> On Dec 8, 2017, at 10:50 AM, Christopher Y. Blaicher <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Ed, > You are probably doing 50% agile already. > > Stories are how the user describes what they want. It makes the user write > out what they want. If they say "I want an accounting system", we would tell > them that is an epic and make them go back and write specific stories and > prioritize them. Note: We don't write application code, but the concepts are > the same. > > Standups are not cumbia gatherings. 10 minutes. We are on two continents > over 7 time zones. Germany to Nebraska. Manager is in the UK. Keeps > everyone in sync. > > Agile is more a formalization of what you are probably doing. > > Chris Blaicher > Technical Architect > Mainframe Development > P: 201-930-8234 | M: 512-627-3803
Chris: OK, maybe I overreacted to your entry, but anytime people start talking about stand up meetings it gives me the willies. I have been in a total of one of those meetings and with the shifting of people in and out of the picture and to top it off you cannot see the faces of the people around them (at least what I participated in). You can tell a lot of peoples expressions as to the truth they are talking left the meeting doubting what the other group's ability to handle items. Example: We had made the decision to upgrade a CPU, and the users were mainly Dutch, and the hardware was on our side of the pond, and the OS, etc. was the same. We had ironed out all the major points, but one and we were waiting for an electrical survey that couldn’t be rushed. The next meeting with the other side of the pond had not done one step of their responsibilities. They looked like they were not actively co-operating and the EVP of the project was getting steamed. When our side got up and broke the news that our electrical facilities were inadequate and to bring them up to snuff was going to cost 1.5 Million USD to do so. The Dutch people looked happy and were anxious to place the blame on us and close down the project. The VP on our side came up with a solution that put the project back on schedule (well within one week), but it had to have the OK of the BOD to push funds around. The Dutch went back into the resistance mode, and our EVP spotted it and said he would deal with it in a few hours as he had a meeting to go to. In two days we had another video meeting, and everyone gave their schedule and how far they were ahead/behind the Dutch were no longer in resistance mode but seemed to be proactive out of the clear blue. After the meeting, we had our own and I asked why the turn around on the Dutch side and the EVP said that he had a conversation with their boss and no details were given. One of the main sticking points left was the use of RACF or ACF2. During the next meeting, it got testy, and the EVP spoke up again that this issue would be resolved by next meeting. Sure enough, the Dutch did a 180 and said that they were happy to go RACF. From then on the project speeded up. We handled meeting so that when a person spoke the person on each side of him/her were visible. That saved the project as no one could hide. A year later I was on a different job and was sent down south to help with bringing MVS up. I showed up on time (the clock on the wall and my watch agreed), and no one was to be seen. I sat down and tried catching up on what was done so far. All of a sudden the doors burst open and a flood of people came through it was almost lie a damn burst. The head of the project came over to say Hi, and I asked what was that all about, and he told me that the Japanese were running the place and every morning they had these group as he called them exercises and people saying what great jobs everybody was doing and blah blah. I looked at him, and he said we tolerate them and that is the last thing he said. The project was in its 3rd stage, and one night I took back to the hotel a listing of PARMLIB and the JES2 init deck and VTALMST. I started marking up everything that was wrong, and I ran out of red ink and switched to blue. I took the listings to my counterpart the next day and asked if he had gone through them at all and he said no, he had left it to his staff. What wasn’t communicated to us that his people were mainly DOS/VSE people. I pointed out all the possible issues, and he sat back and said “oh.” I told him it would take me a day or two of uninterrupted work, but I could fix everything (I hoped). Two days later we sat down with his people, and we listened to the status of everything. There it came to me, and I asked who was doing VTAM, JES2, and Parmlib? Three people raised their hands, and I asked if they had ever done MVS before and not one of the three had. I told them we had two days to update the libraries to get them up to some semblance of getting the system up. They didn’t look happy. I sat down with the Parmlib person first, and we went through each member, and I pointed out some issues with each of the members, he looked at me and said this has to be done, when? I said Saturday. I did the same thing with the other two people, and each one had a monumental task ahead. After they left, I sat down and did each one on my own. Friday afternoon We all got together again, Parmlib person had it 75 percent right, VTAMLST person had put 25 percent, and the JES2 had it only 10 percent right. I gave them what they should have coded, and I said we would meet back here in an hour. We went over each member, and I explained why they needed to code this and add that, etc. etc.. The JEs2 person was the weak link and I went over each item, and he had the INIT and TUNING BOOK while I was talking. He said how did I remember all this, I said I had been doing it for ten years, and JES Parts had changed the most, but in reality, they changed only very little. By Saturday AM we attempted to IPL the system, and we ran into more than a few errors. I said I thought we had gone through all this and he said he had a lot to remember. The woman did a reasonable job and the other guy not so good. Rather than waste system time I came up with my version and renamed their libraries and then created and copied my libraries to new libraries. I said OK let's try this again. We came up first time with no errors. They looked worried like I was going to fire the. I couldn’t have myself but their boss could. After teaching each one the new console commands and syntax and letting them loose to play. I went out and had a strong coffee. One of the people came running back to me saying come quickly it's broken! In their manual hoping the came across the quiesce command and it put the system in a wait state. I showed them how to look at the wait state and look at the operators manual, and I did a restart, and of course, the system came alive. I shook my head and said please continue to play, about 5 minutes later another one came back and said can you take a look, please? One of them did a Z eod. I said look at the manual and see what it does. Then I heard an “oh.” I let them play for a few more minutes then I said here is another operators manual this is for JES2 they played around and didn’t do any “damage.” I said that's enough for today tomorrow we go live, they looked at me and said: “live.” I said semi-live we will start working with NJE and the 3705 and disk etc.. so the next day showed them how to vary paths online, offline and explained paths and took devices online, offline, etc. etc.. I was so-so on RACF, so we had our RACF person come down, and she had it working her first day but had to train their RACF person, and that took two days. We both left with doubts but there was no catastrophe’s no crashes nothing of significance. After that, I got an email with a question or two, daily then went down to one every few days and pretty soon nothing. Then I get a phone call that they needed to take a standalone dump, and I asked don’t you remember me taking you through it? They said yes, but the system was down! I told them that is why they need to take a SAD, so we can take a look to see what happened. I end up taking a quick look at the syslog first and see a whole lot of disk error messages, so I called them up and asked if there a problem with their disk drives and she said the IBM person powered them down to work on them. I asked her if she could get the IBM person on the phone and informed him that actual work was being done on the system whatever possessed you to power down drives on a live system? He wasn’t told that it was live so he assumed he could. I asked that in the future he ask the operator first if it was OK. He said sure. I called the DC manager and told him what had happened, and he was aware of the crash but not what caused it. I asked if he could talk to the CE’s manager about asking first. Ed ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
