{"id":45,"date":"2009-11-13T05:51:21","date_gmt":"2009-11-13T12:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journeyman.ivystreetinc.com\/?p=45"},"modified":"2009-11-13T06:01:51","modified_gmt":"2009-11-13T13:01:51","slug":"a-wikipedia-one-up-isnt-sufficient-for-your-resume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/?p=45","title":{"rendered":"A Wikipedia One Up Isn&#8217;t Sufficient For Your Resume"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not in the nature of most people, developers even more so with our huge egos, to admit we don&#8217;t know something.\u00a0 But if you have a life outside of your compiler, you know that some things can&#8217;t be read about; they have to be experienced.<\/p>\n<p>For a while recently at a place called Ingenix (United Health Group) I was a development manager dropping in Scrum and Agile practices.\u00a0 I came to a few realizations:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Many say they know how to do Agile, but they do not.\u00a0 They have not experienced it, and they have read to little about it and reinterpreted what they read into their own understanding (thus learning nothing).<\/li>\n<li>The struggle at most organizations is to get the correct tooling to support doing Agile.\u00a0 This can be CI servers or even the availability of freakin&#8217; meeting rooms.\u00a0 Without these basic simple things the modern practices of Agile, or any new way of doing things, will fail.\u00a0 Again it ties back to the simple pattern of learning just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to really understand.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Simple as that.<\/p>\n<p>This stuff is difficult too.\u00a0 If you want to use Maven on a project, it can take months.\u00a0 Try telling a VP you want to drop his investment in CVS to switch to Mercurial.\u00a0 Sit in a scrum with scrum-inexperienced team and watch the waste of time add up.\u00a0 At my first United gig the scrum master made us report to the business in non technical terms for 45 minutes each day.\u00a0 We were not allowed to talk to each other as developers . . . we had to do it after, another 15-30 minutes.\u00a0 Yeah . . a big WTF &#8230; One hour everyday of meetings versus the old waterfall one hour every week?\u00a0 And this person was certified!\u00a0 (Maybe sometime I&#8217;ll discuss the &#8220;spirit&#8221; of all this, which seems to be more dangerous than just plain ignorance of methodology.)<\/p>\n<p>I am currently working a gig trying to assist a bit in adding Agile practices to their structure, but it has been near impossible.\u00a0 People get all pissy if you try to &#8220;coach&#8221; them as to simple meanings of things.\u00a0 And then, they say the processes fail.<\/p>\n<p>Examples:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One developer started listing things like &#8220;gather requirements for migration&#8221; and &#8220;code daos&#8221; as spikes.\u00a0 Spikes are proof of concepts, not actual tasks.\u00a0 Spikes are like &#8220;see if Mercurial will offer something that CVS can&#8217;t.&#8221;\u00a0 Etc.\u00a0 I got my head bit off.<\/li>\n<li>TDD.\u00a0 Oh how I hate it for fuzzy logic workflow\/user gesture driven software.\u00a0 But you ask any of the developers around my current place and they are &#8220;experts&#8221; on TDD.\u00a0 &#8220;Yeah we&#8217;re writing unit tests.&#8221;\u00a0 That&#8217;s not TDD!\u00a0 If they have not done it for real, just read a one-up wikipedia page, then nothing is brought to the table.\u00a0 TDD is a design methodology &#8211; you write a test, then write code that breaks it, then fix the test with the code.\u00a0 Its not by any means the same thing test-after-development; and it has to actually be experienced day in and day out to fully appreciate its pro&#8217;s and cons.<\/li>\n<li>Same with pairing.\u00a0 Pair all day for a few weeks, see what that&#8217;s like.\u00a0 Pair when you do not want to pair, pair with someone you do not like . . . until you do, its just something you read.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My advice is this: remain open minded about these until you&#8217;ve actually experienced these things. If you lie about it you are damaging the project and the relationships around you at your gig.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 After all, we are supposed to be the modern day rationalists, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not in the nature of most people, developers even more so with our huge egos, to admit we don&#8217;t know something.\u00a0 But if you have a life outside of your compiler, you know that some things can&#8217;t be read about; they have to be experienced. For a while recently at a place called Ingenix [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/47"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}