<sarcasm>

“So, you managed to pick stories that only involved changing data…”

“Yep.”

Great, there’s no need to test it, right?

There are three possibilities for the universe. On the one hand it is Closed. There’s enough matter that the universe, currently expanding, will eventually stop expanding and collapse in on itself.

The universe might be open. There’s not enough matter for gravitational forces to bring the universe back in on itself.

The final option is that the universe is flat. There’s just enough mass that it will stop expanding but it will not collapse in on itself.

Assuming an infinite number of universes, the final option, the flat option, must surly exist, somewhere. Probably not here, but somewhere. So for all intents and purposes, our universe is likely open or closed but not flat.

While you were reading that, your code rotted just a little. You’ve heard of it, bit rot. The bits in a program sitting on a disk rot. It’s a well known fact. Sure the magnetic surface could give out or if it’s in memory, a stray cosmic ray could flip a bit.

Ojibwe (sometimes spelled Ojibwa; the last syllable is pronounced “way”) is one of the few Native American languages that isn’t immediately threatened with extinction. It is spoken by about 10,000 people around the Great Lakes region. Brothers David and Anton Treuer are helping to keep it alive, as they discussed in a recent Fresh Air interview.

Do you need a really quick, clean, powerful diff/merge tool that you can use in windows, mac, and various Unixen? As a happy and pround vim user, I have been enjoying vimdiff for a number of years.

        > gvim -d file1 file2
        > vimdiff file1 file2

(G)vimdiff is wonderful. You can move changes between two versions of a file with great ease (if you know vim) and amazing speed. It can handle files of any size and does a fine job of syncing up both versions.

Vim can do just about anything. I have learned that no matter how much I use and study Vim I still am just scratching the surface of what the editor can do. I find little tricks and configuration options, new keystrokes, and fun little bits of minutae. I think it’s all new. With my memory, sometimes I just think something is new, and have to go check my past notes to see if I already knew it.

We had a team of surrogate stakeholders in the room, and all the very most important stories (as far as we could tell) on a table in front of us.

“These are the most important?” Heads nodded. “Then,” I asked, “what makes them important?” Brows furrowed, and well-considered answers poured forth.

The middle of the funnel we started on needed work. While it is a simple idea that the single, most important thing in the funnel is the first to emerge from the bottom, it is a multi-flavored affair to try to manage for real.

The idea of a magic funnel, as you may remember, is that there is some kind of organizational structure where many ideas and proposals and issues go into the top. Through some magic, the item that emerges from the bottom of the funnel (to go to the development team) is the single most important thing they could work on next.

This is all just backlog management and prioritization, of course. But I think it can be simpler than I’ve seen it in the past, and that real people working without magic can approximate it.

At a planning meeting, the developers on the team offer up some amount of work they are able to do. This capacity is termed velocity. The customer part of the team then selects enough user stories to consume all of the offered capacity. This is simple negotiation, but that hardly tells the story. What is happening on the customer side is a magic funnel.

I’ve been working on this book for several years now. After a flurry of effort (you might have noticed I’ve been quiet lately) I’m very pleased to say that I’m done with the writing and am preparing the manuscript for production. See The Prentice Hall Listing

The CIO looked into the eyes of his agile development staff last Friday. “Your attitude is affecting other departments” he said.

I’ve heard a lot of department-level speeches start this way, and in relatively small companies it is not unheard-of for a C-level manager to address attitudes of development teams.