adam bien's blog

Why planes and trains are good for (ultra) agile development 📎

  1. Pair programming is default - all people around you can (actually have to) participate even without shifting the keyboard.
  2. All tables are straight - no corners :-)
  3. Everyone is sitting in the same room - a real "village" feeling.
  4. There is in general no internet connection - you are not distorbed with emails, internet etc.
  5. There is nothing to do except travelling (so doing nothing) - you are forced to do something suitable
  6. You have to plan every iteration carefully - otherwise you will end you journey with a inconsistent system.
So - if you would like to be ultra agile, forget your nice office and work in a plane :-). Possible improvement: the plane's video-system could be refactored to display code - and not strange movies...

Actually during the flight between Munich and San Franciso (JavaONE/CommunityOne) I installed Netbeans 6m9, Glassfish v2, developed three examples for my book Java EE 5 Architekturen (Fluid Kernel, Object Copy Support, Lookup Utility) finished my last chapter (wrote about 15 pages) and read several articles. Comparing it with usual 11 hours outside the plane it was very productive - I was even surprised by the landing :-).

I'm already looking forward for the CommunityOne event - and especially interested in glassfish news regarding modularity and clustering. I will blog about this next time - I'm an official glassfish blogger so I will have to :-).