(2022-01-12) Jeffries Jam Session

Ron Jeffries: Jam Session. One of our members, who shall by the group’s convention remain nameless, began the evening with a bit of a rant regarding Jerry Weinberg’s Law of Raspberry Jam: “The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets”.

Now I’m going to make a few points here, including:
That is the way it is: good ideas get spread thin, to the point of becoming useless.
That’s not the only way it is: there is another Weinberg law.
We have new opportunities to take advantage of that other law.

There is another Weinberg law which people seem to forget, the Law of Strawberry Jam: As long as it has lumps, you can never spread it too thin.

What are lumps in this line of work?

I think a lump would have to be a very small idea, and one that is so solid that once you get it, you have it, and if you don’t get it, you don’t. We need ideas that are small, that can only be adopted as a whole, and when adopted, they make enough of a difference to stick.

Is the notion of a Retrospective a lump? How about a daily quick group meeting? How about Test-Driven Development?

I suspect that TDD is too large to be a lump

you can’t write a one-lump book. Lumps are too small

There is another form of lump that has become available to us, and I want to suggest that we’re not making use of it as well as we might.

You’ll have heard of it. It’s called the Internet. It’s called YouTube. It’s called TikTok. It’s called having an entire video studio in your den. We have the ability to record our ideas and to say them directly to anyone who wants to know what we offer, today, tomorrow, and for a long time in the future... If I could get millions of views from programmers, I fancy that I could perhaps get some lumps across... The point here is that we have the opportunity in today’s world to spread our ideas without the Telephone Game interfering so much. (Sources Go Direct)