These are notes that I took a while ago while reading the book.  They have been housed in my OneNote notebook long enough – pushing them to the web where they are more accessible.

1. Eliminate Waste
   1. Seeing Waste
      1. Partially Done Work
      2. Extra Processes
      3. Extra Features
      4. Task Switching
      5. Waiting
      1. Motion
      1. Defects
   1. Value Stream Mapping
1. Amplify Learning
   1. Feedback
   2. Iterations
   3. Synchronization (CI)
   1. Set-based development versus point-based (multiple options - I am available from 9 to 12 versus can you do it at 9)
1. Decide as late as possible (Concurrent Development)
   1. Options Thinking
   1. Last Responsible Moment
   1. Making Decisions
      1. Breadth-First versus Depth-First (Breadth first is delaying commitments)
      2. Intuitive Decision Making
      3. Simple Rules
1. Deliver as fast as possible
   1. Pull System (Kanban)
   1. Queuing Theory
   1. Cost of Delay
1. Empower the team
   1. Self-Determination - allow people to define how to fix things and then make them responsible for implementing the changes (you have to give them the time to do it)
   1. Motivation

3M example - small, self-organizing groups that become passionate about a possibility and are allowed to make it a reality. McKnight one of the early company leaders said such things as "Hire good people, and leave them alone.", "If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.", "Encourage, don't nitpick. Let people run with an idea.", "Give it a try - and quick!". 3M had slack time (15 percent) like Google

1. Leadership

An organization has to value leadership in order to develop leaders

1. Build integrity in
1. See the whole

Systems thinking - looking at organizations as systems and analyzing how they interrelate and perform based on the rules. System dynamics is when this analysis is done through computer simulation. Basic Patterns in systems thinking are: 1. Limits to Growth (theory of constraints) 2. Shifting the burden 3. Suboptimization

1. Measurements
   1. Be very careful about what you measure as it can easily lead to suboptimization. Try to measure one level up rather than one level down
1. Contracts (Trust)

This email went around at work the other day and I got permission to reprint it here.  A key initiative for the Church’s IT department is to engage with the broader community of software developers who would be interested in working on sanctioned projects that the Church needs to complete.  Over the years I have seen and used many applications produced by individuals in their spare time that helps with the work of the Church.  This effort by Church IT (called ICS) is trying to expand the amount of work we can do by engaging with those who are interested and providing them an environment with access to Church infrastructure (authentication, data, apis, etc…) so that we can collaboratively develop software that meets the needs of the Church.

  There is a site I commonly read called Worse Than Failure (WTF – they redefined what WTF meant to them a while back to make the site more palatable to people – perhaps when they started taking ads).  The site publishes programming horror stories and frequently has very funny stories to brighten the day.  A recent article departed from the norm and was more serious in nature.  In it the author made the comment that

Learn Off The Job. Self-improvement is a tenet of every profession, but the place to do that is “off the job,” i.e. not while developing information systems. Instead, learn by creating applications for yourself, your team, or perhaps even some open source project.

  I disagree with that statement.  Our world is filled with professionals that get paid to maintain and enhance their skills.  Doctors, educators, and accountants are expected to take classes and attend seminars to maintain their certifications.  Compensation is often tied to increasing their knowledge.  The same goes for many factory workers.  They are sent to classes to certify them in safety, new equipment, and many other things.  Why would software development and software developers be any different.  Now the author is a single voice and represents just one viewpoint, but I do see this sentiment echoed in the behavior of other organizations though (just not spelled out as clearly). 

  There needs to be a balance in all things.  A software developers main job is not to just learn new technology, but as part of their job they need to be constantly learning and growing.  They should be paid for that time and have their company pay for the training.  Many developers program as a hobby as well and will undoubtedly learn valuable things through their personal activities that can be applied at work.  It is not appropriate though for companies to depend on people using their personal time to advance their skills.

  I know that is a pretty specific title, but after wrestling with this problem for the last couple of days (with a break in there for a very nice weekend!) I figured I would try to put something specific enough for Google to index it and so that some poor soul might benefit from my frustration.

  The WPF designer randomly crashing is not an uncommon thing – Google it and you will see that the solutions are hit and miss and somewhat black magic.  Things like – pin the toolbox when opening a file or create a new XAML file and that randomly fixes the old ones.  My is no less black magic as I have no clear explanation for it – but it worked for me.

  My issue was that XAML files in certain projects would load just fine, but in certain other projects Visual Studio would crash hard.  Finally I removed the Presentation.Core and Presentation.Framework from one of the two projects that were having this problem and added them back.  And Voila! problem fixed for not only that project, but also the other one as well.  I know – random and inexplicable – but thus is the Cider designer in 2008 SP1.  Hopefully this solves your WPF designer woes as well!

  On Tuesday I got a call up from a developer that was dealing with an unusual ASP.NET problem and was looking for some help.  I am not an expert with ASP.NET at all, but we booted up in a Shared View session to look at the problem (that had been stopping him for the better part of a day or two at that point).  He had sub-classed a dropdown list and was trying to use it in his site.  The new dropdown list had a read-only property added so that when set it would render as basically a label instead of as a dropdown list.  He had validated the behavior of the new control in a separate website but couldn’t get it to work in his website and he had borrowed the code along with some other code from another project that had done a similar thing within our company.  I didn’t realize the significance of that fact until later.

  We tried every little hack or nuance that I could think of and it got us nowhere.  The issue was clear the render method that had been overridden for the control was not getting called, but all the other overridden events were (like OnLoad, OnUnLoad, etc….).  Why was that happening that way?  We had another sub-classed control (a textbox) that was working correctly which made things even more confusing.  So as a last straw I figured we would plug into the new feature with Visual Studio that allows you to step into the .NET Framework code and see what is happening.  So we configured our machines using the following instructions/resources – the first link is the most update to date as VS2008 SP1 seems to have added greater support for this feature than which is was launched soon after VS2008 RTM.

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc667410.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configuring-visual-studio-to-debug-net-framework-source-code.aspx

  Then off we went – before long we were in the ASP.NET code watching as it enumerated the control list and called render on each one of the controls belonging to the page.  Surprisingly when we got to the control that was having the problem we saw that instead of calling into our render overload it was calling into a  DropDownListAdapter class that was a sub-class of a WebControlAdapter that was been injected into the process and was controlling the rendering of our control.  Now knowing where to look we found the adapter class as well as some entries into a ServerStateBrowser file registering the adapter to our custom DropDownList class.  This was code given to the developer by the other project.  That code was obviously doing things that the developer wasn’t expecting and didn’t understand (neither did I).  Obviously there is something to learn there about being wary about taking a lot of code that you probably don’t need and aren’t sure all it does.  But all is well that ends well (especially since both he and I wanted this resolved since the New Years holidays started the next day).  We could very well still be hunting without the wonderful new tool in the toolbox to reach into the Framework to see what is happening.  Next time I will break it out sooner rather than grappling in the dark for as long as we did!

  In playing around with the Windows 7 bits I got at PDC I had a small idea that I submitted through the feedback link for Windows 7.  The feedback is more related to how Windows Live works with Windows 7, but I thought I would submit it through that avenue as well as post it here.  The note I sent through the feedback link was

I installed the Windows Live suite of products.  One of the immediate things that came to mind is I would rather have one deskbar icon rather than one for each product.  It would be nice to have one Windows Live icon on the bar and use the little arrow to go select which one to launch - I like having quicker access to them and grouping access under a Windows Live icon would make the experience of the Windows Live Suite feel more unified I think.

Thanks,
Bryan Hinton

I used the unlock method documented here to get access to the incomplete deskbar feature.  I like it - although I would like it more with the Aero Peek feature.  As I used it I realized it would be nice if there was a Windows Live icon on the deskbar that I could click the little arrow on to boot up an instance of Writer or Mail or Messenger etc…  I think it would connect the Windows Live Suite (make it feel more like a suite) and reduce the clutter on the Superbar (that seems to be what people are calling it) by having all the different Windows Live apps pinned there.

  Requirements, Stories, Use Cases, or whatever a team wants to call them form a key part of the execution plan for a development team.  It should tell them what a customer wants.  The artifacts in whatever form they are tend to have varying degrees of detail.  Getting the right amount of detail at the right time is critical to the process of producing successful software.  My thoughts on Requirements definition form around a process with three key elements.

1. Development
2. Prioritization
3. Definition

  Development is first because you have to develop or brainstorm something to start with.  This generally is initially tied to a vision of what the software is supposed to do.  Over time as a product matures this phase often happens through user trials, surveys, feedback, and telemetry from the app that describes its usage and provides insight into where the app needs to evolve. This also happens as analysts evaluate the market the product fits in and based on the market’s evolution or the assumptions about where it will evolve.  In evaluating they determine what features needs to be added in order to allow the software to continue to be competitive in the marketplace.  With internal software this phase is often underappreciated and underutilized.  This is unfortunate because mistakes here whether in internal or commercial products can cause teams to miss the target market tremendously.  A mistake of one degree in a flight plan early in a flight plan causes a much greater deviation than a mistake relatively close to the target.  The Agilist in me openly admits that it is impossible to know everything upfront.  The development effort isn’t about deep detail, but broad strokes of strategy that guide the more detailed planning that occurs later.

  Prioritization comes second as the ideas developed get prioritized.  This act pares down the list of items that need to be defined in detail.  I like Scrum’s backlog analogy but I think the Product and Sprint backlogs might not be enough.  To use a baseball analogy I think you have an At-Bat Backlog, an On-Deck Backlog, and an In the Hole Backlog.  At bat would be your Sprint Backlog representing what is in play now.  On Deck represents perhaps a release backlog or something of that sorts.  These are items that are going to be in play and will need to be defined fairly soon.  In fact during a Sprint it wouldn’t be uncommon for the PM, Business Analyst, etc… to be very active in defining those items near the top of the On-Deck list.  The On-Deck list becomes a focal point in the prioritization process.  The Sprint is work committed to and while some teams might want to have a relative priority there I don’t have a firm opinion on it.  The On-Deck list is key – what will the team work on next is the question that needs to be answered by the prioritization process.  Once we have a prioritization there we can move forward with the third step in the process – Definition

  Definition in this context is providing the detail necessary to move the concept forward in the planning process and ultimately moving it successfully into the implementation phase.  Steps 2 and 3 in the process end up being a rinse and repeat type of deal.  Items will be prioritized onto a list and will need to be defined to some degree.  For example when an item is prioritized onto the On-Deck list it is likely that definition needs to happen in order for some estimates to be provided as to how long the items on the On-Deck list will take to complete (thinking of the On-Deck list as representing the functionality in a release).  As On-Deck items in the list move up – more definition is added so that the customer needs can be clearly identified and the developer can have in hand as much detail as possible when that item pops onto the At Bat Backlog.  It is here that we get to the crux of the matter that caused this post to be written.  I have seen two common behaviors that cause teams to fail relative to requirements definition.  The first is that requirements are defined too early in too much detail and not revisited effectively and as time goes on customer needs shift or change and the requirement as it was written months ago no longer accurately reflects their needs.  The second behavior is too little detail.  A story is defined with a title (which I think the whole story card/post-it thing encourages) and little else and exists like that all the way to the developer.  He has in his mind what the title means, the customer has another thing in mind, and program management has yet another.  Agile methodologies advocate the definition happen through consistent customer interaction and if that happens that can work.  All to often in practice it doesn’t work that way.

The takeaway is don’t under value the requirements process it is perhaps the most difficult thing to get right in the whole software process.  Too much detail, too soon or too little detail, too late – what is too soon and what is too late and how much is too much or little – not easy questions – the process above has worked well for me in addressing the challenges with getting requirements right.

I am sitting in LAX waiting for my flight home and just finished a video done by Channel 9 with Ori Amiga who is one of the stars of the Live Mesh Development team.  He was showing a custom gadget that he built to integrate with his car that included integration with Live Mesh so that he had a Meshified car.  It was pretty cool so I thought I would link to it – With everybody excited about the release of the Mesh client for Windows Mobile this is A different kind of Mobile Mesh.

I watch a lot of podcasts and videocasts.  So much so that I often wish I could watch them in a “faster” mode.  Which I can do with podcasts that are in WMV format.  When they play in Windows Media Player you can right click on the play button and select “fast” playback.  It isn’t double time, but it certainly is sped up.  I listen to all I can with that setting – it helps me get through them faster while still being perfectly understandable etc…  Not all WMV support this so I suspect it may be an encoding feature, but most that I run into do (all the Channel 9 for example - .NET Rocks – etc…).  Windows Media Player on my Samsung i730 can’t do it unfortunately.  All in all it is a nice feature to help me consume information a little quicker than I would otherwise be able to (I get so used to it that it gets to be painful to listen to someone in “normal” speed).

Azure is/was the product formerly known as Red Dog.  It is more than just a Cloud OS.  It is a hosting platform as well (ala Amazon EC2) with components that give it S3 and Simple DB capability.  The Simple DB capability comes from SQL Server Data Services which has been renamed SQL Services or SQL Server Services.  The name change comes from the added capability to support Reporting Services and Analysis Services.  So the Data story of Azure looks to be much deeper than Simple DB as MS fills it out.

There is a rich service infrastructure built on top of it including Live Services and .NET Services (there are others).  The .NET Services provides the ability to make your app Cloud-aware as well as integrate with your existing in house infrastructure.  It is on that point that Azure really starts to set itself apart. 

I will ignore the fact that MS historically has done a better job of making things easier than any other vendor (you are of course welcome to disagree).  Because on that point alone I can see the average developer taking advantage of Cloud Computing more often now that it is almost a Visual Studio click away.  The existing infrastructure investment is an fascinating twist on the Cloud Computing story that has been spun by everyone to date.  Google App Engine says come to me and I will host you – you can use Amazon a little more piecemeal (use just S3, etc…), but the ability to authenticate a Cloud app against your existing identity infrastructure (and taking that and extrapolating that out to the other components of an app) is a huge innovation and makes Cloud Computing much more palatable especially for the enterprise.

Few enterprises were ever going to move all their data or capabilities out to the cloud – too many info security, reliability, and availability concerns.  So the I will host everything models that exist today only really work for small business and startup areas and could (the market is so new we don’t know how things will truly evolve) cause problems as you grow and want to move stuff in house.  Azure really changes that – it still has a very compelling story for the small business/startup, but with the integration with existing infrastructure it starts to work for enterprises as well. 

An example of that is LDS General Conference.  Twice a year the LDS Church hosts this conference and does quite a bit of online streaming (both video and audio).  This has fairly significant infrastructure implications.  What do we do – do we setup our infrastructure to scale to the peak demand (which we really could never do) or something close?  The cost associated with that is just not worth it for the two times a year that the infrastructure is needed.  Enter dynamic resource allocation from the cloud.  Now we deploy our app to the cloud with hooks into our identity and storage infrastructure (or even push some of the storage to the cloud).  Now we can dynamically add resources leveraging our existing app.  Another area that was mentioned by a co-worker is the community development initiative that the Church is starting – hosting in the cloud with secure access to internal services provides some interesting food for thought.

I have registered for the Azure CTP and am looking forward to writing some real code with it to try out some of the claims and see where they deliver and where there is more vapor than substance.

I will try and add posts here as I can – but Twitter is much better for sharing the bite-sized updates that are captured as part of sessions.  You can catch my Twitters at http://twitter.com/HintonBR.  A summary post will be coming sometime soon to capture my notes from the VS2010 session I went to plus the Dublin session I am in as well as others depending on when I get it done.

Here are the pictures I took of my time hands-on with Surface

Snowboard Design app

App list that you can flick through

Photo app grouping photos by categories

Virtual Earth app – I loved it – no 3D mode yet – that would be even better – but cool to use Multi-Touch movement to navigate the map

Keynote stage

Over the last few months it has seemed like every interesting discussion about MS products has some how involved a “just wait until PDC” statement.  Thankfully PDC is finally here.  Tomorrow Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia kick it off with a keynote starting at 8:30 am PT.  On Tuesday there are two keynotes one from 8:30-10:30 with Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, and David Treadwell and then another one from 11:00-12:30 with Don Box and Chris Anderson.  The second one is for sure about Oslo and demoing that.  If I had to guess the first one on Tuesday will involve a Live Mesh show and tell – I wonder what Monday will bring with Muglia and Ozzie – VS2010 stuff to show??

The “goods” or the “bits” won’t be given to attendees until Tuesday – undoubtably because they don’t want the surprises slated for the keynotes to slip out beforehand.  I will be busy twittering for sure and probably a little live blogging as well.  Can’t wait to get started tomorrow. 

I am staying up in Hollywood as all the Conference hotels were sold out by the time I registered (or at least the ones that where semi-reasonable were sold out).  So I am taking the Metro into the Convention Center every morning.  Not too bad actually – I actually enjoyed the experience today – we’ll see if I get tired of it as the week wears on.  The only bummer is no cell reception on the metro – is it like that in New York and other places (Washington D.C.) – if so that is lame – and if not then why hasn’t LA figured out how to make it work yet?

Americans are constantly faced by a myriad of choices.  When we go out to eat we have to pick between Italian, American, Chinese, Greek, Thai, Mexican, Indian, etc….  Once you have picked a type then you have to choose between Applebees, Chili’s, Outback, etc…  The same thing happens on trips to the grocery store, picking a dentist, or what movie to go to.  Many times we sit and spin on making a choice about something that likely doesn’t truly matter that much.

In the technology world this problem continually manifests itself.  Most techies have probably seen projects where the project deadline was hit before all the architectural choices were made because too much time was spent weighing the pros and cons of the variety of choices available.  That isn’t to say that decisions shouldn’t be weighed and measured, but that this activity should be time-boxed and at the end of the time the decision be made based on the data available.  One common example I use as evidence for this is citing the variety of technologies used by the big sites out on the Web.  Facebook uses PHP, MySpace and Microsoft use ASP.NET, Google uses Java (I believe) as do many, many others.  The same argument could be made about what server OS to use, what database to use, and so on.  The fact of the matter is with good people most technologies can be made to meet the need.  The argument that many people will try to cite is the productive improvements that technology X will bring.  The problem with that argument is that productivity is very difficult to measure (many smart people have tried and I have yet seen anyone to trumpet a truly successful way to measure) and so that argument is easy to make, but very, very difficult to prove correct (and often not worth the cost of doing so).

The danger comes when the new technology of the day or moment causes continual churn in an organization.  The seduction of always looking for best of breed (assuming for a moment that there was someway to truly determine best of breed) is that you are then set up to become a technology merry-go-round.  Invest in your technology selections, build expertise, and go deliver value.  Choose to get off the merry-go-round and make a commit.  Change of course will come over time, but when it does it should be obvious and done for obvious reasons.  In most cases change should be made because it will be a game changer either in dollars saved or dollars earned or provide obvious (emphasis on obvious) productivity gains.

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

Hotmail was updated this week as part of the Wave 3 rollout.  When the Live Calendar Wave 3 update rolled a couple of weeks ago we got a good idea of what the UI for the new Hotmail would look like.  I like the cleaner look a lot.  In my previous post about the Client pieces of Wave 3 I commented that the UI change on the client didn’t do much for me.  That is not the case with the UI changes for Hotmail and Calendar, I like the changes a lot.  The performance as promised by the team seems great. 

The search feature worked great – sweeping quickly through my mail collection to find matching items.  I couldn’t find a way to make it only search a specific folder which I like as an option to constrain search results from time to time. 

One glitch to note is that with IE8 when trying to switch to Calendar it opens a new window.  With FF3 the Calendar view shows up in the same window that Hotmail was showing in as I would prefer and expect.  Not sure if that is a problem with how IE8 is working for me specifically or if that is the anticipated behavior for IE8 – I hope not!

Contacts

I have a couple of gripes about contacts to air, but they really stem from the fact that I love what they have done to the Contacts view.  There has been some great work done there.  Not all the integration is available to us at this point I am assuming because in blog postings about the upgrade from the Hotmail team I could see People showing up on their Wave 3 header and that doesn’t show up on mine (although People does show up on the Contacts page as the “title” for that page.  You have a better breakdown of all your contacts versus who is a Messenger contact.  You get to see their profile pictures and when you click on it you can send them a Spaces message, IM them, email them, or view their contact information.  When I try to IM them Live Messenger comes up from what has been written I would expect a Web version of Messenger would be displayed for you to chat with the contact if Live Messenger wasn’t installed on the system.

The Contact Info page is awesome in my opinion.  I love the Recent email listing sitting at the bottom.  The ability to quickly fire off an email to them embedded inline in the Contact page works really well for me (from a UI layout perspective that is – I never doubted that it would actually send an email to the person).  I went to my Gmail account to compare the UIs quickly.  Visually Hotmail was much cleaner to me – looks more polished as well.  All in all a much better UI look than Gmail IMO.  Back to the Contact page I LOVE that I can see a contacts permissions across Windows Live properties.  I can tell what Calendar permissions they have, what Skydrive folders they have access to (can wait for Skydrive and Live Mesh to have some integration story), and Profile information of mine they have access to as well as the same information about what I have access to of theirs.  It surprises me that I can’t edit those permissions from that screen – that enhancement would be Request #1.  Request #2 is that I would like to be able to sort my contact list in other ways than by name.  The main one that come to mind is by Status (Available, Offline, etc…).  There seems to be no effective way to see easily who is Online for example without selecting the Messenger Contacts option (since that is above the Category section it would seem to be considered something different than a Category) and then scanning the list which isn’t easy or effective.  Once again well done on the Contacts interface I love it.

Calendar

The Calendar Wave 3 upgrade rolled out a couple of weeks ago or so.  I talked briefly about it or referred to it is a more appropriate description in my previous post on the Wave 3 Clients.  I love the interface.  Clean and focused.  I love that To-Dos have made their appearance and with them being connected to a Calendar that concept of a shared task list etc… is really nice and MS has definitely one upped Google in this space.  With the subscription to ICS files worked out etc… my wife and I have started using this heavily.  We sync them to Outlook and update them in Outlook using Outlook Connector and that works wonderfully as well.  Calendar has made huge strides and now stands as a worthy competitor to Google Calendar.  That said I do have a few requests of course!

First – a way to search through your calendar – neither the online edition or the Live Mail Client exposed a way to search for future appointments.  Google Calendar has this and it is very handy – definitely a must have.  Second is To-Dos syncing down to the various Clients (Outlook or Live Mail).  I was disappointed that Live Mail didn’t have this with Wave 3.  I realize that there is a level of difficulty in matching Client capabilities with Server capabilities, but if the Clients are always going lag the Servers in functionality that is going to be a big disappointment.  Especially if new releases have the long lead times that Wave 3 has had.  Lastly, Recurring To-Dos!  I was surprised since we can add recurring events that recurring tasks weren’t available.  I use them heavily with Outlook and could never replace my To-Do tools without having recurring tasks.  You would also have to have that if you wanted to support a sync scenario with Windows Mobile.  I suppose that is truly my last request.  Windows Live for mobile has worked great for my email and contacts.  Obviously the last two pieces are Tasks and Calendar items.  Calendar is probably to the point where it may be possible to add that syncing capability.  Tasks/To-do synchronization with Windows Mobile will have to wait until we get recurring tasks.  I am not sure why I see a banner add on my Calendar.  I have a Hotmail Plus subscription and so I don’t see it on the Hotmail screen or on my Spaces site, but do see it on Calendar – that would seem to be a bug as I would expect it not to be there – am I wrong on that?

Additional requests aside I am very pleased with the server upgrades to Windows Live (much more so than the Client upgrades frankly).  I am very excited and hopefully to see similar good things with the upgrades to Spaces, Photos, etc… 

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)