Red Squirrel Reflections

Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

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Sat, 24 Sep 2005

Apprenticeship Patterns in Sydney

Fellow ThoughtWorkers Daragh Farell and Ben Hogan presented the latest (and increasingly in need of an update) apprenticeship patterns at SyXPAC in Australia. Daragh is obviously quite the PowerPoint afficianado (particularly compared to me) and put together a nice slideshow. I'm looking forward to watching the video they took of the event. Thanks guys!

Simon blogged about the experience the next day. Simon referred to our work as behavioral patterns (as opposed to design patterns). I think that is a useful distinction.

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Constantine on Agility in 1993

I'm slowly working my way through The Peopleware Papers by Larry Constantine. It is a collection of short articles, which makes it ideal for intermittent train reading. I was reading "Chaos Manners" (Software Development, May 1993) when I was surprised to see the following quotes:

"Genuine innovation requires an agility beyond the traditional tactics of top-down management."
...
"The trick is to bring out and capitalize on the inventive energy of independent thinkers, encouraging free exploration and individual initiative, to foster a kind of creative chaos that hovers on the supercharged edge of running completely amok, a sort of controlled insanity that breaks out of accepted modes of thinking and challenges assumptions about limits and possibilities."

I was surprised because Larry was writing this 12 years ago, yet for anyone who has read Highsmith or Hock, Larry's ideas sound very familiar. On further reflection I realized I was being naive. It is not as if the thinking behind XP or any of the agile methodologies spontaneously sprang into existance. These sorts of ideas ripen over time, blossoming in a specific season under the right conditions.

[/xp] permanent link