test please delete

[BrowneIssue]

I used to work with a bloke who NEVER took his jumper off.

We eventually speculated he just had cuffs 'n' collar sewed in to the jumper.

Once day, drunk, I queried if this was the case.

He was grumpy: he does it because he can't be doing with ironing and he was narked he had not had the cuffs / collar idea himself!

[BrowneIssue]

m dash, n dash and hyphen

I've been reading up on dashes ('m' and 'n') and hyphens 'cos of this newsletter as what I've been working on.

You know how Word changes your hyphens into a longer dash when you enter a space after it? That's Word turning it into a dash.

What a messy business it is - the rules about when to use each kind of dash or a hyphen is quite complicated. Too damn complicated to be thinking about when typing up documents.

[BrowneIssue]

Every time I read up on Agile programming, I just get more confused.

[BrowneIssue]

It seemed very similar to the approach we were using at [client] back in the early 1990s.

[BrowneIssue]

We were trying to develop a solution to be used by 14 different - but similarish - business units that had never had to work in a common way before.

[BrowneIssue]

What we used to do was:

- have a meeting with half a dozen or so representatives from the end user areas;
- get their suggestions of what to put together next;
- spend two weeks (approx, sometimes one sometimes six weeks) putting together a prototype;
- have a meeting with another half a dozen or so reps to demo the prototype and get feedback;
- either tweak the prototype or code it;
- if a prototype was acceptable, we'd roll it it;
- back to start.

[BrowneIssue]

It was actually a bit more complicated than that. We would have a number of changes running in parallel: some being rolled out, some being tested, some being coded, some being prototyped.

[BrowneIssue]

We could get a small change through the process in about two weeks when we needed to.

[BrowneIssue]

This was being done concurrently with some major work that took months, such as co-ordinating with central finance system changes. On the whole, the end-user business areas were not involved with these changes so it was occurring transparently to them.

[BrowneIssue]

We kept this going for about 2 or 3 years.