Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

My wife and I just watched Bowling for Columbine, a movie I think every American should be exposed to. It is a documentary by Michael Moore. He asks a question, "Why does the United States have over 10,000 murders per year while Canada has only a small fraction?" None of the familiar arguments stand up to the data...Canada has more guns per capita, twice the unemployment rate, they see the same movies, play the same video games, and listen to the same music. The difference seems to be in our network news coverage: the Commercialization of Fear.

It seems that many Canadians do not lock their doors, even ones who have had home intruders in the past. Although I live in an incredibly safe suburb of Chicago, many of my friends and acquaintences raise their eyebrows when I tell them that I rarely lock my door. Now that I think about it, the only time I feel compelled to lock the door is when I've watched something scary on TV. Fear truly is the Mindkiller.

Posted by Dave [Link]

I had a lot of fun writing The Huddle. Using my experiences as a family therapist and college football captain, the paper focuses on the importance of "daily huddles". It also discusses team health and when it may and may not be appropriate to have insiders facilitate retrospectives.

I'm not sure if the analogies will work for the general population, but for the plethora of ex-footbal-player family-therapist-turned-software-developers out there, it should be quite accessible.

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As I was poking around Diana Larsen's web sites, I started reading about Appreciative Inquiry. It is the organizational development version of solution-focused therapy, a postmodern cousin of narrative therapy. As one would expect, there are some differences between a narrative approach and appreciative inquiry, but both are very much strengths based and work from social constructionist assumptions. It's been a good week...

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I haven't kept in touch with any of my professors from graduate school. It has been four years and I finally felt it was time to get back in touch with the professor who taught me the most: Tina Schermer Sellers. I'm trying to get her feedback on an idea I had this week. I would like to integrate Reflecting Teams into Project Retrospectives. I think it could be a powerful tool for troubled teams.

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I'm in conversation with a bunch of retrospective facilitators who are expressing some interest in my experience with narrative therapy and my attempts to apply it to agile software development. I am encouraged beyond words.

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I took Daniel Steinberg's class on Fitnesse this afternoon. It was bunches of fun with a room packed fully of geeks, two or three per laptop, writing simple acceptance tests with Fit. My first question afterward was where Fit would best plug into a web application.

After touring the French Quarter for a while, I ended up back in my hotel, my mind still wondering where I could hook Fit into my Diary. I had spoken with Micah Martin earlier and he had shared some frightening stories of trying to use Fitnesse to test a web application via the GUI. I didn't want to go there. It seemed that it was best fit (no pun intended) for testing domain objects.

I am amazed at how easy it was to create the needed fixtures and get the tests to pass. Once the interface was in place, I moved very quickly, building up tests via wiki in Fitnesse. Being able to run the test directly from the wiki is priceless. See Diary's fit package for the fixtures and the fitnesse directory for the tests.

Posted by Dave [Link]

As I was explaining to my (four-year-old) daughter that I was going to be out of town for a couple days for the XP Agile Universe conference, she asked me a tough question:

"Daddy, what do you do at work?"

I thought about it for a while and responded,

"I write stories for computers to read."

This seemed to satisfy her. I'm not sure if I'm satisfied, but it has been interesting to think about software in these terms.

Posted by Dave [Link]

I just finished reading the first two chapters of Norm Kerth's Project Retrospectives. I am very encouraged thus far, and more interested than ever in pursuing more opportunities to facilitate retrospectives. The skill mix that Norm describes seems an excellent fit for my background, with the exception of no project management experience. I already appreciate this book for exposing me to that bit of insight: to facilitate a retrospective, the facilitator will benefit from having experience on both sides of the fence...

"Because a retrospective facilitator in the software engineering field needs a broad range of skills, knowledge, and ability, it is advantageous if he or she is also a disciplined practitioner of software engineering and project management methods." (pages 32-33)

Posted by Dave [Link]

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