quotable_quotes
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| - | "It is not enough that management commit themselves to quality and productivity, | ||
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| - | "If you only quantify one thing, quantify Cost of Delay" -- Don Reinertsen " | ||
| - | "You can't scale crappy code." -- Dean Leffingwell | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Any inefficency of decentralization costs less than the value of faster response time." -- Don Reinertsen " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "When WIP and utilization become too high, you will see a sudden and catastrophic reduction in throughput." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "A common disease that afflicts management the world over is the impression that 'Our problems are different.' | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Left to themselves, components (of a system) become selfish, independant profit centers and thus destroy the system." | ||
| - | "All we are doing is looking at the timeline, from when the customer gives us an order to when we collect cash And we are reducing the timeline by reducing the non-value added wastes." | ||
| - | “Development managers today face an important trade-off between steady state of performance and the system' | ||
| - | “People who operate within the development system are rarely directly to blame. Individual mistakes happen. However, consistent lack of performance must be attributed to systemic issues. To improve the development system, it must first be recognized that a bad system will always undermine even the best efforts of good people. Bad systems beat good people every time!” -- Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine" | ||
| - | "A firefighting organization requires extraordinary people to achieve ordinary results. In an exceptional organization ordinary people produce extraordinary results routinely." | ||
| - | "There was in fact no correlation between exiting phase gates on time and project success. The data suggested the inverse was true." -- Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine" | ||
| - | "Any project that costs more than $1 million in normalized labor is a waste of money, time, and resources." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "The notion that 'our problems are different', | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "The most important and visible outcropping of the action bias in the excellent companies is their willingness to try things out, to experiment. There is absolutely no magic in the experiment... But our experience has been that most big institutions have forgotten how to test and learn. They seem to prefer analysis and debate to trying something out, and they are paralyzed by fear of failure, however small." | ||
| - | “Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality. Improve process and build quality into the product in the first place.” – Deming | ||
| - | "A project plan is like a lettuce. On the day you buy it, it looks firm and crispy; a week later its a bit wilty around the edges, and after a month its unrecognizable." | ||
| - | "If I have learned one thing it is this: there is no answer. There is never an answer; there are only better questions." | ||
| - | "... doing the wrong thing righter ..." -- Russell Ackoff | ||
| - | "There was in fact no correlation between exiting phase gates on time and project success...the data suggested the inverse might be true." -- Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine" | ||
| - | “Most people do not listen to understand, they listen to reply” -- Stephen Covey | ||
| - | "In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' | ||
| - | “A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it’s not open” -- Frank Zappa | ||
| - | "Study after study shows that we have little-to-no skill in when it comes to making predictions — but that sure doesn' | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "If you are going to quantify one thing, quantufy cost of delay" -- Don Reinersten | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: | ||
| - | "We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "We are working on everything but we can guarantee you that it will not be delivered any earlier than if we were not working on it at all." -- Don Reinertsen commenting on pretending to work on everything when you have a delivery system constrained by capacity. "You don't get more planes to land at an airport by insisting on putting more planes in the air." See "The Big Ideas Behind Lean Product Development" | ||
| - | "Any fool can write code a computer can understand, but it takes real genius to write code a human will understand." | ||
| - | “If done well, management is a tough job, which is why the pay is premium. However, there will always be those managers who want to get paid for the hard parts of management work without actually doing them.” Jerry Weinberg " | ||
| - | “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "In particular I always argue that high-level tests are there as a second line of test defense. If you get a failure in a high level test, not just do you have a bug in your functional code, you also have a missing unit test. Thus whenever you fix a failing end--to--end test, you should be adding unit tests too." -- Martin Fowler | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into smaller manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one." -- Mark Twain via Brun, Brian J | ||
| - | "Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.” -- Woody Guthrie | ||
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| - | "The surest way to mismanage a project and jeopardize a product is to put too much emphasis on the schedule as it demoralizes the team and drives them to make stupid decisions despite their better judgments." | ||
| - | "While working with these teams, I discovered that they were all making the same fundamental errors and they were perpetually repeating those errors ... In every group I worked with, I found the project leads were spending nearly all their time writing code and almost none of their time thinking about the project. The leads didn't spend time trying to keep schedules on track, they didn't look for foreseeable problems so they could circumvent them, they didn't work to protect other team members from unnecessary work, they didn't pay particular attention to training other team members, they didn't set detailed project goals or create effective attack plans. The leads were spending too much time working when they should have been thinking." | ||
| - | "It is better to use imprecise measures of what is wanted than precise measures of what is not." -- Russell L. Ackoff | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" | ||
| - | "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they' | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | “A single-point estimate is usually a target masquerading as an estimate.” -- Steve McConnell | ||
| - | “There is a limit to how well a project can go but no limit to how many problems can occur." | ||
| - | "A company shouldn' | ||
| - | "I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out." -- Jeff Bezos on innovation. | ||
| - | "If you're competitor-focused, | ||
| - | "All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth' | ||
| - | "Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Scrum is not a silver bullet; Scrum is a silver mirror" | ||
| - | "I smell fried brains" | ||
| - | "The deal with engineering goes like this. Product management takes 20% of the capacity right off the top and gives this to engineering to spend as they see fit. Whatever is required to avoid, ‘we need to stop features to rewrite code'. ... If you’re in really bad shape today, you might need to make this 30% or even more of the resources. I get nervous when I find teams that think they can get away with much less than 20%." -- Marty Kagan, Inspired | ||
| - | “Do painful things more frequently, so you can make it less painful…" | ||
| - | “Having a developer add a monitoring metric shouldn’t feel like a schema change.” -- John Allspaw, SVP Tech Ops, Etsy on need to make it easy to help build systems that self--monitor | ||
| - | "We found that when we woke up developers at 2am, defects got fixed faster than ever" -- Patrick Lightbody, CEO, BrowserMob | ||
| - | "If people don' | ||
| - | "You don't have to ask permission to do your job well" -- attributed to Larry Constantine | ||
| - | "Lead people, manage things." | ||
| - | "If the actions of management signal that meeting specifications is satisfactory, | ||
| - | "If you don't think it's going to work, it's already a waste of time. Your experiment can only fail if you believe in a specific outcome." | ||
| - | "Value is rare, extreme and obvious in retrospect" | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "If you don't like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less." -- General Eric Shinseki | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "The key, though, is not to manage by metrics but to use the metrics to understand where to have conversations about what is not getting done." Gary Gruver et al, "The Practical Approach to Large--scale Agile Development." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "It is useful to do detail planning, but you always want to use it with a short time horizon because detailed planning is very perishable. You do not want to hold a large inventory of detailed planning because you are throwing money away when you do that." -- Don Reinersten. | ||
| - | "Yes, estimation is fraught. It is inaccurate, and politically dangerous. But we do have some knowledge and the project deserves to have it." -- Ron Jeffries tweet 2013--03--18. | ||
| - | "Agile is about simplicity. Agile is not simple. If you think it's simple, wait and see." -- Ron Jeffries | ||
| - | "The First Law of Wisdom Aquisition -- It is much easier to identify another' | ||
| - | "If you want people to act like adults, you need to treat them like adults." | ||
| - | "If it’s hard but important to do, do it more often!" | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "And I find it little bit odd that a 50 year old woman in Bangladesh often has an easier time getting experimental capital than the average first line employee in a global 1000 company." | ||
| - | "We say that code is of high quality when productivity remains high in the presence of change in team and goals." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "If you can't do it with a card you'll really mess it up with a tool" -- Dave Thomas, Keynote at Agile 2010 | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "There is no such things as as an IT project; there are only business project that involve IT." -- UK Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary. | ||
| - | "If you’re thinking people don’t like to make changes to their behaviors, just watch a teenage girl get her first cell phone. The changes in her life will be profound and dramatic. And she’ll enjoy every moment of it." -- B.J. Fogg on perception that people don't like change. To which Jared Spool adds: | ||
| - | "If people love change, why do our users complain when we make changes to our designs? Well, it’s not because of their aversion. It’s because we did it wrong." | ||
| - | "The define/ | ||
| - | "A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy." | ||
| - | "A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it." -- Bertrand Russell | ||
| - | "Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well--written prose. Clean code never obscures the designer’s intent but rather is full of crisp abstractions and straightforward lines of control." | ||
| - | "I could list all of the qualities that I notice in clean code, but there is one overarching quality that leads to all of them. Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares. There is nothing obvious that you can do to make it better. All of those things were thought about by the code’s author, and if you try to imagine improvements, | ||
| - | "You know you are working on clean code when each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected. You can call it beautiful code when the code also makes it look like the language was made for the problem." | ||
| - | "Clean code is not written by following a set of rules. You don’t become a software craftsman by learning a list of heuristics. Professionalism and craftsmanship come from values that drive disciplines." | ||
| - | "Cost cutting is just one of the steps in the process toward extinction." | ||
| - | "If you don’t care about the number of defects, I can get it done on any schedule you’d like!" -- Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin | ||
| - | "For success, like happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue and it only does so as an unattended consequence of ones personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself." | ||
| - | “Your project, the whole project, has a binary deliverable. On scheduled completion day, the project has either delivered a system that is accepted by the user, or it hasn’t. Everyone knows the result on that day. The object of building a project model is to divide the project into component pieces, each of which has this same characteristic: | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Never mistake motion for action." | ||
| - | “Testing is the infinite process of comparing the invisible to the ambiguous in order to avoid the unthinkable happening to the anonymous.” – James Bach | ||
| - | “I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.” – Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer and original implementor of C++. | ||
| - | “Do or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda. Interesting use of this quote by Ron Jefferies on dealing with priorities that change. | ||
| - | "The conversation surrounding the estimation process is as (or more) important, than the actual estimate." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "We need to make sure that our people weed their own garden." | ||
| - | “Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” -- Steve Jobs | ||
| - | "When lost in the woods, if the map doesn' | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Cost cutting is just one of the steps in the process toward extinction." | ||
| - | "We can always shoot ourselves in the foot. The amazing thing is how quick we are able to reload and do it again." | ||
| - | "You can fight reality and lose, but only 100% of the time." Byron Katie | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work." -- Peter Drucker | ||
| - | "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five? No, calling a tail a leg don’t make it a leg." -- Abraham Lincoln. I used this in the context that just because you have a group of people working together and you call it a team does not mean you have a team. | ||
| - | "No matter what, the cost of addressing technical debt increases with time." -- Chris Sterling | ||
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| - | " | ||
| - | "No is easier to do. Yes is easier to say." -- Unknown. Quoted at 37 Signals. | ||
| - | "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." | ||
| - | "There is nothing so useless as doing more efficiently what should not be done at all." -- Peter Drucker. | ||
| - | "... manage for the normal and treat the exceptions as exceptional." | ||
| - | "In the business world, the rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield." | ||
| - | "It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time." -- Winston Churchill | ||
| - | "... as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." -- Donald Rumsfeld on the unknowns we don't know. | ||
| - | "Doing it better is not hard, it's easier, so do it better. Increase in code skill means code is better, so your job is easier." | ||
| - | "Many people outsource to a country that is further away than the space station -- does this make sense?" | ||
| - | "The difference between a methodologist and a terrorist is that you can reason with a terrorist" | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Law of crappy systems - if you have a crappy system even brilliant people will never be more that mediocre." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "The problem with single point estimate is that it says there is 100% chance that this will happen. It's a target masquerading as an estimate." | ||
| - | "Only certification drowned in waterfalls." | ||
| - | "If you can't do it on a card, then you will only do it worse in a tool." -- Dave Thomas Agile 2010 Conference Keynote speech, Tuesday 10th August 2010 | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Agile is FrAgile as it depends on sustainable leadership and discipline." | ||
| - | "' | ||
| - | "In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over--value dispositional or personality--based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under--valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior------where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor--observer bias." -- From Wikipedia. | ||
| - | "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." | ||
| - | "The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everyone has decided not to see." -- Ayn Rand. | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "We know this is a useful number because there is a decimal point in it." -- A little fun from Dave Nicolette on problems with numbers and comparing team velocities at How To Compare Elephant Herds. | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I behave." | ||
| - | "Poor management can increase software cost more rapidly than any other factor." | ||
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| - | " | ||
| - | "What is the simplest thing that could possibly work?" -- Kent Beck on a good design | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter." | ||
| - | "I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -- Thomas Edison on experimentation. | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "…we all safely interpret dangerous things in ways that don’t require us to change our lives." | ||
| - | "When you want your boat to go fast it is easier to cut anchors than to add horsepower." | ||
| - | "They must understand, within the context of their specific product, the difference between excellence and perfection. No company can afford a perfect product, but building a product that delivers customer value and maintains technical integrity is essential to commercial success." | ||
| - | "Be quick, but don't hurry." | ||
| - | "The agile triangle: value (releasable product), quality (reliable, adaptable) product, & constraints (cost, schedule, scope)" | ||
| - | "Bad news does not get better with age" -- Joe Little from his "agile principles" | ||
| - | "I know it when I see it." -- Judge Potter Stewart (adapted for Scrum use to understand why the inspect and adapt cycle works) | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "If a test is worth writing, it’s worth automating, and it must always pass in the future. I often see teams that ignore failures in their CI tests because 'We have to get these new stories out, this is the PO’s priority.' | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "We are risk adverse when we might gain." -- Piattelli-Palmarini | ||
| - | "If you never erase the whiteboards, | ||
| - | "A mess is not technical debt. A mess is just a mess." -- " | ||
| - | "To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable but to be certain is to be ridiculous." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "No one has to change. Survival is optional", | ||
| - | "Plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average!" | ||
| - | "This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value." | ||
| - | "No matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, turn back." -- Turkish proverb | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "If you think you have a new idea, you are wrong. Someone probably already had it. This idea isn't original either; I stole it from someone else." -- Bob Sutton | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn' | ||
| - | "Ah well! I am their leader, I really ought to follow them!" -- Alexandre Auguste Ledru--Rollin on servant leadership. | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "There are two kinds of inspection: 1. Inspection after the defect occurs 2. Inspection to prevent defects." | ||
| - | "It is better to prepare and prevent than to repair and repent." | ||
| - | "How come we believe bad news and data immediately but we don't believe any good news". -- John Simpson commenting on reaction to velocity increase (improved productivity) we are seeing in Scrum teams. | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "A world class ' | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "For a new software system, the requirements will not be completely known until after the users have used it" -- This is the " | ||
| - | "Just because Scrum doesn’t say anything about breakfast doesn’t mean you have to go hungry!” – Pete Deemer & Gabrielle Benefield Yahoo, 2006 on the fact that Scrum is lightweight and does not proscribe a practice for every situation. Basically message is "use your common sense" | ||
| - | "A well functioning Scrum will deliver highest business value features first and avoid building features that will never be used by the customer. Since industry data shows over half of the software features developed are never used, development can be completed in half the time by avoiding waste, or unnecessary work." -- Jeff Sutherland 2006 -- "The Nuts and Bolts of Scrum" | ||
| - | "In most companies, development is slowed down by impediments identified during the daily meetings or planning and review meetings. When these impediments are prioritized and systematically removed, further increases in productivity and quality are the result. Well run Scrums achieve the Toyota effect – four times industry average productivity and 12 times better quality." | ||
| - | "I believe that the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity, If forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at its best." -- Peter Senge, MIT on traditional command and control approaches to management. | ||
| - | "Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it." -- Conway' | ||
| - | "Sit down with your team and have a dialog. Dialogs work better with 2 people. Dialogs with one person requires medication." | ||
| - | "Glory and success are not a destination, | ||
| - | "A stronger ' | ||
| - | "When it comes to code it never pays to rush.” -- Marick’s law | ||
| - | "The task is then to refine the code base to better meet customer need. If that is not clear, the programmers should not write a line of code. Every line of code costs money to write and more money to support. It is better for developers to be surfing than writing code that won't be needed. If they write code that ultimately is not used, I will be paying for that code for the life of the system, which is typically longer than my professional life. If they went surfing, they would have fun, and I would have a less expensive system and fewer headaches to maintain." | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensible." | ||
| - | "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Einstein | ||
| - | "We never have time to do it right; we always have time to do it twice." | ||
| - | "Unit testing is spell checking the word, not validating the sentence." | ||
| - | "Plans are an ongoing dynamic activity that peers into the future for indications as to where the solution might emerge and treats the plan as a complex situation, adapting to an emerging solution." | ||
| - | "One is a thug's game, played by gentlemen, and the other a gentleman' | ||
| - | "You will pay for the cost of a face--to--face meeting regardless of whether you have it or not." -- Ken Pugh speech at Agile 2008. | ||
| - | "Later = Never" | ||
| - | "The best measure of clean code? The number of WTF's per minute when reading code." -- Robert Martin, keynote speech at Agile 2008. | ||
| - | "A change in requirement late in the development cycle is a competitive advantage provided you can act on it." -- Mary Poppendieck | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "If you already know the project is going to fail, then a lot of traditional documentation in a project is about figuring out ‘who to blame'" | ||
| - | "User stories are not use cases" -- Mike Cohn | ||
| - | "Scrum is just the result of software developers going through a midlife crisis" | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "It is amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit." | ||
| - | "... if a build is not breaking then it is doubtful the team is pushing itself hard enough and concerns should be raised" | ||
| - | " | ||
| - | "It is typical to adopt the defined (theoretical) modeling approach when the underlying mechanisms by which a process operates are reasonably well understood. When the process is too complicated for the defined approach, the empirical approach is the appropriate choice." | ||
| - | "Of the organizations that are attempting to implement Scrum, probably 30--35% will successfully implement it. And that's because of this core problem. Most organizations don't want to be faced with what they don't want to see. And this puts it up there and says 'are you going to do something about it, or not'?" | ||
| - | "Scrum is arguably the oldest and most widely applied agile and iterative method, with an emphasis on iterative and adaptive PM practices. It has been applied in thousands of organizations and domains since the early 1990s, on projects large and small, from Yahoo to Medtronics to Primavera, with great results when leadership commits to the deep required changes moving away from command--control and wishful--thinking -- predictive management, and with poor results when leadership can’t or won’t make those changes. Scrum can be easily integrated with practices from other iterative methods, such as practices from the Unified Process and Extreme Programming, | ||
| - | "One of the industry statistics is that over 65% of the functionality that is delivered and then has to be maintained and sustained is rarely or never used" -- Scrum et al by Ken Schwaber talking at Google. Quote refers to a study by the Standish Group. | ||
| - | "Scrum is a " | ||
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