Month: March 2021

The Essence of Software Engineering – or, why agile is not enough

kenritley

Sadly, too much literature about agile Ways of Working (WoW) is all about agile Ways of Working – and it stops there.

For Grossly Oversimplified (GO) Impossible Utopia (IU) situations, that works.

But in my own experience, for the real world complexity, agile Ways of Working are only the beginning.

Much, much more is needed for success. As put in the following article: Successful software development teams need to strike a balance between quickly delivering working software systems, satisfying their stakeholders, addressing their risks, and improving their ways of working.

There’s an interesting framework that may help; this is really very interesting and pragmatic stuff:

Don’t let this fool you, however. When I first looked at it, it immediately reminded me of maturity models, such as CMMI. In a maturity model, you can stop at the level that makes sense for you, or even have mixtures of maturity in different areas.

This is not that! As you’ll notice, here’s it’s all about degree of operationalization.

Une juxtaposition de protections à Arles – à trois!

kenritley

This snap really appeals to me.

It’s a juxtaposition of protection in the southern French village of Arles. In the foreground, modern protection against Covid; in the background, medieval protection against lawless threats. And on the side, that column you see is the sensor for a bollard, a modern traffic barricade that helps keep the inner city streets free from the threat of terrorists using their vehicles as weapons.

All three things serving a very similar purpose, keeping out something that is unwanted.

The amazing white horses of Provence

kenritley

The Camargue region in southern France (essentially the swampy delta where the Rhone River empties into the Mediterranean Sea) is famous for its white horses, which many scientists actually think are one of the oldest breeds of horses in the world.

I took this snap down a deserted road in the Camargue, just outside of Sainte-Marie-de-Mer in the south of France

Plane trees in Beaucaire

kenritley

There are many good things about France that trace their origin back to Napolean – and the zillions of kilometers of streets in the south of France, lined by plane trees carefully planted to give shade to army troops, is one of them.

Here is as artistic a snap as I thought I could take of a street in the southern French village of Beaucaire, lined with plane trees:

If you think they are all leaning to the right, you’d be right. This part of France lives under the so-called Mistral wind, a wind of up to nearly 75  km/hr that forces trees to grow tilted. I visited in the winter, and there were numerous times I had to stop the Euro Cruiser, my minivan, because the wind gusts were too strong to safely drive.

An optical illusion in Béziers

kenritley

If you think there is something a bit amiss with this facade, you’d be right:

In fact, I naively walked by until I saw a couple of tourists taking a picture, so I backed up and realized: there are no balconies on that face at all!  In fact, it is a flat building, and what you see is just a very clever painting with perspective.

It’s a tribute to an artist who was born here, Jean-Antoine Injalbert. Funny thing, though, lest you jump to any conclusions: the artist was a famous French sculptor: