I’m half-tempted to get “Options have value. Options expire,” added to my tattoo. The principles which Chris Matts and Olav Maassen champion have become such guiding forces in my life that many of the decisions I make are only done in order to increase the number of options available to me. Once the whole innate phobia of uncertainty is out of the way, it’s a fantastic way to live life in freedom and with fun.

Real Options are also a phenomenal model for managing risk on software project – and not the only brilliant idea that Chris and Olav have!

So imagine my absolute joy when I saw this in the works – a graphical novel, fun and easy to read and understand, dealing with all kinds of ideas around risk management. The skiing story at the end of the first chapter (downloadable from the link) is the same one that Chris shared with me to help me understand his ideas.

Chris and Olav describe it as “a business graphic novel on managing risk. The book is a culmination of their collaboration on the real options model over the last six years. It provides examples of how to manage a project using the real options model and outlines a simple technique for making better (informed) decisions. It also covers more advanced topics such as information arrival process, game theory, feature injection, paradox of choice and how to deal with uncertainty. While geared towards project managers, the book benefits anyone making decisions in their job or daily life. Chris and Olav focus on making risk management easily understandable as everybody does this every day without being aware of it. ”

I am very confident that this book is going to be ground-breaking. I am so confident that I’ve already laid out £500 of hard-earned cash for a chance to star in the book (sorry, that option has expired). I don’t regard this as charity. This is me doing something small to pay Chris and Olav back for their guidance and help over the last few years, and it’s money they’ve helped me earn anyway. Estimated publishing date is Winter 2012… assuming they manage to raise the funds to kick it off.

If you would like to help these two fantastic people get this novel out of the door and benefit from the same help they’ve given me, please go to the Sponsume site before April 14th and pick an option. You never know – you could be the proud owner of a limited edition of a book that turns out to be as ground-breaking as “The Goal”*.

I’m told that it’s too late to get the Pask sorted out for this year – we’re Agile, but not that Agile! Please keep nominees in mind, though. Many members of the committee are talking and are keen to keep the award in some form, so chances are it will be back next year. Watch this space.

It’s that time of year again that the Pask committee meets at the Agile 20XX conference to vote on the nominations which have been made.

The committee is mostly made up of people who’ve already won the award in previous years. We won because of our ideas, because we’re good at spreading them, because we made a difference, because we were under the radar… but not because of our organizational ability! So please forgive this very late post.

We are still collecting nominations (email pask-nominations AT agilealliance DOT org) and will be voting at some point during the week.

A number of people have suggested that the Pask Award doesn’t matter. I thought I’d share some of the things which have happened to me since winning the award last year, so that you can understand exactly what it is that’s being given away.

The Pask Award

It’s always wonderful to be recognised for your work. The award also comes with quite a hefty bit of money – enough to pay for a couple of international conferences, and then some. There’s no trophy, but you get to tell people that you won the award. Your parents will be dead chuffed. You can stand on stage and recognise all the people and communities who’ve helped you. And that’s just the award itself.

The Side Effects

The number of people following me on Twitter doubled overnight, from 500 to 1000. Then it kept climbing. I am now followed by over 1,600 people. That’s enabled me to spread a lot of other people’s messages, too.

Because people have started to know my name, I’ve started getting more offers of work. I’ve had requests for help from the USA, from all over Europe, from India. (Some of them have even offered to pay me!) I’ve been able to raise my rates a bit, and I’m getting all kinds of interesting opportunities which I didn’t have before.

Then, there’s the conference invites. Lots, and lots, and lots of invites to speak around the world. I’m sorry to those people that I’ve had to turn down – I am simply getting so many invites this year that I can’t do all of them, especially if they’re at the same time as others.

Because of the conference invites, I’m getting to speak more, and spread the ideas from my communities, which leads to more Twitter followers and more exposure and more conference invites… I suspect the escalation from this has started to reach a natural limit, but again, I apologise if I haven’t quite been able to keep up. It really has been a little bit insane.

The Further Side-Effects

Because of the invites, I’ve become a better speaker. This means I can now spread the ideas more effectively. They weren’t all my ideas in the first place – many of them came from communities in London and around the world – so now people recognise that I can share ideas effectively. This means more people are now giving me lots of ideas to share! So I’m learning an enormous amount, too. I feel insanely privileged to have such excellent friends and colleagues.

In short…

My life currently rocks beyond my ability to tell it. I’ve been able to help other people’s lives to rock too. A lot of this is due to the award. Many thanks to those who nominated and voted for me, and to the Agile Alliance for continuing to make a difference.

The Gift

If you would like someone to receive a similar gift to the one that I’ve been given in this last year, enabling them to spread their knowledge and ideas to other communities that they wouldn’t normally reach, please nominate at pask-nominations AT agilealliance DOT org. You can see the kind of things we’ve been nominated for in the past. Mostly we’re looking for people who aren’t particularly famous or well known; who haven’t written books or run keynotes, who sit “below the radar”, and could benefit from more exposure – and who will benefit their communities in turn, passing on the opportunities and making the best use of the fame that comes with it.

Do you know of anyone who’s helped their communities? Who’s driven Agile forward in difficult or unusual circumstances? Who’s created an idea, or a community, or a tool, that’s truly revolutionary?

If so, don’t wait – post that email now.

We planned our way with maps we’d made already
Assuming the terrain would be the same,
Expecting well-paved roads to keep us steady
And any local creatures to be tame.
We loaded up our caravans and wagons
With good advice, best practices and tools
But didn’t spot the legend – “Here be dragons!”
So we got burnt, again. They say that fools
Rush in, and yet we count ourselves as wise,
We praise each other’s skill and raise a glass
To intellect – ignoring the demise
Of expeditions just as skilled as ours.
When they return, worn out, their pride in shreds,
We laugh and say, “A death march! You expect
Such things to fail.” And in our clever heads
It’s obvious – at least in retrospect.
The dragons of our ignorance will slay us
If we don’t slay them first. We could be brave
And work for kings who don’t refuse to pay us
When we’re delayed because we found their cave.

They say that matter cannot be created,
A fundamental principle and law,
While dragons keep emerging, unabated;
As many as you slay, there’s still one more.
Our ignorance is limitless – be grateful,
Or else we’d find we’ve nothing left to learn;
To be surprised by dragons may be fateful,
But truth be told, it’s best laid plans that burn.
We could seek out the dragons in their dungeons
And tread there softly, ready to retreat;
We could seek other roads, postponing large ones,
And only fight the ones we might defeat.
The world could be a world of dragon slayers
And stand as men and women, not as mice;
The joy that comes from learning more should sway us;
The fiercest dragons won’t surprise us twice.
Discover tiny dragons, be they few,
And all the mightiest, with equal praise -
Uncertainty’s our muse of all that’s new,
And ignorance the space in which she plays.

This post is more about the Software Craftsmanship manifesto, whose existence discomforts me.

I dislike the wording of the manifesto’s points because I don’t think they differentiate between programmers who genuinely care about the value they deliver, programmers who care about the beauty of their code, and programmers who hold a mistaken belief in their own abilities. Any software developer – even the naive, straight-out-of-college engineer with no knowledge of design and little knowledge of incremental delivery – could sign up to that manifesto in the mistaken belief that they were doing the things it espouses. I used to be one such developer, so I speak from experience.

I dislike the statement, “That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable.” Indispensible? Absolutely necessary and requisite? Plenty of valuable code has been delivered by individuals trying out a new idea on their own; by coders like my dad who can’t make a maintainable product to save their lives, but who can rewrite it if they need to; by parties who started out on a basis of distrust and only learnt collaboration later on, let alone partnership; by people who couldn’t find the software they needed so wrote it themselves, or discovered unintentional value and responded to the change. If that phrase read, “That is, the items on the left are a good start and we would like to help you pursue the items on the right too,” it would be a less elitist message. For those developers who would like to be better, and who are aware that they’re learning, the manifesto casts them into the role of the “others” which Software Craftsmen are “helping to learn” the craft. I guess I’m one of those “others”, because I’m still learning about the items on the right, and I certainly can’t see myself as one of the craftsmen with the manifesto phrased in the form it currently takes.

Ade has outlined a number of mistakes which proponents – and I believe opponents – make regarding the software craftsmanship movement. I think supporters of the manifesto are doing exactly the same thing; failing to look at the background of the movement, and jumping on a bandwagon which lets them concentrate on the things they find stimulating while ignoring the bigger picture. “The glamour is overtaking the intent”, as Dan North put it. If Dan’s post does nothing but address the glamour and steer developers away from indulgence in the technical intricacies of their work – refactoring to oblivion while failing to deliver, focusing on test coverage while the company continues to leak money, worrying about the latest testing tool while failing to talk to stakeholders, or insisting that no one can interrupt their two-week sprint once they’ve made a commitment, for instance – then I applaud it.

I particularly liked the conversation between Dan, Aviv Ben-Yosef and Jason Gormand over Twitter, in which they concluded that Software Craftsman is a status you should be awarded by someone else. If nothing else, Dan’s post has let us have a conversation about what craftsmanship really means; a conversation which should be at least as public as the manifesto itself.

Ade, a further reading section attached to the manifesto is an excellent idea. Without it, that manifesto is the face of the Software Craftsmanship movement. I don’t much care for the expression on that face.

I can only do this because of the fortune I have in my communities, including some great coaches on either side of the pond, the Extreme Tuesday Club, Thoughtworkers and alumni, and the wonderful online communities in Lean and BDD.

My communities give me a safe place in which to play and get feedback. I am a member of a community of thinkers, and if I should happen to be a catalyst more than others, I consider that to be a tribute to those who have inspired me. This is as much a measure of your success as of mine. Thank you all.

My Grandad worked as an engineer during the war. He used to talk about the bombers, who always claimed they were able to hit a target, even though my Grandad pointed out that the practice “bombs” they were dropping hadn’t actually fallen into the nets he’d put in the targets. It was, he said, the only way to test whether they were telling the truth. He was a keen physicist, mathematician and astronomer, and had a marvellous fascination with history and pretty nurses.

In the last few years his memory, and his body, started to fade. He stopped being able to hold on to conversations, but still enjoyed doing the crossword. He read books and papers. He loved to drink whisky and eat sweets. The last time I saw him, we brought him some jellied fruit. “No thanks, Grandad,” I said. “You have them.”

“Oh, good,” he grinned, and hid the box. I never saw a smile on his face that wasn’t a grin – cheeky, half-mocking, and often poking gentle fun at my ever-patient mother. That’s how I’ll remember him; by that smile, and the sparkle in his eyes.

My Grandad passed away in his sleep last night. He would have been 98 next month.

Sleep well, Grandad. I love you. Thank you for making my world a better place.

I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up of hearing tales of Government IT failure. I even heard one story of a company asked to triple its bid so that a council department could spend, and therefore retain, its budget.

Go sign it already.

Then, this morning, I noticed that a link from Wikipedia’s BDD page to one of my old posts was broken. Further investigation showed that several other posts were also missing.

Before I upgraded on my virtual Red Hat server, I dumped the database, imported it into my Windows MySql, and tried the upgrade there. The posts were still fine on the Windows version. I tried reimporting the dump, and ran into the same problem. I can see my missing posts in the SQL file, but they’re not being restored. Still haven’t quite worked out why this happened, or why the upgrade had the same effect as the dodgy restore. I’ll do some more investigation when I have more time.

To cut a long story short, I created a new database, dumped directly from my Windows database to the one on the linux server, then blatted the wordpress options with the ones from the old database so that I didn’t have to go through the hassle of setting up my theme again.

This seems to have worked. If you find any problems, please do let me know.

Lunivore Limited is the company through which I’m offering my services, and lunivore.com is the website which describes those services: software, coaching, training, writing.

Many thanks to Andy Palmer for his Apache expertise and struggling with cpanel’s weirdness! If either site goes down, it’s cpanel doing something strange that we haven’t pinned down yet; I’m home from the wonderful #acguk and will be on it.