-
What Can Agile Learn From Bruce Lee
I've always enjoyed watching kung fu movies. The fluid movement of the fight fascinates me, but it was only recently I realised how much I also enjoy the philosophy that is usually found in these types of movies. I watched the document Be Water, that recounted the life of Bruce Lee.
The documentary carefully explains that Bruce Lee, whose movies I have seen many times, was not only a martial artist and a movie start, but also a philosopher. I became curious how his philosophies affected his thinking and his martial arts, and whether there was something I could learn from that man that I could apply to my own work.
-
A Story of (C)leaning up
Some time ago I had a profound revelation about how I optimise things in my daily life. I had areas where I tended to do a lot of local optimisation, thinking that my way of doing something was efficient. Then one day I had a conversation with a friend about this, and I realised that efficiency is not always the right thing to focus on. I would be much happier by optimising around, well, happiness.
I know, a very engineer-y way of thinking about something as intangible as happiness, but hear me out.
I was making myself more miserable by doing things in ways that I thought were efficient, so it was time to put what I preach at work to use at home too. I started thinking my homelife from a new perspective, and in this post I will explore some things that I found out about cleaning.
-
10 Heuristics for Agile Software Delivery
I’m continuing with the trend of comparing psychological topics to agile. The latest book I devoured was Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions by a risk scientist and psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. I’ll try to apply his ideas about heuristics into my daily work and offer some rules of thumb that I have found useful for effective software delivery and teamwork.
Dr. Gigerenzer offers handy advice on how to battle uncertainty in our everyday life, and bashes complex algorithms and models that fail to address highly volatile and uncertain topics. Gigerenzer claims that in the world of data, we have forgotten rules of thumb - heuristics - as a way to have simple answers to uncertainty.
-
DevOps: A Hopeful Future
I recently finished reading the magnificent book by Rutger Bregman: Humankind: A Hopeful History. The book presents humankind in a different light from the traditional cynical point of view. By breaking down faulty psychological experiments and historical studies, Bregman offers an intriguing viewpoint: maybe we humans as a species are not egoistical and cruel, bound to evil if not controlled. Maybe we are ultimately altruistic and kind, and it’s the system around us that makes us miserable.
I was touched by the viewpoint of the book, and I also saw the many parallelisms between the theories of the book and the work I’ve done in the field of agile and DevOps. This inspired me to write this blog post where I will connect the dots between Bregman’s book and the DevOps movement.
-
Theory of Constraints and League of Legends
Ah yes, the Theory of Constraints (ToC) by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. A theory of prioritizing your improvement actions to the biggest bottleneck within your workflow, one of the best yet simplest theory of lean production management. Revised on factory floors and now utilized in many other places, like in the IT industry.
And now I will make a tongue-in-cheek attempt to explain that theory with the help of… League of Legends? What could go wrong?
League of Legends. -
About the blog
Agile was always meant to be a lightweight discipline to develop software. With the Agile Manifesto as their guideline, a “two pizza” team could be enabled to achieve extraordinary results. But what happens when agile is adopted in a large organization that has traditionally had projects with maybe even hundreds of developers?
These organizations might have decades of experience working from the exact opposite philosophy than the manifesto. What challenges will emerge in the transformation? Why do we so often hear the phrase “agile is dead”? And most importantly, why should we even care?
Agile Emperor
