Duncan Pierce duncanpierce.org

Lindsay McEwan photographed the posters produced by the attendees at our continuous integration problem-solving workshop at XPDay London 2006. And today I finally remembered to upload them to the XPDay website. Sorry for the delay.

What are cognitive biases?

Experiments in cognitive science and social psychology have revealed a wide variety of biases in areas such as statistical reasoning, social attribution and memory. It’s argued these biases are common to all human beings, and some have been demonstrated to hold across very different cultures.

Cognitive biases were first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They claim biases are artifacts of problem-solving heuristics humans use. Recent work on cognition in other animal species reveals that some cognitive biases are not unique to humans, suggesting an evolutionary origin.

Whatever the mechanisms behind cognitive bias, we have good data to suggest that under some circumstances we all have a tendency to react in a way that seems surprising when viewed from a more detached perspective.

It occurred to me for the first time at XPDay London this year quite what a phenomenon we started when we organized that first XPDay in 2001. We (myself, Nat Pryce, Tim Mackinnon, Steve Freeman, Rachel Davies) talked about and hoped that groups in other countries would follow our lead, but I don’t think we seriously expected so many to follow.

I’ve had an idea for a kind of menu I’ve never seen before.

Most dynamic object-oriented programming languages in use today are slots-based. These include Python, PHP and Javascript.

I’ve just seen a very postmodern approach to programming in the Mozilla Roadmap blog.

I’m at PoMoPro today. We’ve been asked to blog our solutions. So here they are.

This post carries on from “Agilists: Metrics aren’t always harmful”.

It seems popular in the agile world to privilege personal experiences, feelings and narrative over most other forms of knowledge-sharing. These things form the only widely accepted medium for expressing knowledge. In some ways that’s good. It’s about time we started actually listening to what people have to say instead of rushing to implement Taylorist production lines, finding it isn’t working and then just doing it harder.

My experience has been that many people in the agile world have an aversion to metrics.

One of our goals when Jason Gorman and I started running our metrics workshop “Do you get what you measure?” was to explore what metrics actually measure when people know the metrics are there. It’s easy for participants to see almost all the metrics that are initially proposed result in very undesirable behaviour. People play the system, often yielding the opposite of the intended effect of the metric.

The State feature in Kew provides access to state-related functions.