rant

- http://xkcd.com/84/

Okay, now let's consider for a moment what America is.  Is America a "white" county? Although many would like it to be, it is not.  Non-hispanic whites were only 68% of the population in 2008 and that number is likely inflated since the percentage is dropping rapidly.  Is it an "English" country?  Officially yes, although a huge number of Americans speak other native languages.  16% of the population is of Hispanic or S. American origin and most of them speak Spanish or Portugese at least as a 2nd language.  So what is it?  An "American" country?

At what point does one become an American and then have the right to delineate the "other" and then humiliate them?

Has any US and EU citizens reading this ever tried to get a visa for another country?  I've gotten several and it is usually as simple as "send in the form with $50 and your passport and get a visa in a week or so".

My in-laws are trying to get a visa to come to the US and visit their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter.  My father in-law was an important figure in the police service for many years and they are 100% above board legally and financially secure.  Here's the process:

1. Pay ~$150 per person in non-refundable application fees (note that a visa for India - and most other places is ~$50).
2. Fill out long forms for all parties involved.
3. Wait in line at a specific bank on the other side of town to deposit a demand draft.
4. Make an appointment with the outsourced visa processing company (more on this in a moment)
5. Go into the interview armed with bank statements, tax statements, personal recommendations, and a "yes suh" attitude.
6. Get your visa issued (or not in the case of my brother in-law - twice in 3 years).
7. Pay *another* $10 per person for a visa issuance fee.

We've just about got to #4 after giving the state department about $600 in fees.  So the only way to get an appointment now that they've outsourced the process is to go to the VFS website.  At the VFS website, you fill out a form, and a captcha and then...

There are NO appointments available.  No indication of when they will become available other than that we should "try later".  3 weeks of trying 10 times a day.  Waking up at 4:30AM to hope we catch the next batch of released appointments.

This is stupid, wasteful, arrogant and hateful behavior.  Especially for the amount of money they require (oh and they just raised it).  It is simply holding powerless brown people hostage to their desire to visit their loved ones.  There is no excuse for such an inefficient system.  Several attempts to contact people at the embassy and get a resolution has failed.  Apparently they think this makes sense and that their customers should be treated this way.

Well I don't think it makes any sense.  Sure there is large demand, but a system which takes your money and then makes you click on a web page hundreds of times instead of just giving you the next available time is absurd and those responsible for setting it up should be sacked.

Long comment from http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/02/misuse-of-velocity-in-agile-projects.html has turned into a post here.

Scrum and Agile is something I'm particularly interested in and enthused about.  But it is strange how many people throw the terms around or even claim to work on Agile teams without a background in the reasons and common applications of Agile.  I'm not saying you have to do everything in your Agile book, but at least read one!

Some of these comments make my eyes bulge out a little bit.  I think even the most elementary book on scrum makes it really clear why we use story points and why they are the basis of all sprint planning.  

Now granted, this is *really* hard to use when you are responsible to a client and have to invoice weekly with the # of hours of work performed and estimate ahead of time what they will get for X.  Time and Materials or fixed bid, client's have expectations.  But outside of that, if you can get a client who is happy to use agile that basically means they hire X full-time people for N number of days - and hope to fullfil part of an agreed upon roadmap.

In that case, the point is that you will never have the fastest, most accurate, most consistent, perfect engineers.  However, you will always have customers - internal or external.  And the hope is that you can at least set realistic expectations with the customers which your engineers have ownership over meeting.  How do you do that?  You let your engineers estimate what they can accomplish, and you check that estimate against what they said they could do in the past.  That's what velocity is about. Not holding people accountable, but letting people hold themselves accountable.

Think of it as pacing yourself in a marathon against your average time, not trying to race others.  You can't race others because:

a). This ain't a marathon and there are a 100 finish lines

b). This ain't a marathon, more like a decathlon and some teams will excel in certain areas and flop in others.

To Sum:

Any measuring you do should be sujective, not quantitative.

Since estimation is subjective, comparing quantitatively between teams is useless.

Give smart people tools to do their job, communicate with customers and get out of the way!

You could measure estimation ability by seeing how often a team meets their targets.  But then, you are also measuring the amount of crap their customers make them deal with, company politics, internet connectivity, coffee quality, etc :)  Just let good engineers get to work.  If you're paying attention, you'll know is performing and who is committed to performance.