Artistic Programming

Let's read our maps and roadmaps again. With a little bit of artistic programming thrown in, the picture gets crystal clear. Find out HOW.

A Quick Word

Have you ever experienced a feeling of "being lost" or "confused" or "overwhelmed" while writing a program?

Dr. John Lee, a leading management expert, demonstrated an interesting principle in his workshops by giving groups of participants a 70-piece puzzle to assemble.

One group viewed a picture of the completed puzzle; the other groups put theirs together without knowing what the finished product looked like. Consistently, the group with the picture finished first.

Why? They already know their goal. They had the advantage of possessing a blueprint for success which they tackled one bite-sized piece at a time.

This example illustrates one of the biggest differentiators between average and great programmers.

A great programmer has the advantage of possessing a blueprint for success which they tackle one bit-sized piece at a time. He can visualize his final working program completely in his mind. He can see his final program running and can visualize its complete behavior even before writing a single line of code. He understands all the possible ways in which his program may go wrong and takes care of that in his design. He knows how his program, when completed, will be tested. He has his test plan and test cases ready before he initiates the task of writing code.

In other words, the completed program is a physical reality for the programmer even before he starts writing it. He has a vivid "goal" in front of him, he is fully aware of the behavior and nature of his goal, and then he starts to take steps towards this goal, one step at a time.

Some programmers do this naturally.

You can learn to do this.

Can you imagine what your career would be, if you could program without ever feeling lost or confused or overwhelmed?

DID YOU KNOW?

What does SCRUM mean?

The term Scrum comes from a paper entitled The New New Product Development Game by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. In rugby, a scrum is a way of restarting the game, either after an accidental infringement or when the ball has gone out of play. The practice of Scrum in the software world includes regular short daily meetings where the team members all get together to communicate progress. Because of the similarity of pausing play (work), and having the players (team members) group together this meeting is commonly known as the Daily Scrum. Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna are credited with introducing the term Scrum into the world of software development in 1993 whilst working at Easel Corporation, a Massachusetts software tools company. Ken Schwaber wrote the original Scrum white paper, SCRUM Development Process which was presented at the OOPSLA conference in 1995.

Scrum is one of the new Agile approaches to building software. In a nutshell, Scrum is a simple approach to the management of complex problems, providing a framework to support innovation and allow development teams to deliver high quality product in short time-frames. Scrum is a state of mind; it is a way of thinking that unleashes the creative spirit while remaining firmly grounded in some solid and long-respected theoretical principles, including empiricism, emergence and self-organization.

F-O-O-D For Thot!

Howard Gardner discusses seven levers for persuading others to embrace new ideas in Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds (Harvard Business School Press, 2004):

1. Reason: You present all relevant considerations of an idea, including its pros and cons.

2. Research: You provide numerical and other information about your idea’s ramifications, or data relevant to your idea.

3. Resonance: You and your ideas are convincing to your listener because of your track record, effective presentation, and sense of your audience.

4. Representational re-descriptions: You deliver your message in a variety of formats, including stories, statistics, and graphics.

5. Resources and rewards: You draw on resources to demonstrate the value of your idea and provide incentives to adopt your idea.

6. Real-world events: You monitor events in the world on a daily basis and, whenever possible, draw on them to support your idea.

7. Resistances: You devote considerable energy to identifying the principal resistances to your ideas (both conscious and unconscious resistances) and try to defuse them directly and implicitly.