“And as an organization, you incur capability debt, because people (managers and technical staff) can’t improve their capabilities when they’re overburdened with too much work to do.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio.

“Motivating your people is always more important than establishing your own favorite processes.” – Jurgen Appelo in “Management 3.0”.

“What can I do to help you do your best work?” - Scott Berkun in “Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management”

“These motivational accessories, as they are called (including slogan coffee mugs, plaques, pins, key chains, and awards), are a triumph of form over substance. They seem to extol the importance of Quality, Leadership, Creativity, Teamwork, Loyalty, and a host of other organizational virtues. But they do so in such simplistic terms as to send an entirely different message: Management here believes that these virtues can be improved with posters rather than by hard work and managerial talent.” – Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister in “Peopleware”

“If a system is to be stable the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled … Simply put, this law states that a system can be controlled by another system only when the other system is just as complex as or more complex than the first one.” – W. Ross Ashby's “Law of Requisite Variety”. If you want to control people, you need a system as least as complex as people.

“People who feel good about themselves produce good results.” – Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson in “The One Minute Manager”

“Pair programming is not pair typing - its pair thinking” – Hans Samios

“Eighty percent of software work is intellectual. A fair amount of it is creative. Little of it is clerical.”Robert Glass in “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering”

“From the beginning of the universe, everything in it was shaped by self-organization.” – Jurgen Appelo in “Management 3.0”.

“Innovation happens to be a concept at the heart of complexity science. Researchers found that complex adaptive systems actively seek a position between order and chaos because innovation and adaptation are maximized when systems are at “the edge of chaos”” – Jurgen Appelo in “Management 3.0”.

“There is plenty of value in root-cause analysis. I mean that root-cause analysis can only look to the past. It helps you to fix problems that have already happened, so they won’t happen again. But it won’t help you to predict what will go wrong in the future.” – Jurgen Appelo in “Management 3.0”.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H.L. Mencken, journalist, writer (1880–1956), on our often intuitive misunderstanding of complex systems

“Stephen Hawking thought it was so important that he called the 21st century the 'century of complexity'.” – Jurgen Appelo in “Management 3.0”.

“Our minds prefer causality over complexity.” – Jurgen Appelo in “Management 3.0”.

“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?” – Frank Herbert in “Heretics of Dune”.

“Never accept a traffic-light status report in a portfolio evaluation meeting. The traffic light provides no data for your decision.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio. The thinking here is that you are about to make “going forward decisions” and so this backward looking status doesn't help with that.

“The big rule of project portfolio management is that you never make a big decision where you commit an entire organization to a huge project for a long time. I define huge as more than 50 percent of your people, and I define long as more than three months.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio

“In all honesty, the only projects that are too risky to start are the ones that can’t return anything you can see in a few weeks.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio

“Project teams don’t work for many reasons. One common way is to have a person who doesn’t work well with others — an unjeller” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio. I think we've all met the “unjeller”.

“Often, innovation is a capacity problem - there needs to be slack in the system to innovate” – Hans Samios

“If you don’t know who your customers are or you haven’t talked to them in six months, you will not deliver what your customers want. This is a slow but sure way to create a doomed project.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio

“Commitment is not a 'We’ll give you part of what you need, but …' It’s a full commitment.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio on staffing the most important projects first.

“If you are trying to staff a project with people who are working part-time on your project and part-time on other projects, you have an uncommitted project. That’s because the cost of context switching will erase any potential ability to focus on this project. Don’t partially commit to a project; that’s a lack of commitment. Be honest. Take that project off the committed list. You may have to move the project to the parking lot. You might have to transform it. But never make a partial commitment.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio

“Commitment is not a 'We’ll give you part of what you need, but …' It’s a full commitment.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio

“Think in terms of value. Producers create value, but customers define it.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio on defining value streams

“The fewer number of active projects you have, the less competition the projects have for the same people. That lack of competition for people allows them to finish projects faster.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio

“The more frequently the projects deliver something you can see, the easier it will be to manage the project and to manage the project portfolio.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio

“Your customers want your products to be filled with great features that are well-tested and run smoothly. They don’t care about your projects, and they certainly don’t care about your portfolio. Your customers care about your products.” – Johanna Rothmans in Manage Your Project Portfolio

“I believe that inside every complex solution is a simple solution trying to get out” – Ron Jeffries

“Integrative Thinking is the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the both models, but is superior to each” – Rotman.

“Commanders know the objective; leaders grasp the direction. Commanders dictate; leaders influence. Controllers demand; collaborators facilitate. Controllers micro-manage; collaborators encourage. Managers who embrace the leadership-collaboration model understand their primary role is to set direction, to provide guidance, and to facilitate connecting people and teams.” – Jim Highsmith.

“Adaptive leaders lead teams, non-adaptive ones manage tasks.” – Jim Highsmith.

“A traditional manager focuses on following the plan with minimal changes, whereas an agile leader focuses on adapting successfully to inevitable changes.” – Jim Highsmith.

“Everyone tries to do too much: solve too many problems, build products with too many features. We say ‘no’ to almost everything. If you include every decent idea that comes along, you’ll just wind up with a half-assed version of your product. What you want to do is build half a product that kicks ass.” – Founders of 37signals in (Taylor, 2011).

“A number of studies have shown that 50% or more of functionality delivered is rarely or never used … This leads to the conclusion that scope is a very poor project control mechanism — we should be using value.” – Jim Highsmith

“Flickr was last deployed 26 minutes ago, including 8 changes by 3 people. In the last week there were 47 deploys of 364 changes by 19 people.” – From the Flickr web site (code.flickr.com), 2/22/11 @ 10:30 AM

“I view product development as a horse race where you can move your bets after the horses have started running.” – Don Reinersten

“The longer something is in transit in a process, the more likely it is the requirement will change” – Don Reinersten

“Stop starting and start finishing.” – Unknown

“Assume variability, preserve options.” – SAFe Lean-Agile Principles

“The vision must be followed by venture” – Vance Havner

“It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.” – Sakaguchi from What Google Learned From Its Quest To Build The Perfect Team

“Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.” – Rozovsky from What Google Learned From Its Quest To Build The Perfect Team

“Psychological safety is ‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.” – Edmondson from What Google Learned From Its Quest To Build The Perfect Team

“Pair programming … turbo changes competency development” – Paul Madden (Ericsson)

“People are not afraid of the failure, they're afraid of the blame.” – Seth Grodin