Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“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't keep us from trying.”

“Today’s development processes typically deliver information asynchronously in large batches. Flow-based processes deliver information in a regular cadence of small batches.” – Don Reinertsen

“Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.” – 'Iron' Mike Tyson.

“Performance of the individual cannot be measured, except on a long-term basis, for which I mean 15, 18, 20 years.” – W. Edwards Deming

“Motivation – nonsense. All that people need to know is why their work is important.” – W. Edwards Deming

“The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise. Everyone propels himself forward, or tries to, for his own good, on his own life preserver. The organization is the loser. The merit rating rewards people that conform to the system. It does not reward attempts to improve the system. Don’t rock the boat.” – W. Edwards Deming, “The Merit System: The Annual Appraisal: Destroyer of People,” 1986.

“We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.” – George Bernard Shaw.

“There's technical debt, then there's technical subprime mortgages with exploding balloon payments.” – Mark Imbriaco (@markimbriaco) via Steve Wingard

“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

“You don't get more planes to land at an airport by insisting on putting more planes in the air.” “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.” – Martin Fowler.

“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 “Managing Teams Congruently”

“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

“Worried that TDD will slow down your programmers? Don't. They probably need slowing down.” – J. B. Rainsberger

“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

“It's not the practices; its the culture that makes you want to use these practices.” Boeing Exec to Joe Justice.

“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

“Keeping the system working is more important than doing work” – Jez Humble on the attitude required for continuous integration and continuous delivery.

“People under time pressure don't think faster” – Tim Lister.

“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.” – Steve Maguire “Debugging the Development Process”

“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.” – in preface by Steve Maguire “Debugging the Development Process”.

“It is better to use imprecise measures of what is wanted than precise measures of what is not.” – Russell L. Ackoff

“Develop on Cadence. Deliver on Demand.” – Dean Leffingwell

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” – Hanlon's Razor

“FEATURE” – license plate seen on a Volkswagen Beetle.

“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.” – Steve McConnell

“A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.” – Jeff Bezos on complacency

“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 are competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer–focused allows you to be more pioneering.” – Jeff Bezos on progress.

“All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's.” – Jeff Bezos – on growth.

“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.” – Brandon Mull via Devraj, Sujata.

“Opacity when inspecting an Increment is like covering a thermostat with a cold, wet washcloth. The thermostat doesn’t have the correct understanding of the actual room temperature, and would incorrectly initiate heating when it should be cooling.” – Ken Schwaber and David Starr on Definition of Done.

“Scrum is not a silver bullet; Scrum is a silver mirror” – Mike Dwyer

“I smell fried brains” – Tim Lister at afternoon keynote speech at Agile 2013

“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 … 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…“ – Adrian Cockcroft, Architect, Netflix.

“Having a developer add a monitoring metric shouldn’t feel like a schema change.” – John Allspaw, SVP Tech Ops, Etsy

“We found that when we woke up developers at 2am, defects got fixed faster than ever” – Patrick Lightbody, CEO, BrowserMob

“If people don't understand the model they won't let it influence their behavior” – Unknown

“You don't have to ask permission to do your job well” – attributed to Larry Constantine

“Lead people, manage things.” – Peter Drucker

“If the actions of management signal that meeting specifications is satisfactory, the product invariably falls short.” – Donald J Wheeler and David S Chambers in “Understanding Statistical Process Control”.

“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.” – Eric Ries tweet.

“Value is rare, extreme and obvious in retrospect” – Joshua J. Arnold (see Cost of Delay)

“Estimate is just one additional metric that helps us make decisions, forecast and model the future.” – Michael Dubakov from “Estimates in Software Development. New Frontiers.”

“If you don't like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki

“Don't be taken in by the Dopeler Effect. The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.” – Terry Jones, On Innovation.