Eventyr

Fear of Voles

Due to the sad lack of delivery of a bulk order of fun fur I need to make other plans...

The fur, should it ever arrive, will now form the basis for a large floor cushion.  My rear may be well-padded at the moment but I strongly believe that it is always good to provide a comfortable place in the office to sit when faced with large piles of reading.  And, believe me, the pile is looming.

('sides which I am jealous as everyone else has bean-bags).

I don't know what to do about my fancy dress costume for tomorrow though.  I appear sadly lacking in costume and am starting to fear the possibility of being 'voled'.

Activate and Pass

Looks like I have completed my Associate Tutor course - thankfully gaining me HEA and SEDA recognition.

And the idle plan I mentioned yesterday appears to have been neatly whisked out of my hands and looks likely to soon become a reality...

Things are moving in my world, and that is a good thing.

Now I just need to settle down to revising this postgraduate course for the autumn term.  Urgh.

Programmer in need of Dojo

One main learning outcome for the coming term is to shore up my programming skills into something semi-useful in an industrial context.

I can program, for sure.  Just nothing useful.

Lets see...

I never quite mastered C.  I loathed the 'stack' of the obscure Pop-11 (sorry Ben).  I was fabulous at Prolog, which remains a special language.  I've used Perl and PHP as needed for web stuff.  I wrote an abysmal text adventure game using Inform - but loved the OOness.  I conquered MATLAB, bent it to my will, and used it to create a full speech recognition teaching program (self-organising neural network powered) which, if you ignored the very ugly gui I created, was theoretically able to teach you to pronounce Norwegian vowels correctly.

Now comes the big change.  A useful language.  Or, at least, one that is useful to me...

I have the book and permission to sit in on the course.  Should be easily done I'd guess.  Practice makes perfect.

I just wish there was a Coders Dojo in Brighton to make my task a bit more fun.  I need to get my code kata on.

Hmm, if only I had the time to set one up...  Perhaps I should find a willing undergraduate...

Studentship

Looks like my Industrial CASE Studenship is going to involve some work and money to set up.  It still feels like the best route to me as:
a) I get to stay at Sussex
b) I get some money (although not the full studentship I could have had at Hertfordshire)
c) I get practical experience in an area relating to my research
d) I get to stop working in Hertfordshire
e) I get to work just in my research area for a time (unheard of!)

However there are still issues and contracts and commitments to iron out.  Fortunately I have at last discovered a useful document on this studentship.

Hopefully it will be sorted in time for me to register for the coming year....

Strategy Association

Finally submitted my extra piece of coursework for the Associate Tutor course at Sussex.  Presuming it goes through this means that I will be Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) and Higher Education Academy (HEA) accredited (Registered Associate Practitioner status for the latter).

In order to pass I needed to display in my portfolio that I had met the following criteria:

SEDA Values:
V1  An understanding of how people learn
V2  Scholarship, professionalism and ethical practice,
V3  Working in and developing learning communities,
V4  Working effectively with diversity and promoting inclusivity,
V5  Continued reflection on professional practice,
V6  The development of both people and of educational processes and systems

SEDA outcomes:
O1  Identified your own professional development goals, directions or priorities
O2  Planned for your initial and/or continuing professional development
O3  Undertaken appropriate development activities
O4  Reviewed your development and your practice, and the relations between them.
O5  Enabled learning O6  Used a variety of appropriate learning approaches
O7  Used a variety of methods for evaluating your teaching role
O8  Informed your professional role with relevant strategy, policy and quality considerations

I managed on all but the final point (O8), so yesterday submitted a final additional document about the HEFCE Widening Participation Strategy, the Sussex Learning and  Teaching Policy [pdf] and the Associate Tutor Policy.

Fun.

At least it is now done.

Proverb (Anon, Norwegian)

It is the duty of the present
    to convey the voices of the past
    to the ears of the future.

-- a Norwegian saying

Robert Holdstock

The life-speaker herself is a young girl who paints her face quite green, and tells all stories with her eyes closed so that the smiles or frowns of those who listen cannot effect a 'shape-change' uponn the characters within the story.

Extract from Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Concurrent vs. Paired

A Field Study of Developer Pairs: Productivity Impacts and Implications by Allen Parrish, Randy Smith, David Hale, and Joanne Hale
Published in IEEE Software, September/October 2004

The authors build from a previous study of programmer productivity as team size increases, where they had concluded that increased concurrent work on core modules leads to decreased productivity.  They reconsider their data for concurrent working pairs in response to positive findings from pair programming.  The authors conclude that the role-based coordination protocol associated with agile software methodologies overcomes a significant productivity loss otherwise associated with concurrent software development pairs. A good article with some pertinent points raised.  The data from the field study supports an interpretation which says that concurrent work on a module reduces productivity.  The metric used for this data set does not provide definitive results as the type of collaboration for the concurrent work is not available (i.e. developers could have been in different offices, not in communication, etc.), but the authors propose interesting avenues for further investigation based on this finding.   

Reviewed for the Agile Alliance

Marginalizing Problem Solvers

Do Agile Methods Marginalize Problem Solvers? by Victor Skowronski
Published in IEEE Computer, October 2004

This short professional article comments that a software development methodology should take advantage of programmers’ strengths and avoid their weaknesses.  It argues, by reference to the working styles of Thomas Aquinas and Isaac Newton, that agile methods may do the opposite for certain working styles – that of problem solvers.  The author questions whether agile methods provide the best environment for the best programmers, and indicates that a good problem solver who lacks people skills appears to be less competent in the eyes of agile methods proponents.   "Competent in this context means that the programmer possesses real-world experience in the technology domain, has built similar systems in the past, and has good people and communication skills."  The four phases of problem solving (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification) are discussed in terms of the difficulties faced at each phase for a problem-solver in an agile environment.  The paper makes a really interesting observation, argued by historical anecdote.  It reads occasionally dismissive of agile without supporting argument, but it would still be interesting to see further work in this area.

Reviewed for the Agile Alliance

 

VBM and Agile

Value-Based Management and Agile Methods by John Favaro
Published May 2003

Describes the five principles of Value Based Management (VBM) and details how the principles of VBM are aligned with those of Agile methods: the operating principles embodied in agile methods make operating parameters explicit, while the financial and strategic principles in VBM make profitability parameters explicit.  Particular attention is focused on financial metrics for measuring value creation and efficient resource usage. The five principles of VBM are neatly outlined, but there is a lack of consistency in the paper about how they relate to Agile – the paper ends up being an expression of similarity for each separate principle, but personally fails to draw any conclusions about what lessons or interest could be drawn from the similarity between the operating principles of agile and the principles of VBM.

Reviewed for the Agile Alliance