Re: is SIP an Emergent Property

On 2003.01.20, Ron Jeffries <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Yes. But sometimes my tests pass easily, and sometimes it's difficult.
> Luck? Or was I not playing my own game?

When someone I'm pairing with goes to run the tests and goes "gee, I
don't know why the tests passed all of a sudden", I call that luck.

In another scenario:  after the tests pass, and I ask the person I'm
pairing with, "Why did the tests pass?" and they explain what change
they made to make them pass, then that's skill.

The difficulty of making the test pass is irrelelvant here.  It's the
intentionality that's important.  Getting desired results without the
correct intention that should lead to those results, is luck.  If you
intended to do something, and did it, and got the results you expected,
then you should be able to describe your intentions to someone else.  At
the bare minimum, you should be able to look back and describe what it
is you did, even if you don't know what inspired you to do it or how it
was even possible for you to do.  That's just an exercise in telling a
story, or the history, of what you just did.

> > The fact that Dan has yet to produce something so trivially simple as a
> > journal of his specific, exact activities, suggests to me that he's
> > either intentionally hiding something, or he's outright lying and isn't
> > even doing it himself, that's why there is no process to document.
> 
> If someone were to say something like this about me, no matter how bizarre
> and crazy my ideas sounded, it would be difficult to take it as gently as
> Dan has. I believe that a general respectful approach to our colleagues
> might be more appropriate, even when we have doubts. And there are other
> models of what's going on that are at least as credible as the above.

While I agree with you and understand your point about my poor approach,
I don't see where the neurotic behavior of asking Dan to explain better
followed by the exact same response from Dan is getting anyone.  So, I
took a different route.

After repeatedly asking Dan for simple things and him skating the
questions, my skepticism has outgrown my respect.  That's my problem and
you're right, I need to learn to deal with it.  But, after this many
attempts, I've tried really hard to find another plausible explanation
other than "there ARE no steps for Dan to document and he's just being a
barstool scientist, because we haven't caught on yet."  It's probably
the most educated form of trolling you'll ever see.

> > Sadly, I can't see how this is even remotely on-topic for the SIP folks
> > here, but maybe someone can draw a connection.  If you can't, please
> > reply offline directly.  Thanks.
> 
> Nearly good point. I think that SIP is probably one of the XP-ish ideas
> which is most amenable to bookkeeping notation. But I don't understand
> bookkeeping, and barely understand SIP, so I could be way off the rails.

This is what kills me!  I'm pretty sure standard bookkeeping practices
and disciplines are exactly what we apply when we set out to define
metrics like SIP and other measures that we want to use to "tweak" our
processes.  However, I don't see anything spectacular about these
bookkeeping practices that makes me want to do them over, say, a
lightweight record-keeping methodology like "scribbling notes".  Just
because you can fully derive a journal and a ledger from memos doesn't
mean you should for every single project where you keep records.

For measuring SIP, beyond recording the date a feature is requested by
the customer and the date the feature is delivered to the customer, I
see no reason for any additional bookkeeping.  Does someone see
necessary details for computing SIP that I'm missing?

-- Dossy

-- 
Dossy Shiobara                       mail: [email protected] 
Panoptic Computer Network             web: http://www.panoptic.com/ 
  "He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
    folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)

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