bitwix

Tangential comments about Software Development

Monday, November 23, 2009

You Assume, I Bet

"That will work," he said. "How do you know?" I said. "I assume it will," he said.

I'm all in favour of intuition. But in Agile programming, I find that the feedback loop when intuition fails is not sharp enough. When my assuming colleague is wrong, he doesn't feel enough pain and goes on to assume another day.

In future, I will require a monetisation of his confidence. Instead of "I assume it will" I will get him to say "I bet it will" followed by the question "how much?" Is this a five pence level of confidence or a five pound one?

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Either he's very good and he wins all the bets. Or I have a get-rich-quick scheme. Or he learns to question his assumptions regularly. Any of these results will be good. Or so I'd assume.