PostExerciseComments
Here are the comments made after the exercise and anthropologists' reports:- Easy to divide into subgroups for poetry-assumed no common theme
- Determined subteams but no process
- No use of power of all members to solve the programming problem
- Some structure, architecture, or map is needed to solve the problem
- Poetry problem used a language we knew
- Subgroups learned different things about the problem
- Success of poetry exercise might be overstated
- and might be underestimating success of programming problem
- No acceptance test for poem
- We missed the envoi
- Should have had 7 subgroups ??
- Poem solved by tackling structure then forming subgroups while program involved structure and analysis
- CS professionals can produce poetry on spec and on schedule!
- Technologists introduce more barriers than are required
- We made progress when we forgot the barriers
- Switched between inspiration and digging for information
- Brian’s laws:
- you need an organizer
- people don’t like this person
- if it had been a failure, I wouldn’t have admitted it.
- We gave up on the idea of perfection.
- Created lines of poetry by “jamming”-changing nouns, verbs, adjectives as needed.
- Created lines in parallel and then compared results
- Used homonyms for ending words
- Expectations, goals of subgroups varied-no agreement across all groups
- Brian visited all groups
- We didn’t realize we had to have 10 syllables so this didn’t hold us up
- No/little revision of words for poem
- Result was on time and met spec but low on aesthetics
- Writing the poem was more like “real work” than doing the program
- No risk of criticism for poem (as long as requirements were met)
- Only desparate measures will allow us to succeed (like “real work”)
- Do experts get lost because they are trying to make it difficult? Do they see, understand too much?
- What are the acceptance tests for a poem?
- Does expertise make it hard to rejoice over a creation?
- This happens in software as in any other creative discipline.
- Coders get paid-pretty well-artists don’t always
- Artists not always recognized until after death.