Team room
A while back when I expressed by concerns about a particular team room I got some negative reactions including from one of the persons who working that particular room. My assertion was that I wouldn't be able to concentrate in such a crammed room.
Now I've come across a few more pictures and I'd like to share the location of pictures of a team space that I really like: it's on Brad Wilson's blog.
Now that our Savila team has grown to 3 fulltime members plus myself I think I should post a few pictures myself as well. So watch out for them ;-)
I almost forgot. Have a look at entry #11 (Cadenza). I guess the plants not only give the room a special atmosphere but also help to dampen noise.
Does Sustainable Pace mean a 40 hour week?
It is travel day and I have some extra time to catch up on my RSS feeds. On InfoQ I came across this:
InfoQ Personalized Feed for Stephan Schwab in Does Sustainable Pace mean a 40 hour week?:
Sustainable Pace is a well known XP practice however, different people relate to it in different ways. Could an Agile team increase its sustainable pace by working longer? An interesting discussion on the Scrum Development group tries to debate the correlation between the number of work hours per week and sustainable pace.
Interesting thought but probably completely futile and towards the wrong direction. Software Developers are not anywhere similar to machines because they are humans - not resources, as many misguided project managers, and probably many managers in general, perceive these talented people. You cannot increase the input and get more output.
On any team you need to leave room for learning. Without learning there is no improvement in productivity or quality or anything else. Skipping the learning means stagnation. In a profession such as software development stopping to learn is dangerous and will get the company and the individual developer into trouble in the near future.
So... Maybe the right question would be to ask how much time out of the regular work week should be devoted to learning, which is not related to the problem being solved in the current project. What the software development profession at large is in bitter need of is a much more elevated level of skills and knowledge and that includes developers and those who manage them.
Interesting idea from the US: instead gas tax breaks use the same money for highspeed networks
The context of this is the upcoming election of the next US president and although I'm not a US citizen and have anything to say about this particular topic it does refer to a thought I carry with me since the early days of running an Internet Access Provider in Germany back in 1994.
Dave Winer in Scripting News for 5/2/2008:
And the money we’d give up for Federal gasoline tax could be better spent on putting high capacity network lines under our streets to increase communication. Some of the car trips must be to exchange information that coud be replaced by moving packets around at gigabit speeds. It wouldn’t cost much to retrofit a few cities with really high speed lines, then we could get to work on developing the services that would make life more interesting, fun and efficient.