The Winter Getaway That Turned the Software World Upside Down

How a group of programming rebels started a global movemenT

Ken Schwaber—the cofounder of Scrum and founder of Scrum.org—says Waterfall “literally ruined our profession.” “It made it so people were viewed as resources rather than valuable participants.” With so much planning done upfront, employees became a mere cog in the wheel.

.. Waterfall “has gradually lost favor … because companies usually build better products if they can change specifications and designs, get feedback from customers, and continually test components as the products are evolving.”

.. Bob “Uncle Bob” Martin. Martin, an industry veteran and the founder of Uncle Bob Consulting, runs The Clean Code Blog

.. “When we compared how we did our work, we were just kind of astonished at the things that were the same.”“When we compared how we did our work, we were just kind of astonished at the things that were the same.”

.. Unlike other historical documents, the Agile Manifesto doesn’t declare truths self-evident. Rather, it compares: We value this over that.

.. Schwaber says the group did invite “a whole bunch of really pretty knowledgeable women” but that none showed. “They thought it would just be a carousing and smoking weekend,” Schwaber says. “They didn’t think we were going to do anything intellectual or productive.”

.. But it’s unclear whether women were, in fact, actually invited: A few of the framers tell me they vaguely remember some women being invited. Others don’t.

.. Unlike Waterfall, Agile emphasizes iterative development, or building software in pieces. Agile teams typically work in short cycles—which are called “sprints” in Scrum, today one of the most widely used forms of Agile—that usually last two weeks each.

.. Today’s software isn’t typically burned onto a CD-ROM and stocked on a store shelf; updates can be pushed to your laptop or smartphone remotely. This makes it easier to add features or fix bugs after releasing the product.

.. Despite discussions over whether the Manifesto itself should be amended, many of the original signers see the document as a historical—not a living—document. “It’s like a Declaration of Independence in U.S. history,” says Cockburn. “You don’t go back and rewrite that.”

..  “Now you can go to a conference, and there’s aisle after aisle of people who are selling you computer tools to run your process. And they say it’s Agile,” says Cunningham. He points to the first value of the Agile Manifesto. “It says, ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.’ How did [Agile] become a process-and-tools business?”

.. The monetization of Agile aside ..

.. the “most annoying aspect right now” is that Agile “has been taken over by the project-management people,” leaving “the technical people and the technical ideas” behind.

..  Sutherland says he sees teams in Silicon Valley that claim to be Agile, but are “not delivering working product at the end of a short iteration.”

 

Trump Once Said the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Was Real. Now He’s Not Sure.

Despite his public acknowledgment of the recording’s authenticity in the final days of the presidential campaign — and his hasty videotaped apology under pressure from his advisers — Mr. Trump as president-elect began raising the prospect with allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.

.. in January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.

“We don’t think that was my voice,” Mr. Trump told the senator, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Since then, Mr. Trump has continued to suggest that the tape that nearly upended his campaign was not actually him, according to three people close to the president.

.. In recent days, he has continued to seed doubt about his appearance on the “Access Hollywood” tape, stunning his advisers.

.. Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the “Access Hollywood” tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality. Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.

.. In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers.

.. To the president’s critics, his conspiracy-mongering goes to the heart of why he poses a threat to the country.

.. Mr. Flake, who is not running for re-election, said in the interview that he was about to begin a series of speeches on the Senate floor outlining his concerns about Mr. Trump. The first, he said, will be dedicated to what Mr. Flake called the president’s disregard for the truth.
.. But the president’s success last year has also left some in his party in awe of his achievement and uneasy about angering his base of supporters.
.. “This guy got $2 billion of earned media in the primary, and he won an election that nobody thought he was going to win,” said Senator David Perdue ..  “This is a guy who is doing things that are totally unprecedented.”
.. “This guy, I think, is a historic person of destiny at a time and place in America when we’ve got to make a right-hand turn here.”
.. Mr. Trump’s friends did not bother denying that the president was creating an alternative version of events. One Republican lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Trump’s false statements had become familiar to people over time. The president continues to boast of winning districts that he did not in fact win, the lawmaker said, and of receiving 52 percent of the women’s vote, even though exit polls show that 42 percent of women supported him.

There is something truly historic about Trump

President Trump is making history at a historic level. He tells us this himself.

.. Technically, either trip could be categorized as historical, in the sense that both occurred in the past. But in the sense of being moments of great and lasting importance? Well, consider that on his latest voyage, the president arguably got the most attention when he called the nuclear-armed leader of North Korea short and fat. Nixon-goes-to-China it wasn’t.

.. Trump has always asserted that he is the best and the greatest, but his attempts to write himself into the history books have truly been history-making.Among the things Trump has called “historic”: His initiative on women’s entrepreneurship. Pulling out of the Paris climate-change agreement. Executive orders on whistleblowers, financial services and the Antiquities Act. His apprenticeship initiative. The Clemson football team’s 2016 season. And the launch of a ship named for Gerald Ford.

.. After 11 weeks on the job, Trump reported that he had “achieved historic progress.” At the 100-day mark, his “historic progress” included “historic steps to secure our border.”

.. He predicted that his first Cabinet meeting would be “a historic Cabinet meeting” — and it was, as measured by the volume of praise heaped on him by his subordinates.

.. Other White House officials have given “historic” designations to things such as the Congressional Picnic; HR 1004, the Regulatory Integrity Act of 2017; and HR 1009, the OIRA Insight, Reform and Accountability Act.