Opportunity or crisis

While political leaders are struggling to agree on anything but the existence of the climate problem the private sector is already profiting from solutions.

Prior to the Credit Crunch only top line mattered. Cost was something that conservative accountants dealt with and something that only mattered for the declining manufacturing industry. Credit was so abundant and cheap that it made a lot more sense to optimize top line than to minimize cost. The Crunch changed all that, drastically and to the better.

While I’m not too happy about the Crunch in general, the renewed and very reasonable attention to cost has brought a lot of positive momentum into the technology sector. The “recent” buzz of cloud computing is just one of the areas which to some extent has been fueled by cost reduction efforts. It just doesn’t make any sense for companies to host and manage individual server farms. Another trend indicator is Microsofts new Operating System, Windows 7. It is the first version of Windows that does not require substantially more resources than its predecessor. Contrary to tradition, Moores law does not seem to have been a design parameter and it actually runs quite well on existing computers.

One of the reasons Microsoft seems to be faring better with 7 than Vista is probably that they where forced to listen to the consumers. Somewhere down the line, some consultant struck gold and came up with the idea that companies should probably produce what their clients where requesting. While user driven innovation sounds like common sense, it wasn’t. For years tech companies have been dictating requirements and assuming usage behavior. Look at many of the programs on your computer. They suck and you only use a minuscule fraction of the functionality they have.

It seems to me that the Crunch has forced us all to figure out and produce what we really need, not what might be nice but the bare bone essentials. It’s not that certain anymore that the general market growth will bail companies out nor is it certain that Moores law will ensure that bloated applications will run. This drastically changes the rules of the game. Resources are no longer unlimited but constitute real boundaries.

Fortunately we’ve been sloppy for decades so there is plenty of room for optimization and economic growth within the boundaries. Our computers are orders of magnitude more powerful than those of the Apollo 11 mission and yet we accept sluggish performance and poor user interfaces. There are still thousands of servers out there that are barely utilized or only utilized during an 8 hour work day but are kept running cool and safe 24/7 at immense costs.

There is a huge economic upside in optimization within the existing resource boundaries and there is tremendous opportunity for growth. The best part is that it consumers will get better products of higher quality that lasts longer while the environmental impact of consumption and production will be minimized.

Companies that understand this change of premise will see unprecedented growth in the new decade and big companies like Microsoft has already started the transition.

Wolf anybody?

Securethoughts.com reports that millions of PDFs created from within Internet Explorer have privacy issues. The so called issue is that IF you load a local html file in IE and IF you then print that file to PDF, IE will give the document the file path as title. IF you then publish this PDF document, evil does will be able to obtain information from the path info.
So what can this information be used for?? According to the post, attackers could use it to obtain information about what operating system you are running and then use that information for malicious attacks.

PDF is not the perfect format and it has had flaws before but only the very neurotic needs to be concerned about this issue as the information given away should be easily available by:
1) Guessing: Anybody printing a HTML page to pdf and publishing it is very likely to be Windows user
2) Looking at the application (or producer) meta data in the PDF file that very often will tell you what program and what OS was used to produce the file

Long story short, unless you are printing PDF files stored at C:\Documents and Settings\Larry\Desktop\reports for my stupid and ignorant boss\Report1.html you need not worry. If you have security concerns in general, youre probably not using, PDF, Windows or IE.

No wolf here, large puddle at the most.

Why scrum works??

The evidence indicating that Scrum is a more productive methodology is overwhelming. Companies report substantial growth in productivity and quality when transitioning from waterfall to agile. I am myself a strong proponent of Scrum and use it on a daily basis but I find the root causes of the experienced performance increases blurred.

A plethora of explanations for the effectiveness of Scrum have been offered, the most conspicuous of which is that the procedures, the planning and the artifacts in the Scrum framework constitute a more effective method of execution and that this is the primary contributing factor. Smaller teams doing their own planning and given tools for tracking progress is by this argument more effective than large teams in bureaucratic project formation.

The Hawthorne effect or combinations of the Hawthorne and the Placebo effect has been suggested as explanations for the recorded productivity increases. While the Hawthorne effect is usually quite short lived one could argue that the continuous improving and thus changing nature of the process could prolong or even perpetualise the effect.

If Placebo where to account for the productivity increases the argument would probably be that it is general knowledge that implementing Scrum is usually associated with a productivity increase and also that the implementation process and scrum master training is often littered with success stories told or written by industry experts. The implication being that if implementation does not result in substantial productivity increases, the Scrum is not done “Correct” and Scrum will, as a curious side effect, by logic convention always be successful . This should place strong expectations on the organization implementing scrum and could help making the success prophecies self-fulfilling.

In my opinion, Scrum is not driven by means of Placebo or Hawthorne although I do believe both effects attribute to the success of the methodology. Neither do I think that the methodology is the main contributing factor. My favorite is that the main reason Scrum results in performance increases is the immense positive effect it has on employee motivation. Herzbergs two factor theory claims that some factors, if present, contribute to job satisfaction while the absence of others lead to dissatisfaction. That is, a few basic things (hygiene factors) like fair salary and supervision will cause demotivation when not present but will not by themselves motivate employees while other factors (motivators) such as achievement, responsibility and personal growth will motivate employees. Given that the hygiene factors should be present in most modern well driven companies (even those using waterfall) any motivation based performance gains must be sought in the motivators. I find that the strong overlap between the values of the agile manifesto and Herzbergs motivators are extremely indicative as to the root cause of the experienced performance improvements.

To the best of my knowledge there is no strong research substantiating or quantifying the contributions of the many theories to the reported productivity improvements and I find this quite unsettling. We are faced with a brilliant framework that seems to work but we have no clear understanding of why.

We need this knowledge. Firstly because the scrum cake may not be fully baked yet, adding more chocolate chips may improve the outcome, but we don’t understand which ingredients result in the great taste so we are flying blind. Secondly, because Scrum and Agile are methodologies based on learning and empirical knowledge we should not accept basing it on assumptions.

It should be possible to design experiments that would allow for the quantification of at least some of the contributing factors and I believe that the next improvements of Agile requires this more specific knowledge of the contributing factors. I also think that this knowledge will help to further expand the use of Agile methodologies.