magpiebrain

I had an enjoyable couple of days at XPDAY 2006 in London earlier this week. Stand-out presentations for me were Joe and Dan’s Awesome_Acceptance_Testing and Chris Matt’s Managing Uncertainty & Risk Using Real Options, more of which later.

Ivan’s Are We Nearly There Yet? has the makings of an interesting presentation, however I think he was slightly knocked off track by the larger than expected attendance. I personally found the discussion around using actual days for iteration-level estimation warranted the whole session.

Keynote Controversy

The second day’s keynote, Love in the Age of Software by James Noble and Robert Biddle was by degrees entertaining, annoying, embarrassing, enjoyable but not quite educational enough. It was a shame to see some people leave during it (which could be down to either the previous night’s free drinks or the unconventional presenting style) – all that did was remind me that many people in our industry are actually far more conservative than we think.

dbdeploy

Theoretically mine and Graham’s dpdeploy presentation was the official launch of the database refactoring tool. The talk went well enough I think, but I think some much of audience were looking for a silver bullet that just doesn’t exist. dbdeploy is nothing more than the latest in a long line of process change hiding behind a tool (CruiseControl being an excellent example).

Anyway, the dpdeploy website is up and the documentation is being improved all the time.

Once upon a time, the Internets was about two things:

• Kittens
• Porn

Then, things changed, and the Internets became about these things:

• Kittens
• Porn
• Gambling

Then blogging happened, and things changed again. The Internets was transformed into a media concerned with:

• Kittens
• Porn
• Gambling
• People talking about their macs

Yes, for those still listening, I’m awaiting the delivery of a shiny new MacBook Pro.

As Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubmner’s book Freakonomics explains, Economics can be considered as nothing more than the study of how incentives affect people. Broadly split into three types – Financial (What’s it worth to me?), Moral (Is it the right thing to do?) and Social (Will society act in a bad way if I do this thing?) by understanding the incentives available to someone, you can understand how they will act in a given circumstance.

Taken further, Econmics allows you to alter the available incentives to alter how people act. Want people to reduce their carbon output? Well, you could explain how they’d save money by reducing their energy use (financial incentive). You could also create a groundswell of opinion stating that society views excessive energy use badly (social incentive, which could ultimately become a moral incentive).

A good example of changing incentives to change behaviour could be seen on BBC Breakfast this morning. Since 1998, using a mobile phone whilst driving has been illegal in Jersey. The simple act of making something illegal attempts to act as a moral incentive – with the punishment of a £500 fine acting as a financial incentive. On it’s own, this wasn’t enough. There wasn’t enough stigma associated with the act of using a mobile phone whilst driving for it to stop altogether. In the end it took a campaign, started by Paul Newman (no relation) and backed by the local Jersey Evening Post and more surprisingly mobile phone company Jersey Telecom. The resulting Hands Off campaign is attempting to create the social incentive – using a mobile phone when driving is unacceptable to society.

I spotted some “side by side photo’s”:http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/01/zune-vs-ipod/ of Apple’s latest 80GB iPod, and Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player.

For me, the decision about which one I’d rather have comes down to this – would I rather have a 5th generation product from Apple, or a 1st generation product from Microsoft?