>Reciprocity is not guaranteed on airlines (or toll bridges - it
 >has always amused me that the toll on the Severn Bridge between
 >England and Wales is GBP 4.20 for a car to enter Wales but there
 >is no toll the other way, ie entering England). (Maybe it shows
 >how the two countries value themselves?)

All of the bridges in the San Francisco Bay area only charge toll in one direction. Some genius realized that, on the average, just about as many cars went each way for the obvious reason that most trips across the bridges are round trips. So they doubled the toll and took down the toll booths going one way (except for the Golden Gate Bridge where the toll booths remain, unattended). There has been considerable saving in toll collection costs and the toll booth traffic jams in one direction are gone. Is it possible the Severn Bridge does similarly?

Basically it’s an ad for Whiteboard Photo. ;-)

Phlip:

 During the planning game, you review last week's
 finished stories, and they inspire you to write some
 new cards, to edit some cards, and to toss some cards.
 Then you (the Onsite Customer) re-sort all the cards,
 and draw off the top batch for the next week.

 But another input into this system that affects the
 planning game - the competition.

 The USA occupied Iraq using an effective new battle
 technique. In traditional advances, you send a
 diversionary force against one of your enemies flanks,
 draw them that way, then send your main force against
 their other flank.

 Modern soldiers, with cell-phones and such, follow a
 more agile approach. You simply send two forks of your
 forces, probing towards both flanks. You use sensitive
 algorithms to detect the defending commander's
 decision which flank to defend. If you can rapidly
 turn one advance into the diversion, and the other
 into the main attack, you will soon collapse the
 opposition's ability to effectively make decisions.

 Agile onsite customers can play this card too. If you
 detect your competition's marching orders, in
 real-time (using either sensitive algorithms,
 good-old-fashioned industrial espionage, or just
 reading their self-congratulatory Web site), you can
 then request iteration features which provide the
 minimum amount of code needed to start your project
 towards blocking the competition's advance. This
 technique will, again, collapse the competition's
 ability to make decisions.

 Or convince them to hire an XP coach or three. So
 either way it's a win-win-win for us! ;-)

Steven’s reply: :-)

 Or you could follow the agile strategy that Microsoft
 pioneered - announcing products with your competitions'
 features before you even start implementing them.

"Process waste" is the behaviors that don’t produce a working product. The biggest waste in the industry today is "programming in the debugger". This is so endemic nobody even calls it waste. Our vendors work very hard to supply us with advanced debuggers, so we can merrily cause problems and then fix them, instead of preventing problems.

Another big waste is delayed integration. Some shops account for how many modules we must write, then specify the modules’ interfaces, and tell each programmer to write a module separate from the others. Then at the end of this cycle the programmers start trying to integrate. They might not even have build scripts to plug the modules together; they might find themselves manually integrating by clicking on the user interface to an IDE.

Delayed integration costs some orders of magnitude more than the cumulative cost of continuous integration does.

Get ahead of these problems. Write tests first, constantly review code, don’t own code, and integrate continuously. Write and maintain build scripts that support all these behaviors seamlessly.

Don’t delay surprises. If "our product has an installer" appears as a motherhood story, integrate the installation system early, and test it every day. Don’t wait for the last iteration.

The ideal is that the last week before a big release should look and feel just like any other.

But there are similarities: software is developed in stages, it is created in a process amenable to change, and it’s developed in a team. Lean manufacturing is a different approach than a traditional assembly line, and offers some lessons for software development. xp123.com/xplor/xp0312/index.shtml

link

Example isn’t another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.

   --Albert Einstei

I’ve started work on a book, tentatively titled _Driving Projects with Examples: a Handbook for Agile Teams_. All that’s done to date is the Preface.

Two years ago, this would have been about driving projects with tests, but I think the role of examples in projects is larger than that. Also, examples fit more obviously into the whole "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" thing. Examples are something people use to explain themselves to each other. Conversations and learning are more obviously part of the picture.

Because I’m so hot on examples, I’ve put the draft book on a new site, exampler.com. Here’s the book: <www.exampler.com/book/>

(And, rather than "QA", "tester", or even "ECaBian", "exampler" might be a good name for those people on an Agile project that exhibit certain traits more strongly than other team members.)

Some of you practice the style of development I’m documenting - or variants of it. If you do, I want to talk to you, be it on the phone, or via emai, or in person. (I am budgeting travel money to visit worthy sites.) I’m serious about the "handbook" in the title: I want to fill it with tricks, tips, techniques, and stories. The more people I gather them from, the better the book will be.

In this document we show you the Ruby version of the Smalltalk code published in the pink book.

"The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."

• Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson’s Turing Award Lecture

paulgraham.com/power.html

The first person to write about these issues, as far as I know, was Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. He wrote that programmers seemed to generate about the same amount of code per day regardless of the language. When I first read this in my early twenties, it was a big surprise to me and seemed to have huge implications. It meant that (a) the only way to get software written faster was to use a more succinct language, and (b) someone who took the trouble to do this could leave competitors who didn’t in the dust.

Brooks’ hypothesis, if it’s true, seems to be at the very heart of hacking. In the years since, I’ve paid close attention to any evidence I could get on the question, from formal studies to anecdotes about individual projects. I have seen nothing to contradict him.

…I arrived at the classroom ten minutes before the lecture began. I was worried that there wouldn’t be any seats left, but I discovered one at the fourth row from the front so I hurried over and sat down. The classroom, which can hold around 200 people, filled up almost instantly. By the time I entered the room, Mr. Miyamoto was already sitting in a chair next to the blackboard.

Since Miyamoto was apparently too busy to make any special preparations for the event, it was decided to move from a traditional lecture format to a more informal discussion. To start off things, the instructor in charge discussed CERO [the Japanese game rating system], age restrictions, GTA, Kakuto Chojin, and other topics related to game regulation.

And then Miyamoto stepped up to the mike. Applause…

www.video-fenky.com/features/miyamoto.html