Agile Learning Labs

What Makes Agile Projects Succeed (or fail)? - Code Camp

Approximately 30 people came together Sunday morning to examine the question: "What makes agile projects succeed (or fail)?" This was one of my sessions at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2007, an open space conference that had over 900 registrants.

We generated and clarified almost 50 success or failure factors. Next the whole group participated in ranking the factors into tiers, from most important to least important. Dot voting was used to allow each participant's experience to count equally, resulting in a result that reflects the collective wisdom of the group present. We managed to do all of this in less than an hour and a half! To learn more about the process and how to use it, click here.

Here are the top success (or failure) factors, as determined by the group:

Tier One
Quick deployment
Automated tests

Tier Two
Close communication with end-user / End-user inclusiveness
Skilled developers

Tier Three
Small task size
Unclear requirements combined with lack of vision and leadership (failure)
Tool selection challenges (failure)

Tier Four
Avoiding context switches
Empowerment
Embracing flexibility
Agile / Multi-site (not co-located ) challenges (failure)
Developer resistance to refactoring (failure)
Hard to do budget upfront (failure)

Tier Five
Education and mentoring
Lack of documentation for new dev team members
Whole systems thinking
Lack of big picture view
Stakeholders more supportive, have better visibility
Bootstrapping the team
Poor communication with customers about budget and/or feature set (failure)

Tier Six
Gelled team
Frequent refactoring
Knowing the difference between research and development
Communication within the team
Story backlog unmanageable (failure)

Here are the results from a different goup that examined the same question at Agile Open CA.

Silicon Valley Code Camp

Code Camp is a free conference by and for the developer community. Speakers volunteer their time and everyone attends for free. It's a place to learn, to network and to dig into some code. It's happening this weekend.

I'll be doing two sessions Sunday morning:
"Agile Intro" and "What Makes Agile Projects Succeed (or fail)?"

Engineering Managers Support Group - Tonight

The October 2007 Engineering Managers Support Group meeting is just a few hours away!

Where:
Round Table Pizza (event room)
61 43rd Ave
San Mateo, CA

Schedule:
7:00 PM Socializing and free pizza
7:30 PM Getting a New Hire Up and Running

You have found an ideal candidate; made them an offer, and they start in two weeks. Now what? I will share an approach that has worked for me, and some lessons learned as well. Please bring your experiences to share, and together we will unearth best practices for integrating new hires into the team.

After that, we will have a facilitated discussion where participants can share challenges that they are facing and get feedback, ideas, and support from the group. The event is free and so it the pizza! Come out, join the discussion, and become a better manager.

Agile Open CA - Retrospective

Agile Open California 2007 has come to an end. I am sitting on a pier here at the Fort Mason Center, enjoying a muffin from Greens, watching sailboats, and collecting my thoughts.

I met some truly interesting people, heard some amazing stories, and learned much. I am exhausted and energized at the same time. I am so inspired, that I have volunteered to be a part of the conference team for next year! This was the most amazing conference experience that I've ever had.

Agile Open CA - Day One

Wow! The people and the energy are fantastic!

I was a busy guy today. I facilitated three sessions:

• Why Do Agile Projects Succeed (or fail)?
• The Business Case for Agile
• Managing Agile

Agile Open California 2007

Open Space is a conference format of the people, for the people, and by the people. Participants cooperatively create the agenda and host sessions on topics that they feel passionately about.

This month, the agile community is putting on an Open Space conference at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Sound interesting? It gets better. This one is unbelievably affordable. For only $250 you get two full days, October 22nd and 23rd.

I've proposed two sessions:

• The Business Case for Agile
• What Makes Agile Projects Successful?

Agile Open California Website

Register Here

See you there!

Photo courtesy of Peter Kaminski

Getting a New Hire Up and Running - October Engineering Managers Support Group

You have found an ideal candidate, made him an offer, and he starts in two weeks. Now what? At this month's Engineering Managers Support Group meeting I will share an approach that worked well for me, and some lessons learned as well. Please bring your experiences to share, and together we will unearth best practices for integrating new hires into the team.

After that, we will have a facilitated discussion where participants can share challenges that they are facing and get feedback, ideas, and support from the group. The event is free and so it the pizza! Come out, join the discussion, and become a better manager.

We are meeting on Wednesday, October 24th, in San Mateo.
RSVP now

FogBugz 6.0 - Stunning

I went to Joel's demo of FogBugz 6.0 this morning. I have to say that Ben, the engineer in charge of UI, has done some spectacular work. This is the most usable web-app that I have ever seen. It seems every bit as interactive as a good old Windows application. Congrats to Ben, Joel, and the whole FogBugz team.

Lunch With Joel Spolsky

I'm sitting in a Starbucks in the 'Multimedia Gulch' area of San Francisco, having just shared some fine San Francisco Burritos with Joel Spolsky. It's been a few years since we last chatted, and much has changed. Joel's company, Fog Creek Software, has more than doubled in size. They have mostly filled their recently expanded office space and Joel is busy figuring out how much space they should get to accommodate future growth. A new version of FogBugz has just been released and Joel is doing a demo tour. I think he still has space available in a few of his Bay Area demos. If you get a chance, check it out. I'll be there tomorrow morning in Mountain View.

We explored the question of how big can an engineering group get before it needs formal leadership and management structure. Fog Creek is still below the threshold. When I joined FactSet, we were just getting there. I remember fondly the time when all the projects where single-person affairs. It is a much more efficient way to work, as each person that gets added to the team adds exponentially to the communication overhead. OK, exponential is really more theoretical (think fully connected graph) than practical, but the point remains that as the team gets bigger, more time is spent communicating.

We posited that very often, a company bumps into the need for more 'management' or leadership when they take on the task of building the second product. While the company's original product may have evolved organically over time, starting as the brainchild and fruit of one person and growing head-count slowly, companies often try to accelerate the process with subsequent products. They have the bodies now, so they should be able to build out the product faster by assigning 10 or 20 people to the project from day one; right? Maybe, but such an effort takes leadership. Put 20 brilliant software developers in a room and tell them that the company needs them to build a snazzy new product and you will often get 20 radically different ideas about what that means how they should proceed. This is a perfect recipe for a bunch of thrashing, but not much progress toward a good product.

We sparred a bit over the value of agile development methods, especially Extreme Programming (XP), but that conversation quickly ended with us both agreeing that good teams can use such practices effectively and that dysfunctional teams can abuse them. In the end, it's the people that matter the most.