The Whiteboard - 2013-05-16

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9:54 AM

ethically challenged question. Innocent on the surface but related to the "electronic tool" OP is affiliated with, can't figure how to handle this?

-1

Q: Is physical Agile board "always" better than electronic tool?

I have seen many comment when agile newbies asks a question in agile forum about which Agile tool they should use and they are always some strong answers around don't go to the evil electronic tool mainly because you will lose the big-visible-board advantage which better generate team conversatio...

OP promotes their tool in some of their answers (for the sake of precision, affiliation is disclosed, answers appear relevant and there seem to be no "flood")...

0

A: Software Management Tools for Agile Process Development

Years ago, a group of Agile coaches at Proteus Technologies were trying to find a decent Agile tool to help collaborating our Agile projects with their remote customers. Like many Agile teams, we started with physical story wall but having remote customers make this a challenge. In the attempt to...

5

A: How should we draw the release burndown chart?

This is currently how my colleagues and I solve the burndown problems in the Agile tool that we are building The added scoped is represented by the vertical line just like Mike Cohn's graph. We also emphasize this with the light-grey bars. Unestimated stories are calculated based on current ...

10:06 AM

@gnat As long as this particular question and answers remain spam free, I'd leave it be.

Though I did just edit the question to remove some of the more emotionally charged wording.

1 hour later…

11:24 AM

@MadKeithV good edit, it's certainly softened the tension to me. I also am rather inclined to let it go (under "close supervision"), mostly because of your answer and because I could not find a duplicate

@MadKeithV pfleh, I am anti-physical scrumboard just because it's something people are so zealous about :| I don't actually care and think both physical and non-physical scrum boards work perfectly great when you have decent devs, and both work terribly when you have terrible devs, but most of all people shouldn't be so up in arms about any one solution, rather they should happily have a go at whatever and continue trying things until something works well

...or just fire everyone when you've tried all the tools and failed at all of them; this means the team is a fail not the tools.

that said, I am so pro physical whiteboard for engineers. Any dev organization that doesn't give engineers at least a 4' whiteboard at their cube, and walls full in labs is damaged.. being able to white board when designing is so necessary, I've tried using notepads when whiteboards weren't available and it's really not the same..

stenos definitely can't be used for design communication/conversations anything like a proper whiteboard even if a steno can be used for your own design work (which I still think whiteboards work better for because the ease of erasing and moving parts about)

11:41 AM

@JimmyHoffa I've actually had to fight for whiteboards because putting them up would "damage the walls"...

@MadKeithV not putting them up damages the software.

@ChrisF @RobertHarvey I've long noticed the 40+ year old engineers I've worked with over the years all use mechanical pencils religiously. Do you guys? Why, is this just a holdover from years in college when papers were handwritten so you couldn't just hit the backspace key like the rest of us? Practically all other engineers I see (me included) use pens on our stenos...

frankly a mechanical pencil would just annoy me, way too much to think about when I just want to write a note and doesn't give the same smooth writing feel of a pen...

I use regular pencils because you can sharpen them to a lethal weapon in a pinch.

@MadKeithV that's what I keep extra checkers in the sole of my shoe for

@JimmyHoffa I haven't used a mechanical pencil in years - but then again strictly speaking I'm not an engineer.

You're a programmer/developer/whatever no? Or are you a manager now?

11:47 AM

I used to use a fountain pen as my handwriting with a ball point is so sloppy, but these days I just scribble with what ever's at hand.

@JimmyHoffa I'm still a developer, but I wouldn't class myself as an Engineer - not in the strict definition of the term.

Ah. I'm not that picky, but whenever the thought crosses my mind when I'm at the store I'll grab a few nicer ballpoints just because they put the ink down easily and roll well

fountain pen sounds like fun, it's appropriately eccentric to be up my alley

@JimmyHoffa It can get messy :)

@JimmyHoffa Seriously, I use a calligraphy fountain pen quite a lot. It makes for great-looking writing.

@ChrisF I know it's not accurate to use the word 'engineer' for what we do, but developer/programmer to my mind is a title for people that programmed in the bygone ways where spaghetti madness was the law of the land. I have a hard time calling someone who's mindful of maintenance costs and attentive to design concepts and structural consequences of their actions a "programmer" or "developer"

I see

11:54 AM

@MadKeithV don't get me wrong, no amount of magical pen will make my penmanship worthy of the term "penmanship" as opposed to rorschach test

@ChrisF you coded during those years; through the 80s/90s did you not find it much more common to just be asked to sling a solution on top of the pile of other solutions into the code base as opposed to attending to the design of the whole and where changes for a solution belonged? Was refactoring near as common then as now? I just correlate "programmer" and "developer" with "codemonkey" so much, maybe that's because that's what I was at the time

@JimmyHoffa It always varied. Sometimes you just have to put a sticking plaster over the problem and hope it holds.

I've always used "developer" for someone who designs and codes.

Yeah, we all do that, it's just my perception that through the last decade there has been a large increase in the drive for quality over what was in the decade pryor, but again that may just be my experience due to the timeline of my personal career track

@ChrisF Perhaps developer -> engineer is just a generational shift. words that mean the same thing but the new generation has decided to eschew one for the other.

Probably true. "Programmer" is someone who just codes what he's told to.

granted, engineer should have a particular meaning regarding formality of approach

In the UK you can't really call yourself an engineer unless you're a member of the BCS/IEEE etc.

When I graduated in the 80's it was done, but not widespread. I've never seen the need.

12:12 PM

Aye, good on 'em who do that, but I can't say as though it's necessary to write software with quality, though it may well be an indicator of a person who does, at the same time it may be a false indicator..

I should think getting a CS degree should indicate someone capable of good software development; the degree requires quite a bit of rather complex high level work to be achieved. It's strange to me that people can do so many of those difficult CS degree tasks yet still be unable to do simple development with any form of elegance or even correctness often... I don't understand the dissonance between those two things, but perhaps if I'd a degree I would better understand how people pass classes

...without really having the mental dexterity and ability required for simple software development

The thing is that the don't teach "software development". They teach "programming" - i.e. the syntax and algorithms, but it's usually only on smallish programs.

There's still no acknowledgement that most software development in the real world is maintaining and upgrading existing systems with relatively little completely new development.

It's why recruiters make a big thing of "green field" development when they can.

@ChrisF as someone without a degree, when I hear about the things people study and are tested on in CS programs and look into them; I find many of them to be very high level complex things, the oddity to me is that people are able to understand and accomplish these very high level things (like complex runtime analysis, automata, number theory, linear programming, computation theory) yet presented with a code base are unable to analyze it and make correct assumptions about any code path in it

not that I expect them to know how to do that as though they were taught to, but I expect they should be able to just because they had the intelligence level to understand and work with those other far more complex topics I mentioned

yet often we all work with colleagues who regardless of their degree and years of experience even still fail at the common task of following a code path

...just strange. The things people study in CS are way more complex than the things we do in industry it seems, yet the dissonance persists. Perhaps many people are just much better at regurgitating than I ever was

user20683

12:31 PM

@JimmyHoffa a good many professors tend to not be very good at coding is why

user20683

a great many of them are from a time when you wrote procedural routines to crunch numbers, not maintained large object oriented structures

user20683

the Java book we used was from 1999

@WorldEngineer shouldn't matter, a student who can understand automata theory should be able to do the much simpler task of following a code path and make correct analysis of it's behaviour and cases

Or so it goes in my book, code is easy, it's the math and theory that's hard, but maybe that's just my perception due to overexposure to code..

user20683

@JimmyHoffa hard to say, I generally find debugging less annoying than proofs

user20683

enumerate out what the system should do, annihilate the edge cases if you can then start testing the weird stuff you can't and move from there

user20683

12:36 PM

even then, the user will do things you never expected

user41796

1:00 PM

@JimmyHoffa - I am an engineer but I'm definitely not in the 40+ years of tenure crowd. My writing tool of choice is a mechanical pencil, but I'm just as likely to use a pen if it's just taking notes. For sketches and design work, it has to be a mechanical pencil. The efficiency of being able to click and always have a precision tip of graphite to write with makes a mechanical pencil more appealing than a non-mechanical pencil.

user41796

My artsy side greatly prefers a pencil over pen as I can control the shading much more easily with pencil.

user41796

RE: (software) engineer | developer | programmer. Common usage treats the terms and titles synonymously. If IEEE and NSPE (Nat Soc Pro Engrs) are successful with licensing Software Engrs as PEs then they might be able to create enough of a stink to draw a distinction. Certain titles like "Senior Electrical Engr" have very specific meaning in the industry. Those who assign the title without regards to the associated qualifications see a lot of negative pressure from peer companies.

user41796

For example, if you ever meet someone who says they are a "Senior ___ Engineer" (electrical, mechanical, civil, etc...) then you should feel free to ask what states they are licensed in. If they're not licensed then they are not honoring industry agreed upon titles.

1:42 PM

@GlenH7 Yeah, I know that, I know there's also a fight to title engineer in our industry with licensure as well, though it will never happen; remember we're always looking for lower quality in this industry not higher; PHP ftw.

user41796

1:58 PM

NCEES and IEEE rolling out a software engineer PE exam this past April adds an interesting element to that industry fight. No doubt that many orgs simply want cheaper cheaper cheaper.

2:22 PM

@JimmyHoffa I was. I like VB6; it suffers from a few inconsistencies, but as you say you can knock up applications in it very quickly. VBA in Access was especially RAD.

You need some discipline to keep it from becoming a big ball of mud, however.

As for mechanical pencils, I could never get myself to use them. You need one of those big white gum erasers; the ones on the pencils are worthless. I use three Uniball Jetstream 0.7 pens, in black, blue and red colors; whiteboard-style writing on a 1/4 inch pile of printer paper. At 50 years old, my hands get tired if I have to write more than a paragraph; I've gone for months without writing anything. Typing is the new precision writing instrument.

@RobertHarvey VB6 was my first job for years; which is why it occurred to me thinking about it that ruby is the modern day VB6, it's every juniors favorite start. I'm sure I wrote terrible VB6 just like a bunch of youngins are out their writing terrible ruby these days, but I grew up and moved to a proper language... wonder how the same will play out for ruby folks

So that's two misses on the mechanical pencils. I prefer those uniballs too, barely have to touch the paper and they scratch out bold lines, makes it easier. Find it so weird that some engineers like the mechanical pencils, perhaps I just don't have the fine motor skills necessary

As for the big ball of mud, there's more than enough of that in .NET too.. I suppose you could write clean well organized VB6 applications, but at the time people who were writing clean well organized applications were java or C++ devs, finding VB6 folks who had that focus was likely much more difficult. A lot more VB6 folks like I was existed; green as hell slinging code with the mantra "Looks like it works! Great!"

2:48 PM

@JimmyHoffa It's when you have to go back in and add features or fix bugs that you start thinking about writing your applications so that they are more maintainable.

I've created quite the programmer honeypot here:

27

A: Why is 0 false?

Because the math works. FALSE OR TRUE is TRUE, because 0 | 1 is 1. ... insert many other examples here. Traditionally, C programs have conditions like if (someFunctionReturningANumber()) rather than if (someFunctionReturningANumber() != 0) because the concept of zero being equivalent to...

> @NeilG: I can call spaghetti macaroni, but it's still spaghetti, even though both are pasta.

I can't help but hear that in my head in a cheesy italian accent

@JimmyHoffa Back when I still had good eyes, I would write assembly on eight to the inch graph paper with a 0.5 pencil. ;)

user41796

@JimmyHoffa re: fine motor skills | soft touch - that's actually a good point regarding mechanical pencils. My high school art teacher could spot my shadings from a mile away. It just had a distinctive style and required a fine touch to apply.

@RobertHarvey And now you don't have good eyes, coincidence? Hmm... :P

user41796

@RobertHarvey kind of odd (?) that the 0 | false question has 12 answers.... I don't quite understand why DeadMG's answer is getting so many down votes.

3:04 PM

@RobertHarvey I appreciated your answer until I scrolled down and saw Giorgio and Purdy's answers, they refer to algebras older than boole's and the magmas Purdy defines hold a lot of rationale

In reality, the mathematical underpinnings are probably somewhat shaky; they made the decision in C because it logically made sense at the time (it still does), and now all other sensible languages follow the same convention.

user41796

@RobertHarvey - I'm curious to know why do you think the underpinnings are somewhat shaky. To a degree, it's "just a convention" that allowed other math scientists to converse. But conventions are necessary for communication. Makes me think I'm missing something there in your point.

@RobertHarvey I don't know, I suspect it was pre-C: Assembly coders surely had to do true/false checks and likely used 1/0 for it, and if you go back to early computers this was probably done from the start as such, and the early folks in this stuff likely did have strong enough algebraic foundations to know about galois fields and ring theory etc

true/false checks surely were necessary as early as the first program, and the people who were dealing with computers at that time were mathematicians...

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - agreed. Logic design predates C and is heavily reliant upon boolean logic. I'd go so far as to argue that logic design was one of the basis of computer science

3:28 PM

@GlenH7 yeah, I think all the maths and logics have come to this conclusion because there's always going to be one inevitable truth at the end of it: There is one nothing, but there are countless somethings; 0 denotes the lack of anything, everything else denotes the measurement of something. It will always be logically strange to call truth the lack of something, and false the measurement of many things. as opposed to saying false is the lack of something(truth)

user41796

Agreed. I think Neil G was trying to argue the counterpoint, but ...

3:42 PM

@RobertHarvey Everything OK? For a moment there you sounded like a PHP developer...

3:58 PM

@YannisRizos That's not far off, although I've seen the list of PHP functions, and VB/VBA are probably more coherent by, say, an order of magnitude.

As a new developer, your choices are:
1. Write a big ball of mud in an easy language, learn all the hard lessons and rewrite from scratch, doing things right the second time,
2. Learn a bondage and discipline language that's incredibly verbose, but never lets you make bad choices (yeah, right), or
3. Go through the pain of learning an advanced, expressive language like Haskell that nobody uses in industry, but does things right from the start.

@RobertHarvey Never understood why the list of PHP functions seems so weird to non PHP developers... 90% of that list is extensions, and most of those extensions map to open source libraries. Most of the functions are consistent with the functions of the libraries they are build on.

I think it's the inconsistency of the API and the calling conventions that makes outsiders to PHP a bit crazy. That, and the wealth of PHP tutorials on the internet that teach people how to do it wrong.

I presume you've read Jeff Atwood's blog posts about PHP.

codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html

Yeah, but the core language isn't that inconsistent. You just get a ton of extensions with the language that are more or less adapters to open source libraries. The extension functions are terribly inconsistent with each other, but they map beautifully to the libraries they use. And (more or less) that's the same with every open source language. No point in creating a whole new API for libraries that have been out there for... ever. I'm talking about stuff like curl, db connectors, etc.

4:15 PM

@RobertHarvey This could probably be a canned answer to NUMEROUS bad Q's we constantly get on P.SE...

@RobertHarvey Yes. Can't say I found anything of value in there. He's trying to say "don't rant" in... a rant. Lost me after he pointed to that "A Fractal of Bad Design" blog post. Which I've read up to the point where it quotes PHP's docs from the 2.0 era. That's early 1997.

If you are going to bash one of the largest developer ecosystems, you need to do a much better job than quoting docs from 1997.

It's not like there aren't a thousand things wrong with PHP today.

2

@MichaelT I wasn't 100% certain what this question was about, thanks for taking the time to answer the other possible version of it.

4:40 PM

@JimmyHoffa I break mechanical pencil tips regularly, and in terms of precision drawing/writing using the burnt end of a tree branch wouldn't materially worsen the clarity of my penmanship. If anyone else needs to read my writing, I type it.

2

I have really good gross motor skills, apparently because while my fine motor neurons where doing scrimshaw or something, my gross motor neurons came in and stabbed them.

user55340

@YannisRizos no problem - it's something I've fussed about too.

@MichaelT perl question!

./memcache-top
Can't locate Time/HiRes.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 .) at ./memcache-top line 59.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./memcache-top line 59.

How do I go about getting the missing Time/HiRes.pm ?

just google for it and download it and pop it into place?

@JimmyHoffa I'm pretty sure the answer is CPAN. But that's because CPAN is the answer to every perl question.

user55340

Is it on the machine? If not, install it via -MCPAN

user55340

If it is, but in a non standard spot, use lib "path/to/lib";

4:54 PM

@MichaelT I have no clue and don't know how to install anythin via -MCPAN

user55340

perl -MCPAN -e shell

If it were in a non-standard place how would I find it?

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - why did I just hear a thundering rendition of Gandalf's "You shall not pass!" Hmmmm, seems real close to the "Danger, Will Robinson" ;-)

user55340

find / -name "Time.pm" -print

(that won't thrash the box will it? this is in production)

user55340

4:56 PM

Or rather HiRes.pm

user55340

If its prod, one should install libs in a standard place.

normally I tend to avoid doing full disk searches, but don't know if that will trash in nix the way it does in windows

user55340

You might also try locate instead. It thrashes disks nightly to build a database.

user55340

Still, if its prod, it should be installed in a standard spot. If it isn't in the default search path, install it.

perl -MCPAN -e shell
Can't locate CPAN.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 .).
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

Screw it, I'll just go jigger the pm up, I really don't want to mess with this machine, these are not machines my team manages, we just have a service running on them..

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May '1316

The Whiteboard

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