Lessons from Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”

I’ve always kept a copy of Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” within reach, for those days when it seems necessary to remind myself of Jonathan’s story – of struggle, of questions and learning, of constantly challenging himself, and of keeping true to his curiosities. I’ve re-read it a number of times in the past several years (it’s a short book, digestible in a few hours), and it has never failed to uplift my spirits. It always feels like talking to a great friend that I’ve never seen for an extended period of time.

Here are some favorite lines from the book:

• Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world though what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.
• Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.
• “You can go to any place and to any time that you wish to go,” the Elder said. “I’ve gone everywhere and everywhere I can think of.” He looked across the sea. “It’s strange. The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly. Remember, Jonathan, heaven isn’t a place or a time, because place and time are so very meaningless.”
• “To fly as fast as he thought, to anywhere that is,” he said, “you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”
• “Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.”
• “Look at Fletcher! Lowell! Charles-Roland! Judy Lee! Are they also special and gifted and divine? No more than you are, no more than I am. The only difference, the very only one, is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it.”
• “Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be hard?”
• “Oh, Fletch, you don’t love that! You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.”
• We’re free to go where we wish and to be what we are.

Lessons from Richard Bach’s “Life with my Guardian Angel”

The new year is always a great time to remember to talk to our guardian angel, to look at what beliefs do we have come to accept, and to remind ourselves of which sort of heaven do we really want to go to. 🙂 Happy New Year!

Some favorite lines from the book:

• “You’ll never learn it all,” he said. “Nobody has learned everything about flying and they never will. But if you practice, you can learn enough to be a good pilot, even if you don’t know everything.”
• Every context, every subtext means the same: heaven will be joy when we reach that place of mind, whether or not we reach its borders alive, or not-alive.
• All the books I’ve read about death and dying, filled with stories and accounts and proofs that we go on after this lifetime, how can my heaven be exactly the same place that it is for everyone who’s died in the last thousand years or so? Is there one place in paradise where some folks enjoy cigars, a different heaven where others travel instantly to other places, others have houses, others don’t need shelter from winds or rains, which don’t exist in their heaven? Does heaven require space and time? Can heaven be kind of a dream, where we imagine space and time, but know that space-time doesn’t exist? How many heavens can there be? Two? Twenty? A million heavens, an indefinite number of heavens? Not just for mortals, but for every expression of life and love who recovers from the belief of dying? Do mortals share the same heaven with animals, with bees? There must be a heaven for dogs and cats who love people, and different heavens for dogs, cats, and other animals who prefer to continue without any humans at all. There must be a heaven for chipmunks and a separate heaven for crocodiles, and different ones for recently arrived spirits who’ve spent a lifetime thinking that no such place exists. There must be separate heavens to take care of the people who believe the various religions. Then different heavens for the different ways of thinking. Separate heavens.
• Don’t you know? What you call ‘death’ is your chance to make different choices, make different stories about life and love.
• What will your mortal’s life be like without tests, without adventure, without risk? Does the word ‘graveyard’ come to mind?
• Your mission in every one of your lifetimes is to create love, to express love, to treasure love, to paint love in the biggest letters in every color of every language you will ever learn!
• The world of space, time, and appearances can be wondrous beautiful. Have care, though, and don’t let your mortal mistake them for real.
• You can work right now, today, as a mortal, to refine your beliefs, to make your heaven happier than the squirrelly heaven you’ve already built with your not-much-thought-about belief system. You can do this now.
• We’re connected by the bonds of love that we’ve built. With anyone. With our parents, with our friends, with our pets, with fictional characters from books or motion pictures, with characters in our own imagination!

Notes from Jonathan Bach’s “Session-Based Test Management”

Tracking exploratory testing work is difficult for test managers. We don’t want to micro-manage testers, we want them to explore to their hearts content when they test, but we won’t know how much progress there is if we don’t track the work. We also won’t know what sort of problems testers encounter during testing, unless they have the nerve to tell us immediately. Jonathan Bach’s “Session-Based Test Management” article has one suggestion: use sessions, uninterrupted blocks of reviewable and chartered test effort.

Here are a few favorite notes from the article:

• Unlike traditional scripted testing, exploratory testing is an ad hoc process. Everything we do is optimized to find bugs fast, so we continually adjust our plans to re-focus on the most promising risk areas; we follow hunches; we minimize the time spent on documentation. That leaves us with some problems. For one thing, keeping track of each tester’s progress can be like herding snakes into a burlap bag.
• The first thing we realized in our effort to reinvent exploratory test management was that testers do a lot of things during the day that aren’t testing. If we wanted to track testing, we needed a way to distinguish testing from everything else. Thus, “sessions” were born. In our practice of exploratory testing, a session, not a test case or bug report, is the basic testing work unit . What we call a session is an uninterrupted block of reviewable, chartered test effort. By “chartered,” we mean that each session is associated with a mission—what we are testing or what problems we are looking for. By “uninterrupted,” we mean no significant interruptions, no email, meetings, chatting or telephone calls. By “reviewable,” we mean a report, called a session sheet, is produced that can be examined by a third-party, such as the test manager, that provides information about what happened.
• From a distance, exploratory testing can look like one big amorphous task. But it’s actually an aggregate of sub-tasks that appear and disappear like bubbles in a Jacuzzi. We’d like to know what tasks happen during a test session, but we don’t want the reporting to be too much of a burden. Collecting data about testing takes energy away from doing testing.
• We separate test sessions into three kinds of tasks: test design and execution, bug investigation and reporting, and session setup. We call these the “TBS” metrics. We then ask the testers to estimate the relative proportion of time they spent on each kind of task. Test design and execution means scanning the product and looking for problems. Bug investigation and reporting is what happens once the tester stumbles into behavior that looks like it might be a problem. Session setup is anything else testers do that makes the first two tasks possible, including tasks such as configuring equipment, locating materials, reading manuals, or writing a session report
• We also ask testers to report the portion of their time they spend “on charter” versus “on opportunity”. Opportunity testing is any testing that doesn’t fit the charter of the session. Since we’re in doing exploratory testing, we remind and encourage testers that it’s okay to divert from their charter if they stumble into an off-charter problem that looks important.
• Although these metrics can provide better visibility and insight about what we’re doing in our test process, it’s important to realize that the session-based testing process and associated metrics could easily be distorted by a confused or biased test manager. A silver-tongued tester could bias the sheets and manipulate the debriefing in such a way as to fool the test manager about the work being done. Even if everyone is completely sober and honest, the numbers may be distorted by confusion over the reporting protocol, or the fact that some testers may be far more productive than other testers. Effective use of the session sheets and metrics requires continual awareness about the potential for these problems.
• One colleague of mine, upon hearing me talk about this approach, expressed the concern that senior testers would balk at all the paperwork associated with the session sheets. All that structure, she felt, would just get in the way of what senior testers already know how to do. Although my first instinct was to argue with her, on second thought, she was giving me an important reality check. This approach does impose a structure that is not strictly necessary in order to achieve the mission of good testing. Segmenting complex and interwoven test tasks into distinct little sessions is not always easy or natural. Session-based test management is simply one way to bring more accountability to exploratory testing, for those situations where accountability is especially important.

Takeaways from Timothy Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Body”

This year, I decided I was going to get better at exercising. To do that, I thought about reading a few books to give myself an idea on how to go about it. One such book was Timothy Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Body“, which is a goldmine of content. In it are suggested exercises that gets the job done, walkthroughs, and some science of how things work. But the book is so much more than just a guide on physical exercises. There’s ideas on self-experimentation, adherence, being proactively skeptical, harajuku moments, a slow-carb diet, and more.

Here are some favorite takeaways:

• Science starts with educated (read: wild-ass) guesses. Then it’s all trial and error. Sometimes you predict correctly from the outset. More often, you make mistakes and stumble across unexpected findings, which lead to new questions. If you want to sit on the sidelines and play full-time skeptic, suspending actions until a scientific consensus is reached, that’s your choice. But don’t use skepticism as a thinly veiled excuse for inaction or remaining in your comfort zone. Be skeptical, but for the right reason: because you’re looking for the most promising option to test in real life. Be proactively skeptical, not defensively skeptical.
• We break commitments to ourselves with embarrassing regularity. How can someone trying to lose weight binge on an entire pint of ice cream before bed? How can even the most disciplined of executives fail to make 30 minutes of time per week for exercise? How can someone whose marriage depends on quitting smoking pick up a cigarette? Simple: logic fails.
• Take adherence seriously: will you actually stick with this change until you hit your goal? If not, find another method, even if it’s less effective and less efficient. The decent method that you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.
• Self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know. When you study your own problem (e.g. acne), you care more about finding a solution than others are likely to care.
• If results are fast and measurable, self-discipline isn’t needed.
• If you want to be more confident or effective, rather than relying on easily-defeated positive thinking and mental gymnastics, learn to run faster, lift more than your peers, or lose those last ten pounds. It’s measurable, it’s clear, you can’t lie to yourself. It therefore works. The Cartesian separation of mind and body is false. They’re reciprocal. Start with the precision of changing physical reality and a domino effect will often take care of the internal.
• Job not going well? Company having issues? Some idiot making life difficult? If you add ten laps to your swimming, or if you cut five seconds off your best mile time, it can still be a great week. Controlling your body puts you in life’s driver’s seat.
• Recreation is for fun. Exercise is for producing changes. Don’t confuse the two.
• People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are terrible at it. There are two reasons:
  • Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have.
  • There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers.
• For a long time, I’ve known that the key to getting started down the path of being remarkable in anything is to simply act with the intention of being remarkable. If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply go with the flow and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for. That’s been my secret. Stop wishing and start doing.

Web Accessibility Visualization Tool: tota11y

Testing web sites and apps come in many forms. Testers try their best to test everything, but obviously there’s only so much they can do within a schedule. Some forms of testing are more prioritized than others, and that’s not inherently bad; for a solo tester on a team, one usually tests in a way that covers more bases at the beginning.

Web accessibility testing is one of those forms of testing that often takes a backseat, sometimes even forgotten. Web accessibility helps people with disabilities get better surfing experience. Although websites are typically not built with such functionality in mind, it matters.

And tota11y is a tool from Khan Academy we can leverage for testing accessibility. It is available as an easy-to-use bookmarklet. For whatever page we want to test, we just need to go there and click the bookmarklet, after which the tool will appear on the bottom left corner of the page. Clicking the tool reveals options and using each helps us spot common accessibility violations.

Here are some screenshots of using it on a page I test at work, checking headings, contrast, and link text:

Spotted: Nonconsecutive heading level use

Multiple insufficient contrast ratio violations

And unclear link texts

Looks like there’s room for improvement, although these violations are not necessarily errors.

Lessons from Mark Manson’s “Models: Attract Women Through Honesty”

I picked up Mark Manson’s “Models: Attract Women Through Honesty” because I was intrigued by the title and because I am at a time in my life where I’d like to meet more interesting women. It did not disappoint. The book was insightful, and, like other compelling reads, it pushes me to look hard at myself and how I’ve been living my life, this time particularly on the subject of women. The concepts of neediness and vulnerability are, for me, the main takeaways.

Here are just a few of the noteworthy lines from the book:

• In our post-industrial, post-feminist world, we lack a clear model of what an attractive man is. Centuries ago, a man’s role and duty was power and protection. Decades ago, it was to provide. But now? We’re not quite sure. We are either the first or second generation of men to grow up without a clear definition of our social roles, and without a model of what it is to be strong and attractive men.
• Seduction is an interplay of emotions. Your movement or lack of movement reflects and alters emotions, not the words. Words are the side-effect. Sex is the side-effect. The game is emotions, emotions through movement.
• In surveys among literally tens of thousands of women, across all cultures, ethnicities, age groups, and socio-economic standing, and even time periods, there’s one universal quality in men that they all find desirable: social status and access to resources. The amount in which they desire it varies from culture to culture and from age group to age group, but the desire for it is universal.
• Social status is determined by how you behave around other people, how other people behave around you, and how you treat yourself.
• Female arousal is somewhat narcissistic in nature. Women are turned on by being wanted, by being desired. The more physical assertiveness you pursue a woman with, the more aroused she becomes — sometimes even if she wasn’t interested in you to begin with.
• How attractive a man is is inversely proportional to how emotionally needy he is. The more emotionally needy he is in his life, the less attractive he is and vice-versa. Neediness is defined by being more highly invested in other people’s perceptions of you than your perception of yourself.
• All people eventually return to their baseline levels of investment. And until one is able to permanently alter his baseline level of identity investment in themselves, they will continue to attract the same types of women, and end up in the same failed relationships. Permanent change to one’s investment and neediness in their relationships with women is hard and a process that encompasses all facets of one’s life. But it’s a worthwhile journey. As a man, it may be the most worthwhile journey. And the key to it is probably something you wouldn’t expect. In fact, it’s something that most men turn their nose up to when they hear it. It’s vulnerability.
• Making yourself vulnerable doesn’t just mean being willing to share your fears or insecurities. It can mean putting yourself in a position where you can be rejected, saying a joke that may not be funny, asserting an opinion that may offend others, joining a table of people you don’t know, telling a woman that you like her and want to date her. All of these things require you to stick your neck out on the line emotionally in some way. You’re making yourself vulnerable when you do them. In this way, vulnerability represents a form of power, a deep and subtle form of power. A man who’s able to make himself vulnerable is saying to the world, “I don’t care what you think of me; this is who I am, and I refuse to be anyone else.” He’s saying he’s not needy and that he’s high status.
• Show your rough edges. Stop trying to be perfect. Expose yourself and share yourself without inhibition. Take the rejections and lumps and move on because you’re a bigger and stronger man. And when you find a woman who loves who you are (and you will), revel in her affection.
• The biggest criticism of showing interest to a woman that you want to be with is that it immediately shows you as highly invested in her responses. When you say, “You’re cute and I wanted to meet you,” that translates roughly to, “Hi, I want to be with you and am officially invested in the prospect of it happening.” What they miss though is the sub-communication going on underneath what’s actually being said. The sub-communication is, “I’m totally OK with the idea of you rejecting me, otherwise I would not be approaching you in this manner.”
• True honesty is only possible when it is unconditional. The truth is only the truth when it is given as a gift — when nothing is expected in return. When I tell a girl that she is beautiful, I say it not expecting anything in return. Whether she rejects me or falls in love with me isn’t important in that moment. What’s important is that I’m expressing my feelings to her. I will give compliments only when I am honestly inspired to give them, and usually after already meeting a woman and displaying to her that I’m willing to disagree with her, willing to be rejected by her and willing to walk away from her if it ever comes to that.

Five People and Their Thoughts (Part 8)

Sharing a new batch of engaging videos from people I follow, which I hope you’ll come to like as I do:

• Workarounds (by Alan Richardson, about workarounds, how you can use them in testing, custom-using tools, moving boilerplate to the appendix, bypassing processes that gets in the way, understanding risks and value, technical skills, and taking control of your career)
• 100% Coverage is Too High for Apps! (by Kent Dodds, on code coverage, what it tells you, as well as what it does not tell you)
• Open Water Swimming (by Timothy Ferriss, about fears, habits, total immersion swimming, Terry Laughlin, compressing months of conventional training into just a few days, and the power of micro-successes)
• How To Stop Hating Your Tests (by Justin Searls, representing Test Double, on doing only three things for tests, avoiding conditionals, consistency, apparent test purpose, redundant test coverage, optimizing feedback loops, false negatives, and building better workflows)
• Meaning of Life (by Derek Sivers, about a classic unsolvable problem, using time wisely, making good choices, making memories, the growth mindset, inherent meaning, and a blank slate)

Notes from Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”

Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” has been around a while but I’ve never read it before until now. It’s a short book that tells the adventure of a young Santiago in pursuit of his treasure under the pyramids of Egypt, and tries to inspire readers to do the same, to go in pursuit of their own dreams. It’s a story that has remained popular in bookstores all these years and now I understand why. Personally, however, I’ve found it to be a bit underwhelming, perhaps because the writing wasn’t to my taste.

Nevertheless, here are some interesting lines from the book:

• That was what made traveling appeal to him – he always made new friends, and he didn’t need to spend all of his time with them. When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person’s life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
• “People learn, early in their lives, what is their reason for being,” said the old man, with a certain bitterness. “Maybe that’s why they give up on it so early, too.”
• The sheep had taught him something even more important; that there was a language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at that shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.
• I know why I want to get back to my flock, he thought. I understand sheep; they’re no longer a problem, and they can be good friends. On the other hand, I don’t know if the desert can be a friend, and it’s in the desert that I have to search for my treasure.
• He still had some doubts about the decision he had made. But he was able to understand one thing; making a decision was only the beginning of things.
• “I’m alive,” he said to the boy, as they ate a bunch of dates one night, with no fires and no moon. “When I’m eating, that’s all I think about. If I’m on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight, it will be just as good a day to die as any other.”
• Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.
• “Everyone has his or her own way of learning things,” he said to himself. “His way isn’t the same way as mine, nor mine as his. But we’re both in search of our Personal Legends, and I respect him for that.”

 

 

Takeaways from Derek Sivers’s “Anything You Want”

Derek Sivers, in his book titled “Anything You Want“, shares tales and lessons he’s learned when he started, built, and sold CD Baby, a global music distribution platform, for $22M (which will return to musicians after he dies). He’s an entrepreneur, but a divergent kind of entrepreneur from the ones I’m accustomed to, and I’ve grown fond of his philosophies in both business and in life. Perhaps it’s because of Seth Godin‘s influence, perhaps it’s because he’s a very slow thinker, perhaps it’s because the things he says just sounds about right.

Some favorite lines from the book:

• Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy. Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams. You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.
• The key point is that I wasn’t trying to make a big business. I was just daydreaming about how one little thing would look in a perfect world. When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia. When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it’ll be a dream come true for someone else, too.
• Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working. We all have lots of ideas, creations, and projects. When you present one to the world and it’s not a hit, don’t keep pushing it as is. Instead, get back to improving and inventing. Present each new idea or improvement to the world. If multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the response is anything less, don’t pursue it.
• If you’re not saying “Hell yeah!” about something, say no. When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” then say no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “Hell yeah!” We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.
• Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision – even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone – according to what’s best for your customers. If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, “How can I best help you now?” Then focus on  satisfying those requests. None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding. They want you to keep your attention focused on them. It’s counter-intuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.
• Watch out when anyone (including you) says he wants to do something big, but can’t until he raises money. It usually means the person is more in love with the idea of being big-big-big than with actually doing something useful. For an idea to get big-big-big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn’t need funding. If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision. It’ll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you’ll be in the game. You’ll be ahead of the rest, because you actually started, while others are waiting for the finish line to magically appear at the starting line.
• Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?
• We all grade ourselves by different measures:
  • For some people, it’s as simple as how much money they make. When their net worth is going up, they know they’re doing well.
  • For others, it’s how much money they give.
  • For some, it’s how many people’s lives they can influence for the better.
  • For others, it’s how deeply they can influence just a few people’s lives.
  • For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites, or anything else. If I create something that is not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input.
• When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand. They’ll assume the only reason we do anything is to get it done, and doing it yourself is not the most efficient way. But that’s forgetting about the joy of learning and doing. Yes, it may take longer. Yes, it may be inefficient. Yes, it may even cost you millions of dollars in lost opportunities because your business is growing slower because you’re insisting on doing something yourself. But the whole point of doing anything is because it makes you happy! That’s it! You might get bigger faster and make millions if you outsource everything to the experts. But what’s the point of getting bigger and making millions? To be happy, right? In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have. To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.

Lessons from Kent Beck and Martin Fowler’s “Planning Extreme Programming”

The first edition of “Planning Extreme Programming” by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler was published about 18 years (that long) ago, and already it says so much about how planning for software projects can be done well. It talks about programmers and customers, their fears and frustrations, their rights and responsibilities, and putting all those knowledge into a planning style that can work for development teams. It doesn’t have to be labeled XP, but it does need to help people be focused, confident, and hopeful.

Here are some noteworthy lines from the book:

• Planning is not about predicting the future. When you make a plan for developing a piece of software, development is not going to go like that. Not ever. Your customers wouldn’t even be happy if it did, because by the time the software gets there, the customers don’t want what was planned; they want something different.
• We plan to ensure that we are always doing the most important thing left to do, to coordinate effectively with other people, and to respond quickly to unexpected events.
• If you know you have a tight deadline, but you make a plan and the plans says you can make the deadline, then you’ll start on your first task with a sense of urgency but still working as well as possible. After all, you have enough time. This is exactly the behavior that is most likely to cause the plan to come true. Panic leads to fatigue, defects, and communication breakdowns.
• Any software planning technique must try to create visibility, so everyone involved in the project can really see how far along a project is. This means that you need clear milestones, ones that cannot be fudged, and clearly represent progress. Milestones must also be things that everyone involved in the project, including the customer, can understand and learn to trust.
• We need a planning style that
  • Preserves the programmer’s confidence that the plan is possible
  • Preserves the customer’s confidence that they are getting as much as they can
  • Costs as little to execute as possible (because we’ll be planning often, but nobody pays for plans; they pay for results)
• If we are going to develop well, we must create a culture that makes it possible for programmers and customers to acknowledge their fears and accept their rights and responsibilities. Without such guarantees, we cannot be courageous. We huddle in fear behind fortress walls, building them ever stronger, adding ever more weight to the development processes we have adopted. We continually add cannonades and battlements, documents and reviews, procedures and sign-offs, moats with crocodiles, torture chambers, and huge pots of boiling oil. But when our fears are acknowledged and our rights are accepted, then we can be courageous. We can set goals that are hard to reach and collaborate to make those goals. We can tear down the structures that we built out of fear and that impeded us. We will have the courage to do only what is necessary and no more, to spend our time on what’s important rather than on protecting ourselves.
• We use driving as a metaphor for developing software. Driving is not about pointing in one direction and holding to it; driving is about making lots of little course corrections. You don’t drive software development by getting your project pointed in the right direction (The Plan). You drive software development by seeing that you are drifting a little this way and steering a little that way. This way, that way, as long as you develop the software.
• When you don’t have enough time you are out of luck. You can’t make more time. Not having enough time is a position of helplessness. And hopelessness breeds frustration, mistakes, burnout, and failure. Having too much to do, however, is a situation we all know. When you have too much to do you can prioritize and not do some things, reduce the size of some of the things you do, ask someone else to do some things. Having too much to do breeds hope. We may not like being there, but at least we know what to do.
• Focusing on one or two iterations means that the programmers clearly need to know that stories are in the iteration they are currently working on. It’s also useful to know what’s in the next iteration. Beyond that the iteration allocation is not so useful. The real decider for how far in advance you should plan is the cost of keeping the plan up-to-date versus the benefit you get when you know that plans are inherently unstable. You have to honestly asses the value compared to the volatility of the plans.
• Writing the stories is not the point. Communicating is the point. We’ve seen too many requirements documents that are written down but don’t involve communication.
• We want to get a release to the customer as soon as possible. We want this release to be as valuable to the customer as possible. That way the customer will like us and keep feeding us cookies. So we give her the things she wants most. That way we can release quickly and the customer feels the benefit. Should everything go to pot at the end of the schedule, it’s okay, because the stories at risk are less important than the stories we have already completed. Even if we can’t release quickly, the customer will be happier if we do the most valuable things first. It shows we are listening, and really trying to solve her problems. It also may prompt the customer to go for an earlier release once she sees that value of what appears.
• One of the worst things about software bugs is that they come with a strong element of blame (from the customer) and guilt (from the programmer). If only we’d tested more, if only you were competent programmers, there wouldn’t be these bugs. We’ve seen people screaming on news groups and managers banging on tables saying that no bugs are acceptable. All this emotion really screws up the process of dealing with bugs and hurts the key human relationships that are essential if software development is to work well.
• We assume that the programmers are trying to do the most professional job they can. As part of this they will go to great lengths to eliminate bugs. But nobody can eliminate all of them. The customer has to trust that the programmers are working hard to reduce bugs, and can monitor the testing process to see that they are doing as much as they should.
• For most software, however, we don’t actually want zero bugs. (Now there’s a statement that we guarantee will be used against us out of context.) Any defect, once it’s in there, takes time and effort to remove. That time and effort will take away from effort spent putting in features. So you have to decide which to do. Even when you know about a bug, someone has to decide whether you want to eliminate the bug or add another feature. Who decides? In our view it must be the customer. The customer has to make a business decision based on the cost of having the bug versus the value of having another feature – or the value of deploying now instead of waiting to reduce the bug count. (We would argue that this does not hold true for bugs that could be life-threatening. In that case we think the programmers have a duty to public safety that is far greater than their duty to the customer.) There are plenty of cases where the business decision is to have the feature instead.
• All the planning techniques in the world, can’t save you if you forget that software is built by human beings. In the end keep the human beings focused, happy, and motivated and they will deliver.