Martin was at our office last week to talk about refactoring and other eXtreme Programming related topics. One of my colleagues gave Martin a nice introduction. When Martin failed to materialize in the room, my colleague attempted to stretch out the intro. Eventually one of Martin's assistants stepped in to tell us that he was not feeling well, but would be with us in a moment. Sure enough, a few minutes later Martin stepped in to the room, apologized for the delay and for the likely brevity of his remarks. He then sat on a table, composed himself (I was thinking to myseelf "Gee, if you're really this ill, please don't feel compelled to go through with this presentation"). He then stood up and spoke quite eloquently about the importance of people in achieving quality programming results. I loved it. No amount of process definition, no level of comittment to CMM is going to make good programming results come out of an average, or less than average, staff. It always comes back to people and developing their skills and treating them like they are people with skills that are valued.

10:32:54 AM