Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

I mean it is a ️️hot-take but I don't regard scrum as any sort of subset of agile. Rather scrum emerged when big companies wanted to basically do what they were already doing, but call it agile. A framework emerged to teach these companies a “safe word” rendition of agile, don't worry it's only agile until you say “banana.”

You cannot appoint somebody to the strange title of “scrum master” (which I guess makes the rest of us scrum slaves?) to lead a process of “daily scrum” where we look together at a kanban board and make sure that we are “sprinting” and then turn around to insist that you value “individuals and interactions over processes and tools,” which is ¼ of the Manifesto. You have voted with your intention and your vote was to value your process and tools over trusting the individual developers and letting them have direct interactions with your customers.

Even the word “sprint.” I used to play Ultimate in one of the teams in the Dutch national league, it is a sprinting sport. The word “sprint” means exhaustion. It means stopping. If you jog around in Ultimate you lose, you have to rest, sprint, rest, sprint. If your model is “always sprinting” then do not tell me that you value “individuals and interactions.” And if you do value the latter please either (a) remove the metaphor “sprint” from your process or (b) add “rest weeks” after each sprint to “clean up” the mess you made! Anything else is lying to yourself.

The phenomenon of estimating “story points” is even worse, no? It is intrinsically about processes and tools and the idea of a developer having a phone call or face-to-face with the client directly to see if this feature request is actually accurate, deciding that it is not, and trashing it to open a different request... it's not just “do we claim those juicy story points when this happens?” but also “was part of your measure of ‘complexity’ the complexity of determining that the Ask did not meet the Need?” ...And so the fundamental idea of estimating a “todo” does not fit well with agile, whereas you can estimate “in progs” and “done” just fine.

And before you say “no by the time we estimate we should already know that we want the feature, devs should never have to talk to clients,” please be aware that this response explicitly abdicates another ½ of the Agile manifesto, “customer collaboration over contract negotiation” and “responding to change over following a plan.” The whole point of the Agile manifesto is that your kanban board is stale. Not because it's a kanban board, but because it is written down. Like one of the four principles (the last ¼ not covered in the above ¾) is explicitly anti-literary.

This is sort of “no true Scotsman” of me but my read is that the moment Agile was systematized, it died a little on the inside. It was a “screw your systems!” reaction that then got steamrollered by the real world, where “bullshit jobs” and middle management reign even though they bespeak a bureaucratic feudalism rather than a lean-and-mean capitalism.

XEONs use a 100MHz referenced called "BCLK" and scale this up to the different frequencies it needs internally (core, dram, pci, etc.). Typically this info is found in the datasheet, but only the DC parameters (voltage min/max) etc were found in the first datasheet I found. Timing is so important that often processor manufacturers will have an apnote discussing it in detail, often with suggested parts and circuit layouts.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/proces...

That's precisely why I put Here's hoping for a flood of further improvements.

This wasn't intended to be read as sarcastic. It really is a great development. It's still amusing that the number is so tiny.

Up until around 1990 or so 55MPH was the maximum speed limit; this was originally to conserve fuel. Up until 1995 55MPH was the maximum except for roads very far from population centers.

Even after 1995, many states were very slow to raise the speed limit (I lived near the Maryland/Virginia boarder and remember Maryland did well before Virginia), and when they did raise the speed limit it was by small amounts.

Today, you can drive from Los Angeles to New York and not hit any significant stretches of freeway with speedlimits under 65, and west of the Mississipi river, you will spend most of it at 70mph or higher.

On top of that, the actual speed that will get you pulled over can be much higher (In CA you are very unlikely to get pulled over for single-digit MPH speeding on a freeway, making a 65 speed limit a de-facto 74; in the northeast US it's not uncommon to get pulled over for going just 5MPH over the posted limit).

So the vision statement is on agilemanifesto.org and to a lesser extent the "principles behind the agile manifesto" on the same page.

What I am challenging in the above is that there is a "lip service" given rather than a deep assimilation. So when the principles say "business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project" they mean that there should be an open-door policy, “hey Amanda I am working on the Estimating-Work-in-Process application and I was wondering what you do with ____” “Oh, that is not supposed to be possible,” type of interactions. The ‘lip service’ is “your boss will answer any questions at daily stand-up.”

Because these interactions are routine, the idea of needing constant scheduling and progress updates ideally ‘should be’ a lesser issue. People want progress updates to make sure that you are not spending all your time on Reddit, they will be able to see that more readily if they see you working.

The core of agile is anti-establishment thinking. One of the principles is “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” Elsewhere Don Wells elaborates on it, “Don't panic. With professional software engineers on our project we can relax knowing that the team will do what is needed to get the job done. Any activity needed with any combination of people will just get done without any further scheduling or ceremony. This is the spirit and benefit of a self organizing team.”

And so a fundamental idea of agile, perversely enough, is that you’re not going to have one size fits all, there is no one ‘proper implementation.’ There is just the way that you made it work. If you have different personalities it’s gonna express differently.

I am not being facetious here, though I realize it sounds kind of like it! Adam Savage had a great video a little while back about something unrelated—weathering prop money—where he took live questions from the audience, and one question was about “the best way” to make that money look bloody, and he answered in true artisan style:

> So, your question though, “what is the best way”... The answer is, there is no, there is no best way! There is the way you figure out how to do it. Yeah! That’s really the thing. It may be that you’ve gotta, like, take a brush and kinda work at a whole bunch of different bills, and then take the stack and then effect the stack, right?, I think that’s like a multi-stage process, and then you should do some tests with different paints and see, like, under the lighting conditions these will be seen—I don’t know if it’s for a theater or a film—does it communicate? Does it tell you that it’s bloody, dirty money? That’s the question to be asking, you gotta hold it up, look at it, [mimes looking at it and pausing and thinking] “does that sell to me?”—and ask other people, “does this sell?”... and like most of the time they’re gonna go, “no,” and you’re gonna keep on going. But it’s trial and error.

And like the fundamental story about agile is that agile is trial and error, it is about trying to work together as a team and being like “did that work” and the answer is usually “no, Leah is totally burned out after she had to work 60+ hours of straight development that one week,” or “Alvin is having trouble with nobody inviting him in, he wants to start contributing to this project and everybody is like ‘nah man we got it’ and he is being excluded” and you’re gonna have to reshape. There is a necessary aspect of vulnerability in other words in any proper development strategy whether top-down design-first waterfall or agile or something else.

There is no one agile software development process. There is a set of agile software development values. It is a values-driven approach, “how are we living up to our self-commitments today?” rather than “did I follow the appropriate procedure?” And thus it is quite anarchist at its fundamental core. This is probably why I am ragging on scrum in the end, scrum came in and said “there is a non-anarchist way to do agile” and I am sitting here like “uh, do you know what you just said?”

With that said, all the usual caveats, I understand that you want to be able to state what all is likely to be in an upcoming release and what all isn’t and this requires creating estimates and so forth. But perhaps the most damning thing is when estimates turn into deadlines. When an estimate becomes a deadline it gets padded and re-padded, then the urgency of the feature gets de-emphasized because you have such an abundance of time to do it in, so you spend a bunch of time up-front completing your “design doc” about what you are about to build and then someone asks to weigh in and “approve it” and you have reinvented waterfall.