Quotes (from Twitter)

The the past 2-3 months that I've been on Twitter, I've been saving Tweets that, at the time, struck in particular when they appeared. As the list was getting long, I thought I'd better post these now, before it got ridiculously long. Some are quotes, not from Twitter users, but quotes other Twitter users thought were interesting from authors, philosophers, etc. There's even a few here of my own. :-) [In some cases there are follow-ups combined with the original which are not, therefore, in alphabetical order by the author's name.]

Abraham Maslow (via ASQ) - "Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, & blocking of communication threatens all the basic needs."

Alan Shalloway - Doing meta thinking is good (see my book design patterns explained). "going meta" means doing meta thinking w/o validation ;)

Alan Shalloway - practices followed as solutions are dangerous. Practices followed as examples of understood principles are a basis of learning.

Albert Einstein - Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.

Alistair Cockburn - The center of agile development is to deliver running, tested features to users and collect feedback.

Alistair Cockburn - We need shared understanding at this point, not shared common sense.

Alistair Cockburn: OH "a large dev team has a voracious appetite for requirements". Food for thought.

Andrew Clay Shafer - In a mechanical system, friction is the most common cause of lost work. Friction seems like a useful metaphor.

Ari Tikka - Standardized work... in Finnish I like word "vakioitu". Has the flavor of being constant instead of forced to standard.

August Turak - Maximum motivation emerges from the peer pressure of a team working toward a common mission.

Bas Vodde - I'm a positive person, but gradually losing hope that large companies can get rid of their self-destroying habits. Esther Derby - plus structures and policies reinforce current behavior, sometimes punish new behavior. Bas Vodde - Yes, and people reinforce each others behavior all the time. A nice system build to keep it in status quo.

Ben Simo - If you learn from /waste/ and /rework/, is it really waste?

Ben Simo - SW doesn't handle ambiguity like people but SW systems definitely can be complex. Plus, human users r part of those systems.

Benjamin Mitchell - A new team has set up a Kanban board with an explicit column for 'blocked'. Amazing how quickly kanban boards provide useful information.

Bill Graham - “It’s only work if there’s something else you’d rather be doing.”

Bob Marshall - Locating Sw Dev in IT seems dumb to me (these days). But the wider point: who owns Product Dev?

Bob Marshall - The one and only question you need to ask agile teams: "What measures are you using to understand and improve performance?

Bob Martin - Scrum+XP+Lean+Kanban+CSM+DSDM+TDD+BDD+CSP+... = murky Agilebet soup. Maybe it's time to rethink this.

Brian Marick - like to think of AR⊗TA as part of new wave: "economy of trust", "smaller co's w/ intense collaboration", products instead of finance, etc.

Brian Marick - Courage isn't needed for those things once you've constructed an environment where making mistakes isn't scary. So I'd put courage as a temporary value, a stepping stone.

Brian Marick - I detect a certain tendency for craftsmanship to become narcissistic, about the individual's heroic journey toward mastery.

Brian Marick - I think of arxta as a back to basics movement, where basics are pretty much XP attitude & the original scrappiness of Scrum.

Brian Marick - Interesting to think about changes required by "Done means it's in the user's hands. Nothing less."

Brian Marick - Much social thought today is about making sure no one gets something for nothing (welfare queens!) and bad ppl suffer (smokers: perish). (Esther Derby - Those seem almost like tribal values.) What gets lost is persuading/allowing ppl to give something for nothing (open source, social capital) so that ordinary people benefit. Being jealous of resources is human reproduction model (small # of children, huge investment in each). Alternative is our maple: huge # of seeds, waste cheerfully accepted. Maple doesn't care that some seeds wasted on undeserving ground.

Brian Marick - People who think they're on a hero's journey tend to disregard the ordinary schmucks around them.

Brian Marick - The idea that working with other people is risky, that it requires lowering some sort of barrier or thinking differently (becoming humble).

Brian Marick - Thing about waterfall for programmers: you only have to acknowledge your gross lack of skill every few months. With Agile, it's *every day*. Ron Jeffries - true but i can't do much harm in a single day.

C. Northcote Parkinson - “Delay is the deadliest form of denial.” (Not from Twitter)

Charles Kingsley - We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Chris Sims - People think agile introduces uncertainty when it is actually just uncovering the uncertainty that has always been there.

Classic #quote - A user is somebody who tells you what they want the day you give them what they asked for.

Courtney Benson - "People don’t fail because they make mistakes. People fail because they don’t learn from their mistakes.” Chuck Musciano

Dan North - talk on learning at Better Software conf: "Use metrics as indicators, not targets."

Dave Pembs - Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

David Alfaro - "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" So true! Docs=Potential Knowledge [hardly unleashed], People=Kinetic Knowledge.

David Alfaro - You will be amazed how powerful is to switch the immediate reaction "I disagree" to "I don't see it, help me see it"

David Anderson - TPS yes! Lean (Womack, Jones, Daniels) No! A theory of variation is missing from core Lean literature. So not Deming.

David Hussman - "what do you call a stand-up meeting with too many people? A stand-there meeting"

David Platt (via Michael Bolton) - “Your user is not you. Most people don't want to DRIVE somewhere, they want to BE somewhere."

Derrick Bailey - if you don't learn fr waste/rework, it's not only waste/rework, its complete failure. i expect learning fr waste/rework.

Doug Shimp - A well formed team often can solve problems faster than the surrounding business is able to apply.

Doug Shimp - Build your team protocols one at a time. Pay attention and adapt based on realities encounter and don't assume what is needed.

Doug Shimp - Great individual talent is often not enough. We need teams that are talented & humble enough 2 work together.

Doug Shimp - If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

Doug Shimp - Scrum often reveals that the business is not able to figure out which problems to solve.

Ed Yourdon - David Stephenson makes key point (at #e2conf1): "make customers co-creators"

Elizabeth Hendrickson - Seems to me that prof testers do 4 things well: observe, notice what can be varied, predict risks, & explore methodically.

Elizabeth Hendrickson -Trying to test the depths of the code thru the UI is like peering through the shower head to examine pipes in the basement.

Esther Derby - primary work of managers: establish conditions for teams to work in. develop people. work on the work system.

G.M. Weinberg - CENTER means know your own agenda and motivations. Get control of yourself first, so you can genuinely be of service to someone else. ENTER means you must enter someone else's system to help them. You can't bash your way in, and you can't force them to see things as you do. TURN means that we think in terms of making a nudge here and there. We can't expect to transform someone. They self-transform, if at all.

G.M. Weinberg - Instead of thinking, 'irrational', think 'rational from the perspective of a different set of values.

George Dinwiddie - "Talk to the card" We found that focus on the card wall helped bring focus to the standup.

George Dinwiddie - Yes, it's a pity. With mechanical products, the customer can admire the design and workmanship. Estimate long term value.

Gia Lyons - Marketing = Matchmaker. Sales = Dating. Services = Marriage. Support = Marriage Counseling.

Greg Vaughn - Agile offers more control. But you have to give up the illusion of predictability.

Henrik Kniberg - In Scrum, the Scrum Master's role is to create a great Team, and the Product Owner's role is to use that team to create a great Product.

Herm Albright - A positive attitude may not solve all your problems but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

Igor Macaubus - "Rules and procedures can be an insurance policy against disaster, and they prevent disaster. But they also assure mediocrity."

Immanuel Kant - Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.

J.B.Rainsberger - I find that the more authority I have over my own habits, the more I care about outcomes over dogma.

J.B.Rainsberger - Perhaps if more craftspeople worked more closely together, the narcissism would subside.

James Bach - Testing under no circumstances shows that the product will work. So we test mainly to discover how it will not work.

James Bach - When you see someone "resist change", realize from their point of view they are just applying self-discipline to do things right.

Jason Yip - If you had to scale down Agile to a few core skills that can be learned and applied without a huge commitment. What would that look like?

Jason Yip - The problem is not concentration of power; the problem is thinking based on authority rather than responsibility.

Jeff Patton - popular quote at yesterday's agile round table [Colorado somewhere] on good management: "organize their goals, not their work." - can't remember where I got it.

Jens Ohlig - pizza with the radius z and thickness a has the volume pi*z*z*a [Life is good]

Jim Highsmith - Agile managers understand that demanding certainty in the face of uncertainty is dysfunctional.

Jim Highsmith - Calculating value points. If the product mgr has no time to calculate value, the dev team has no time to calculate cost.

Jim Highsmith - Documentation is often the solution to a communications problem that can't be corrected with documentation.

Jim Highsmith - The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner.

Joshua Kerievsky - An improvement is something that "enhances value or excellence." Don't ship features. Ship improvements.

Joshua Kerievsky - To release frequently, discover and build "acceptably incomplete" features that can ship today and evolve tomorrow. re: "acceptably incomplete" - one Customer deferred a good number of stories (8-10) that would "flesh out" a feature. In the end, those stories were never implemented - Customer realized that they didn't really need them after all. Dave Rooney - So, "acceptably incomplete" was actually "perfectly acceptable". Joshua Kerievsky - Completeness is overrated. We get more done faster by finding what is acceptable in its incompleteness. The core issue may be that we don't know what "complete" really is all the time (perhaps 'most' of the time). That's why the hardest and perhaps most valuable skill to master is Evolutionary Design.

Keith Braithwaite - No. I'd call src ctrl a good practice so good that it's mandatory until something better comes along—and I hope for something better. Ron Jeffries - so your concern with "best" is that someday something might be better? Keith Braithwaite - My concern is that a stated belief in the current way being best will lessen the likelihood of a better way being recognised.

Kent Beck - by "aspirations" i mean "who we are trying to be": software will improve when we aspire to be accountable, transparent, reliable. Ron Jeffries - well, yes, that and when we act in accord with those aspirations.

Kent Beck - Disagree that xp1e glorified programmers. Talking code when addressing the industry built on code isn't glorifying. The kind of thing i notice is when i say "the team" in 1e i mean "the programmers". In 2e we meant everybody influencing dev. "respect" as a value hasn't been widely accepted. Michael Feathers - The thing that was key in XP1E was the emphatic message "with these constraints, this works.” Up to that point, everyone was trying to solve the "general problem" of software dev. Rachel Davies - for me - XP1E was about listening to customers without compromising code quality - a way to achieve balance.

Kent Beck - i would be very glad to see a dramatic increase in aspirations for outcomes accompanied by a dramatic decrease in dogma.

Kent Beck - not quite a definition but... "quality results in a steady flow of value" or "a steady flow of value indicates the presence of quality".

Kent Beck - shu ha ri is generally a power trip for the teacher. empathy, engagement, and modeling work much better if you can deliver them.

Kevlin Henney - Use of "general" and "flexible" are design meeting smells.

LinusTorvalds - Real men don’t use backups, they post their stuff on a public FTP server & let the rest of the world make copies.

Luke Hohmann - Surveys are about getting answers to questions. #innovationgames are about shared exploration of complex issues to gain insight.

Malte Foegen (via Hillel Glazer) - "Replace 'process' with 'work' everywhere you see it & ppl will not get so hung-up on process."

Mark Graban - Toyota people taught me to shift my mindset from "we can't do that" to "we haven't figured out how to do that YET."

Mark Twain - The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

Martin Fowler - I'd rather someone thoughtfully does something counter to my advice than someone blindly follows it.

Martin L. Shoemaker - If you want to get things done around here, you have to learn to think outside the boss...

Matt Podwysocki - @KentBeck now what about the anti-for campaign? I could get behind that one too. Composable functions over explicit loops.

Michael Bolton - Serendipity is the discovery of something in the absence of a goal to discover it.

Michael Bolton - Testing is not quality assurance. Testing provides information to those who make decisions about quality assurance (programmers, managers).

Michael Bolton - That which is ubiquitous without being influential is in obsolescence. (from Mark Federman @ #Agile 2008, and maybe from McLuhan).

Michael Bolton - There is no test that is guaranteed to be needed only once. True; as is the converse. A test of some kind will help us tell the difference.

Michael Bolton -To me, "going meta" means "going above the current level of conversation to try to figure out what we're really talking about".

Michael Bolton: We get into BIG problems when we confuse MEASUREMENT which can be qua [l nt] itative with METRICS, which are functions, quantitative.

Michael Feathers - The test of a philosophy is the state the world would be in if it were followed fully. Most philosophies posit impossible worlds. Human nature is the one bit that many philosophies don't account for. Some pay lip service to it, but then conveniently ignore it.

Mike Wesely - "Statistics are often used as a drunken man uses a lamppost; for support rather than illumination."

Napoleon Bonaparte - Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

Nicole Radziwill - Alex just invented a new word: "for-gonna-get" - when you haven't forgotten about it yet, but you will forget something in the future.

Ohno - “Do not codify method" [because improvement is never-ending, and by writing it down, your process will ossify].

Paul Seibert - Are you agile? Look for adaptation in the face of things you did not expect?

Paul Seibert - The right people don't need to be managed. if you need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake.

Randy Nelson (of Pixar) - Core skill of innovators is error recovery not failure avoidance. [Is agile more about the former compared to traditional approaches that may emphasize the latter?]

Ricardo Semler - "It's unfair to expect all employees to feel passionate about their work."

Rob England - Open content standards those I know of have failed. Open OK, but need money and editors. COBIT 5 might fly.

Ron Jeffries - an estimate is a guess in a clean shirt.

Ron Jeffries - OK. Here's the deal. The fact that you think you need tools to support your distributed development is a sign. Read the damn sign.

Ron Jeffries - There is a big difference between "I don't know a better way" and "there is no better way".

RonJeffries - @jwgrenning well put. TDD style finds mistakes, preventing defects.

Scott Bellware - That decay that plagues community efforts (agile, alt.net, etc) is only inevitable if the community fears principled community organization. With a values statement of code of conduct, a community becomes an *intentional community*. A community with defined values and protocols can afford more diversity than a community that eschews definition for the sake of diversity. A community's core values necessarily creates a core group. as long as that group doesn't devolve into a clique, it strengthens the whole. On top of creating definitions that permit a core, the group needs values and protocols to recognize and address cliquishness of the core.

Scott Duncan - I think we should talk about (what I think is) DeMarco's main point: focusing on the goal of creating software that changes/transforms and the conception vs construction aspect of software. Note also that he does not reject the idea of engineering software, so understanding what that may mean still seems important, though control, predictability & consistency are not most important to him.

Scott Duncan - My reading of the article suggests the pt is to focus on building transformational sw, not expect cmd & ctrl will be the best way to structure doing that, and rethink what the engineering of sw needs to mean in doing so.

Scott Duncan - Perhaps why some at #agileroots felt "real" agile is about code & coding techniques, feeling social "stuff" is a distraction. Alistair noted that people saying this weren't around when the Manifesto was crafted. Kent Beck - how odd. the social stuff is the point. technique supports relationships. Ron Jeffries - Yes, many techies think "social stuff" is distraction. But no: valuable skill. At same time, one puts effort where one's heart is. George Dinwiddie - Many business people also think "social stuff" is distraction.

Scott Duncan - Stability seems relative: depends on how much change one can absorb/comprehend in some period of time. Could it be that acceptance/concern over an agile approach is about one's relative sense of stability?

Scott McKain - “What gets measured is what gets done” is true but also “What gets measured gets emphasized by management.”

Seiche Sanders (ASQ) - I've never been a fan of the shooting-a-mouse-with-a-shotgun problem-solving approach. Propagates more problems/costs.

Shigeo Shingo - What is the Toyota Production System? When asked this question most people (80 percent) will echo the view of the average consumer and say: “It’s a kanban system”; another 15 percent may actually know how it functions in the factory and say: “It’s a production system”; only a very few (5 percent) really understand its purpose and say: “It’s a system for the absolute elimination of waste.” Some people imagine that Toyota has put on a smart new set of clothes, the kanban system, so they go out and purchase the same outfit and try it on. They quickly discover that they are much too fat to wear it! They must eliminate waste and make fundamental improvements in their production systems before techniques like kanban can be of any help. The Toyota production system is 80 percent waste elimination, 15 percent production system, and only 5 percent kanban. This confusion stems from a misunderstanding of the relationship between basic principles of production at Toyota and kanban as a technique to help implement those principles. – Shigeo Shingo, A Study of the Toyota Production System

Thomas Cagley - The world is not rational and expecting people or even groups of people to act rationally is confirmation of the thesis.

Tobias G Mayer - If teams are not collocated, are they dislocated?

Tom Gilb - DeMarco is really saying we must control value not merely cost and time.

Vadim Zaytzev - “Formal rules for comments are difficult enough to be easily forgotten to be included in a language standard” Michael D. Hill - aren't comments for precisely the stuff we can't express formally? if we could, they'd be called "code".

William W. (Woody) Williams - Agile development requires continuous planning. Waterfall requires constant re-planning.

William W. (Woody) Williams - Despite rumors to the contrary, Scrum is not a project management practice, it is a software delivery method.

William W. (Woody) Williams - It is infinitely better to mentor and train people - risking they leave - than to do nothing and risk they stay.