RE: is SIP an Emergent Property

Hi Kent,

>Only in the sense that there is so much less to remember and learn at first.
>   1. Measure SIP.
>   2. Figure out what might be keeping it from dropping further.
>   3. Try something from the list of practices (or elsewhere).
>   4. Measure again.
>
>My pleasure comes from the radical simplification of XP, which for me in 
>an aesthetic intellectual move of a kind I deeply desire but rarely achieve.
>
>Does that answer your question?

Not quite. I trust that SIP does something special for you, as the software 
developer. My quest is to know whether that something works as well for the 
customer.

My ideal reply from you would be of the type: "my customer, Jim Jones, 
loves SIP for these reasons..." Another might be that Jim Jones (and Dan 
Palanza) seem to have not yet figured out how SIP can serve the needs of 
the customer.

I follow the XP list because I am extremely interested in how double entry 
bookkeeping will, in due time, serve the agile model of software 
development. I see that potential solution as cultural. While building 
houses and writing software are different disciplines, I see bookkeeping's 
solution as common to both, and therefore--typical of pattern study--as a 
pattern common to both disciplines.

I have a similar problem with what velocity measures, yet I have no issue 
with ideal days. I use ideal hours in my building quotes. They serve as 
units of measure. I learned early on that if one sells a workers time on an 
hourly basis it would be an exceptional week when that worker performed 28 
billable hours while working a legitimate 40 hour week. And so the metric, 
for my complete needs, must works in two ways: actual versus ideal.

SIP seeks an ideal timing for spending money to build software. This 
problem seems to me to also suffer the issue of actual versus ideal 
considerations. Work in process, in bookkeeping, is an issue of inventory. 
Just as entity  wants to implement the most billable hours in each worker's 
week, so does entity want to generate product with the least amount of its 
capital tied up in inventory.

The solution to these two types of metrics are completely worked out in 
double entry bookkeeping, and have been for centuries. And so, relative to 
SIP, my eye is always out for an evolution in the XP community toward 
bookkeeping's well refined methodology. When it happens, as velocity and 
units is presently evolving in XP, I believe that the successful pattern 
will work equally well for both the craft person developing software and 
the customer who seeks to optimize craft's contribution to viable 
commercial products.

"Double entry" is a name rooted in the dual focus of debtor versus creditor.

As a craft contributor, SIP is your thesis. The customer almost surely has 
a different thesis. The question asks how the two points of view will be 
synthesized. Relative to commercial metrics, this is what the bookkeeping 
pattern has resolved for centuries. And so I am watching for your evolution 
toward that pattern.

Dan