Agile Teams

Last Thursday I attended the IEEE ENCS chapter meeting, for which the featured speakers were two Special Agents from the regional FBI office. The topic was cybersecurity: “Computer Crime, Computer Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Combating High Tech Threats”. The session was nearly full, as well-attended as recent smart grid sessions.

Both speakers kept the audience’s attention by adroitly mixing cybersecurity fundamentals with highlights of local cybercrime cases. I didn’t gain any new insights, but I did pick up a few good reference URLs I hadn’t yet explored: cybercrime.gov, consumer.gov, cert.org/homeusers, governmentsecurity.org, sans.org/newsletters/risk/ or  sans.org/newsletters/ouch/, infragard.net, ncinfragard.org. The NC Infragard organization meets every month, alternating between Raleigh and Charlotte; membership is free, and they offer a free newsletter.

Bonus: At the end of the 90 min talk, the agent from the foreign intelligence squad offered this interesting suggestion for safe surfing without the overhead and system slowdowns of security software: run your browser through a VMware server (or, an audience member suggested, Knoppix).

For a current project investigating the use of collaboration tools on GSD (global software development) projects, I’ve been assessing the impact of videoconferencing on development team activities. On the plus side is the great potential benefit of visual feedback. On the negative side, I’ve realized, is the great potential to inadvertently offend never-met teammates of a different cultural background with one’s gestures or body language.

To help me better understand these factors, and so I can assess whether they might be useful references for our development teams, I’ve picked up a few books on the topic, including:

• Gestures: The DO’s and TABOOs of Body Language Around the World
• Cross-Cultural Dialogues
• Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands

Also, towards the general topic of GSD and cultural differences, I’m [re-]reading:

• The Psychology of Computer Programming
• Cultural Diversity: Its Social Psychology

Recommendations for other good resources on this topic are welcome! I’ll summarize my opinions of the usefulness of these books for GSD purposes in this blog.

During a recent stay at a reasonably nice hotel, I was looking for a place to hang up my wet raincoat when I noticed this sign on the wall, up high. Clearly there had been problems in the past with sprinkler malfunctions, and after one or more incidents of ‘defect correction’ (fixing the sprinkler malfunctions), someone did root cause analysis (e.g. why? … why? …), identified coat hangers as the culprit, and took this action to try to prevent future defects.

Commendable, right?

But I looked around the entire hotel room and realized I still had no good place to hang my wet raincoat.

This exemplifies a saying I recall hearing in an SEI Six Sigma training class last year, and earlier in a QFD class:
    ”Just because nothing is wrong, doesn’t mean anything is right.”
Taking corrective and preventive actions, and driving defect levels towards zero, may be useful and necessary, but is not sufficient to achieve true high quality. Satisfaction of real customer needs matters most. It would be neither hard nor expensive to install a coat hook somewhere in the hotel room for wet/snowy/dirty/… outergarments. Adding this small amenity would not only dilute the temptation to guests who might otherwise hang wet coats on the sprinklers, they’d be less likely to drape them over the chairs in the rooms, which probably isn’t good for the wood or upholstery, …

Thanks to a tweet by Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki), today I found a great NYT magazine article: “The Green Issue: Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” It quickly segued from the specifics of poll results on the importance of climate change into an interesting discussion of how humans make decisions under uncertainty and risk - highly relevant to software development!

I found this today via @ahkai on Twitter, and it made me LOL: 20 Things Programmers Say When Something Is Not Working. I do agree with GirlGeek’s comment that “That’s not a bug, that’s a feature” definitely should have been on the list!

On Feb 28 I discovered and installed the Global Translator plugin for Wordpress. The plugin supports 4 different translation engines, with Google providing by far the most choices. I built a short list of friends who are native (or at least fluent) speakers of many of the available languages, configured the plugin for source language English and those options for target languages (SV IT ES FR PL HI EL DE zh-CN zh-TW KO JA), then I “called in favors” to test the plugin. Within a week, the verdicts were pretty much in. 

Conclusion? Most of my testers expressed the opinion that it was more confusing, funnier, or both to read the translation than to cope with the English. The Asian languages were especially noted as not being well done. The European languages which are closest to the origins of English, not surprisingly, seemed to fare the best.

Certainly the content of this blog, which focuses on software development, is not representative of everything that anyone might want to translate from English to another language, or from another language to English. The engine may handle general personal correspondence much better, and given that Google just announced this week that they now support built-in translation in Gmail, that’s probably the focus of their engine development efforts. I expect the capabilities of translation engines will continue to improve, and I plan to monitor them. But for my purposes, I don’t think they are anywhere near ready for ‘industrial’ use yet.

I know I am lucky to have such great, helpful friends!  Thanks to Elizabeth, Sayuri, Qingfeng, Aldo, Dright, Yonghee, Sami, Jan, and Jim for their kindness and assistance.

Recently I searched LinkedIn for a group for people who, like me, are interested in how global software development (GSD) teams can work together more effectively. When I didn’t find one, I started one. Please consider joining the Global Software Development (GSD) group on LinkedIn if this topic interests you too!

I have yet to find a good aggregator or portal that collects relevant blog posts, topics, etc. on GSD, either. If you know of one (or more), please post it in the LinkedIn group or send me a message via email or twitter. Thanks! (Eventually, if none turns up, maybe we’ll build one … ‘better to light a candle than to curse the darkness’)

What a great idea: The Ada Lovelace Day Collection

For instance, here’s a well-written tribute to Anita Borg in honor of the event: Honoring Anita Borg on Ada Lovelace Day

Interesting write up on experiences with language barriers among global teams: http://janetgregory.blogspot.com/2009/03/communication-language-barriers.html - thanks to DianaOfPortland on twitter.

Great post on Chris Sterling’s “Harmony with Agile and Architecture” blog about the impact of “shared resources” (plus it seems the author and I share a pet peeve about referring to people as “resources”, as if they were interchangeable widgets and not unique human beings)