Heather McLean

“Waste”—it’s an ominous word by itself, and in the world of Lean principles, it’s the one thing you’re striving to eliminate. Waste can be defined as that which adds no value to a project; i.e., those things that you are spending time and money doing, but they don’t move the project forward. Software projects are often full of waste, and in such an imprecise discipline, it can be difficult to identify the sources of waste. In fact, a lot of times we end up running in circles, attempting to clean up the symptoms rather than the causes.

In my experience, the one largest source of waste that can be eliminated or reduced to add immediate benefit to a project is rework¹. Rework falls into two major categories:

• Technical debt
• Defects

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The next meeting of the Fort Worth APLN is on August 11, 2009 at 6:30 PM. The speaker will be Ben Gatzke:

Ben Gatzke has been delivering ecommerce software for a decade beginning with his time at Accenture where his teams delivered B2B netcentric solutions for major energy firms such as BP and Exxon Mobil.  Next, as the technology founder of PayDay One/ThinkCash, Ben’s success garnered the company the support of two of the largest VCs in the nation, Sequoia and Technology Crossover Ventures.  Ben is currently practicing agile consulting across the US for teams ready to take value-driven delivery to the next level.

As usual, if you want more information, contact Charles Seaman at fortworthapln@gmail.com.

As one of the rare female members of the IT workforce, I can always support the inclusion of more women. Thus, I applaud Microsoft’s investment in the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Sadly, after reading some of the comments to the article, it becomes blatantly obvious why women tend to avoid IT. You can see some of the very best in male chauvanism:

From aptly named “Anonymous Coward”:

“and they are innovative technical thinkers”

I love women as much as the next guy. Women have their role in society, but innovative? In 28 years in IT I’ve never seen a woman come up with an answer to a difficult technical problem that she’d not read somewhere.

From “Brian 29,” obviously trying to be funny but exemplifying how a lot of other men see us:

I saw the headline in my rss feed and thought this would be about booth babes. I was a little disappointed, but I guess I should have known better when it didn’t say NSFW….

At least “TW Burger” admits what he/she says is sexist, I think trying to be insightful, but really just advocating pushing us into “traditionally female” roles:

I can not comment in any way, shape, or form without sounding like a sexist pig. However, here goes: Reverse/Positive discrimination grants like this are usually is the brain-child of someone with a single minded agenda that ignores that the money would be better spent elsewhere. There are very few women in IT because they do not want to be in IT. Spend the $1 million on getting women into careers they want. Daughters of rich families do not become assembly line workers, maids, or receptionists. I can foresee this money being ladled onto women who do not need the cash or those that would not normally take, and have no real interest in, IT taking free courses simply because it didn’t cost anything and would look good on a resume.

Steve Roper on the surface makes what would seem to be a logical point, but he also forgets that men are already in a position of power, making it less appropriate to give them certain kinds of assistance:

… Feminism isn’t about *equal* rights, it’s about *women’s* rights. That’s why it’s called FEMinism.

A few years ago we had a similar campaign here in Australia to get more men into teaching positions and the government proposed a subsidy for men entering teacher-training courses. What happened?

The whole scheme was kiboshed within weeks of the proposal by angry feminists in the Education Department and the so-called “Equal Opportunity” Commission, who called the scheme sexist and discriminatory against women. They did not, however, utter so much as a squeak when TAFE (technical college) started an equally discriminatory program to get more women into the IT courses. But such double standards are par for the course these days.

Anyways, there are dozens more that you can read at the Register. It is these attitudes that cause women not to want to enter IT (or any predominantly male profession, for that matter), not any lack of ability or interest. Males in large groups tend to create a hostile environment for women, either by cause or accident. Sometimes it’s just being complacent without realizing what you’re doing. It can also start with a girl’s parents steering her away from “un-lady-like” professions, stunting her opportunities from the very beginning.

As a general disclaimer, I will say that I have had the pleasure of working with many wonderful men over the years. I’ve had many supportive male colleagues. I don’t want it to seem like I’m blaming the entire male population for the transgressions of a select few. On the other hand, I’ve also had to deal with a few not-so-stellar individuals who have done a range of injustices such as downplaying my contributions to the team simply for being a woman, patronizing me, and even sexual harassment. These few heartbreaking encounters can really color the experience negatively.

I’ll admit this is a little bit of geek porn today, different from my usual fare. Google has released a new algorithm for sending software updates dubbed Courgette. In particular, I found the section on “guessing” intriguing:

We can think of a differential update as a prediction followed by a correction, a kind of guessing game.  In its simplest form (just bsdiff / bspatch), the client has only a dumb guess, ‘original’, so the server sends a binary diff to correct ‘original’ to the desired answer, ‘update’.  Now what if the server could pass a hint that could be used to generate a better guess, but we are not sure the guess will be useful?  We could insure against losing information by using the original and the guess together as the basis for the diff…

This system has some interesting properties.  If the guess is the empty string, then we have the same diff as with plain bsdiff.  If the guess is perfect, the diff will be tiny, simply a directive to copy the guess.

A predictive software update engine has some interesting potential. I would love to see with what kind of accuracy their algorithm can actually “guess” the correct patch.