Hiccupps

    This week at work my team attended a Myers Briggs Type Indicator workshop. Beforehand we each completed a questionnaire which assigned us a personality type based on our position on five behavioural preference axes. For what it's worth, this time I was labelled INFJ-A and roughly at the mid-point on every axis.  I am sceptical about the value of such labels . In my less charitable moments, I imagine that the MBTI exercise gives us each a box and, later when work shows up, we try to force the work into the box regardless of any compatiblity in size and shape. On the other hand, I am not sceptical about the value of having conversations with those I work with about how we each like to work or, if you prefer it, what shape our boxes are, how much they flex, and how eager we are to chop problems up so that they fit into our boxes. Wondering how to stretch the workshop's conversational value into something ongoing I decided to write a README for ...

  Last month I started thinking about slicing , my instinctive approach to looking for perspectives on a problem, an opinion, an observation, or anything else. This time around I've got an example to talk about. On Fridays I ensemble with a group of medical quality engineers and medical knowledge engineers. We learn from each other, about testing and about the domain. On and off recently we've looked at a project of theirs which aims to understand better what work they do, how they do it, and why it's that way, and then write it up for internal and external consumption. In one early session, with a wider group in the company, there was an extremely open and exciting conversation about what should be covered in this effort.  It was the kind of discussion that greenfield projects often have, before scope is nailed down, where the world seems ripe with possibility, no difficulties have been identified, and there is no talk of who will taking respons...