Today's Comic Story

For the third time this week, I was centre stage for something at work: this time, providing the "Introduction to Agile" presentation for about 8 recent hires at work. I'd done this dog and pony show once before so I was able to wing it (no preparation required) and still feel fairly confident about pulling it off. It's a roughly 20-minute Power Point slide show, with an accompanying 5- to 10-minute interactive exercise.

The aforementioned interlude in the prezo involves getting a volunteer from the 'newbies' who's willing to do some drawing with markers in front of the rest of us. I try to explain Agile by way of an example showing the power of collaboration: the artist-on-demand draws whatever the audience asks for, and those pseudo-customers react to what's added to the canvas by enhancing their requests. Each time I've done this activity, including with the Grade 9s earlier this week, the results are wildly different. And then I show everyone the requirements that I'd written out beforehand, which consist of a few requests like "a house", "some trees" and "a sunny day." The picture that came about interactively typically better represents whatever the group present wanted, because they were allowed to tailor it as the exercise went along.

Anyway, one of the items drawn this time was a sun (to go along with some storm clouds and a rainbow), which happened to get drawn with a red marker (there was no yellow marker available). My boss came into the room long after the picture was finished, looked it over, and said, "Ah, a red sun, meaning..." at which point we both said, in unison, "that Superman would have no powers!" The new hires and HR representatives all laughed loudly at this amusing display of geekitude, wondrous in its glory!