Michael Kenny

Founder of http://www.rhizomorphic.org e: kenny (at) acm DOT org

Originally from Barking, London; spent around 12 years in Munich Germany before moving to Zurich, Switzerland - where I work(ed) with PeterSommerlad and others at itopia.

Worked pretty much in most parts of Germany at companies as diverse as Hewlett Packard, BMW, and Mobilcom. I sometimes even program for enjoyment - various "Art" projects (http://www.gameover.org, www.toywar.com, www.etoy.com, www.offsite.ch) and a "new" but very wiki-like tool written in object perl for.... well knowledge management/authoring....which exists on my laptop in a constant pre-alpha state, waiting for a port to java for XML and subversion.... object perl support in eclipse would be good...

I'm less convinced by all the "advances" in software technology - objects (inheritance coupling, change unfriendly interface rigidity) , dumb client to... and back again, and all the accompanying methods etc... you name it. What are you being sold. Which problems are being solved. Sales talk. Often it's just dressing up, careers are made and you're left with stuff that doesn't help or even makes things worse.

Discussions around software/tech/methods are difficult. http://www.agilealliance.org/show/895 a paper at www.xp2002.org polarised opinion at least. Some people felt undermined, others were very supportive. Maybe it's natural for each community build up its own sense of reality. Its own sense of what makes sense. Often these senses seem to me to be quite back-breaking. I wonder about the WalledGarden effect and herd effects in these communities.

A recent example was a questionaire on Agile Processes, all possible answers seemed to entirely rule out any idea the Agile might not have worked. The underlying answer was going to be simple. Other examples are conferences or discussion forums which do some kind of implicit belief reinforcement therapy (self selecting after all). We respond to faces and groups and facts that reinforce our prejudice and, I think, simple answers. I'm interested more in why we do it, and what the real story might be.

XP - can work, but there are many many variables - for example without a business champion it's going to be difficult. Lots of resistance around. Who do you trust? Can we talk about Agile failures?

CategoryHomePage