Here are some snippets of interesting quotes/topics/articles that I have come across:
Agile:
- Excellent summary by Henrik Kniberg on What Agile is (and isn’t).
Leadership:
“Good leaders build strong followers. Great leaders build more leaders…
They trust themselves enough to develop people who can and will one day take their job. They have the confidence to know that their ability to develop leaders is the one characteristic that will ensure their leadership will far outlast them.”
Estimation:
- The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki: http://amzn.to/17osBpZ.
- The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (New Edition) by Scott E. Page: http://amzn.to/18i55FZ.
“As soon as you talk about ideal days in your estimation, then you are saying that your process sucks. It is not ideal. You will receive pressure from yourself (and likely also your managers) to improve your velocity. Get more ideal days per actual day. Stop wasting time.
But the source of the delta is not wasting time. It isn’t that you only get to code 4 hours per day. The source is the Planning Fallacy and WYSIATI. No matter how good your development process, you will never get a good ideal day per day ratio. And so you will always be striving to improve something that you can’t improve, while there are potential improvements elsewhere.”
Team:
Summary from ‘5 Things You Think Will Improve Your Work Life (But Actually Won’t)‘: “In one experiment, he asked subjects to build sculptures out of Legos for $3 apiece. Then, he gradually lowered the price he would pay them for making the same creations. Surprisingly, his participants kept on toiling as the price they were paid got steadily lower. Then Ariely introduced a game-changer: He offered the participants the same $3 per Lego creation, but he and his team dismantled what his subjects had created before asking the participant to build the next. The rub? When they saw that no one would ever see what they’d built, the participants became depressed, and, even for the same payment, created fewer sculptures.”
XP:
“What’s more, those teams that don’t do all these practices today, are trying to move towards them. These practices have become an ideal, a goal to be achieved as opposed to a heresy to be revile…
Very few people use that term nowadays. Some still use the abbreviation XP; but for the most part the name has evaporated. It is very rare for me to hear a team describe what they do as Extreme Programming, even when they are practicing all twelve practices as described. The names change. The practices remain…
An idea succeeds when it outlives the movement that spawns it and simply becomes part of our everyday lives. That’s SUCCESS!”