I thought this was very funny. No offences to the guys I work with but maybe this will get us thinking about making our own song so that people will know how we work, what we do and who we are? There’s one particular guy on the team that can actually play an instrument and is even in a band (they play live shows). Joel, I am talking about you! Maybe your band can help us create our own agile development rock song? Or a song about the benefits of test driven development? Ha Ha! Check out the song “Code Monkey” by Jonathan Coulton. You can find other songs found on his website: http://www.jonathancoulton.com/. I wonder if there’s original songs written specifically about agile software development…?

Don’t worry, I am not trying to change the English language! That comment is very true with the software development process that I believe in, practice, and communicate to the people that I work with to deliver business value (including customers). This statement by Kent Beck in “Extreme Programming Explained (Second Edition)” essentially means don’t try to make things 100% perfect, rather the action of perfecting something is more important. Most of the time the benefits and value to the business will be missed if we wait for perfection before we can start/deliver. Continual improvement or kaizen in building and delivering software means many things (taken from http://www.kaizenmanifesto.org/):

1. Make continuous improvements in every aspect of the business.
2. Actively pursue a superior, complete customer experience.
3. Continually improve designs, code, and processes.
4. Strive to increase agility (binshou) while reducing costs.
5. Use the Deming Cycle to minimize disruption from change.
6. Prevent errors (poka-yoke), in software and in business.
7. Respect people, leverage expertise, and trust staff.
8. Reward suggestions, improvements, and progress.
9. Always move forward.

So if you are looking for the perfect design, the perfect process, or the perfect software solution, you’ll be left behind while others are finding the benefits of a great solution today, knowing and understanding that tomorrow it will be even better. Make kaizen work for you today by not waiting for perfection!

Well it’s taken way too long to get this site up, but in the last 2 weeks I’ve worked with our website developer to get our Third Angle division site up. My role in this division is the agile project manager and we are the software development division of MediaLogic Group. The team is made up of very passionate developers and we are an Agile Software Development shop based in Calgary, Alberta. Look out, you’ll here more from us soon enough! I’ am looking forward to 2008 as some of our goals are to make an image for ourselves in the industry and spread our name in the agile community both in Calgary and beyond. The website will constantly be updated as we have a lot more content to add so please come back often.