Amongst other things this article tells you when best to have children :-). groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/files/when%20should%20we%20test.pdf

• Eliminate waste: Spend time only on what adds real customer value
• Amplify learning: When you have tough problems, increase feedback
• Decide as late as possible: Keep your options open as long as practical, but no longer
• Deliver as fast as possible: Deliver value to customers as soon as they ask for it
• Empower the team: Let the people who add value use their full potential.
• Build integrity in: Don’t try to tack on integrity after the fact - build it in
• See the whole: Beware of the temptation to optimize parts at the expense of the whole

Link

 >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?

This from a lean manufacturing consultant:

Find the simple path to what works and follow it, always looking for a simpler path.

Patrick D. Smith

  >>Here is a version of Forth that runs under Windows, written in Whitespace:
  >
  >>
  >>I can't get it to run.  Do you think my browser has clobbered the code?
  Hmmm. I did exactly as the web page[1] suggests: "What do you do? Simply
  print it out and delete the file, ready to type in at a later date.
  Nobody will know that your blank piece of paper is actually vital
  computer code!"  I sure hope that I didn't mistake my only copy of the
  source code for an ordinary blank page!

  Perhaps writing my Befunge[2] compiler in Malborge[3] and then making it
  to a Forth[4] compiler written in Whitespace[1] wasn't such a good idea...

 References:
 1 http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/
 2 http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Befunge/
 3 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=28147
 4 http://www.cbel.com/forth_programming_language/

 >>Which brings me to an excellent 'forthism' I once read in a
 >> newsletter.  It stated:
 >>
 >>     "You can do anything in Forth - but you must be prepared
 >>     to do it yourself."
 In a recent discussion in c.l.functional, about why popular languages
 are popular, I summarized the relationship between Lisp and Forth
 more-or-less as follows:
 "From the Lisper's perspective, every other language is a cute subset
 of lisp; whereas from the Forther's perspective, every other language
 is a cute extension of Forth."

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

 In years past, we have implemented some extremely complicated databases in
 Forth.  The first was done in the mid 1970's for the company Cybek in NJ,
 and it was used in some extremely complex applications.  FORTH, Inc. also
 did some very complex databases for other companies, one of which was still
 in use last time I checked, at www.calmuni.com.  That one was a
 2-dimensional database, with a huge bit matrix in the center used to
 calculate overlapping bonded indebtedness.  A few years ago my contact  there
 told me that a state agency had just spent several million $$ trying to
 replicate it using modern database tools, but the result was too large and
 too slow to be usable.

 In the late 1980's we added class-based techniques to it, which many people
 liked (although I personally preferred the earlier, simpler version).

 It's hard to describe the whole approach in a newsgroup post, though.  It
 certainly didn't resemble SQL!

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

Summertime .. so all we do is to ski-roller. High time for the snow to come back and cool it down a bit. I found that pic a long time ago on I have forgotten what website.

• Skolelinux is a network architecture tailored for use in schools.
• Skolelinux is designed to be easy and cheap to maintain.
• Skolelinux gives the students their own usernames, home directories and services.
• Skolelinux includes OpenOffice.org

link

"The Linux Incompatibility list is a wiki project that attempts to document hardware that is incompatible with Linux rather than list what is compatible. In the wiki, it is possible to add alternitives so as to push hardware manufacturers to make good binary drivers, publish specifications, or even better, publish open drivers."