Agile Learning Labs

This week on InfoQ - Information radiators: Is low-tech really better?

In this week's InfoQ article, Chris covers the debate over high tech vs.low tech toolsets (what Alistair Cockburn refers to as information radiators) for managing agile projects: eg, which is the lesser evil, killing a tree and taping its carcass to the wall one notecard at a time, or clicking through an annoying heirarchical menu every time you want to see your data?

The focus of the article is a discussion thread on the Xtreme Programming Yahoo Group, where topic is being contested with a great deal of heat.

There is a natural tendency among technologists to prefer technological solutions, but many of the debaters claim that experience has shown the low tech solutions to be best. Ron Jeffries says:

Display important project information not in some formal way, not on the web, not in PowerPoint, but in charts on the wall that no one can miss....A web site doesn't push information at us; we have to go look. A slide show always comes with a meeting and a lecture. A wall chart is there when we are, in our face, always visible.

This makes intuitive sense to me. I think there's something important about making the whole visible at a glance. Imagine how hard it would be to read a novel if there were one word printed per page--we read words in context, not in isolation. I think we experience projects much the same way, and it's important to always have a view of the gestalt.

The Agile Tools blog has an archival post that features pictures of several examples (as pictured) of both virtual and physical task boards. It's interesting to look at them and see which ones make you want to be on that project.

The Agile Conference Calendar is now live

Last year Chris spent more time on tour than Madonna, logging appearances at no fewer than eleven software conferences. To keep track of all this activity and help us plan for 2009, I've been building out a Google calendar listing all of the upcoming software conferences nationwide (and a few beyond) that are most relevant to agile practitioners. It's up to date through June as of now. We've had a few requests to share this data, so here it is on its own page. Enjoy!

See you at P Camp

Apparently you and your entire extended family have already signed up to attend P Camp, as registration is now closed at 550 sign-ups. There is, however, a hint that it may be opened up again should host Enthiosys figure out a way to lay folks head to foot instead of end to end and squeeze more of them into the Yahoo Campus venue. We hope so, and will keep you posted!

For those of you who missed last year's camp, it is a one day unconference for Product Managers, meaning that any attendee can propose and lead a session on any topic they like. Last year, Chris led a session on Why Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail) and packed the house for an Agile 101 session. There were so many good questions he didn't get through all of his material. Here is a blow by blow description of everything that happened at P-Camp last year.

This is a superbly organized event, with a great website, a facebook group, a linkedin group, and a wiki that people actually use. Apparently someone there knows how to manage a project.

Save 44% on SD West Registration--This Week Only!

We got an email from Tami Carter, Conference Director for SD West, with a sweet offer to pass on to our readers and clients:

Save 44% on SD West — This Week Only!

In honor of Presidents' Day and our newly inaugurated 44th president,
we are offering an exclusive discount. Register with the code 9W4400
by this Friday, February 20, to save 44% off the All Access Pass, VIP
Pass or Conference Pass!

Chris will be running a session on What Makes Agile Projects Succeed on Thursday Morning. I've never been to SD West, but want to go just to meet Tami, who is the coolness, which I know from following her highly entertaining twitterfeed. Here's a bit from her blog post on 25 Things About SD West 2009:

1) Uncle Bob's keynote on March 9 at 12:15 PM. Extreme Programming may
be 10 years old, but it still attracts controversy and debate. Has
agile really improved the way we create software?

2) Better Software, No Matter What. Scott Meyers' full day tutorial on
improving software quality is a can't-miss on Monday.

3) Drink beer and eat pizza while finding out about life inside
LinkedIn Engineering at Monday night's Birds-of-a-Feather gathering.

4) Get around the Scrum pyramid scheme. Learn about the agile method,
using the agile method in Mike Vizdos's half-day tutorial on Tuesday,
March 10.

5) Tuesday's Booth Crawl through a jam-packed expo floor, featuring
platinum exhibitors IBM and Intel, along with a host of other leading
software development companies.

6) "Better Software, No Matter What. Scott Meyers' full day tutorial
on improving software quality is a can't-miss on Monday.

7) Drink beer and eat pizza while finding out about life inside
LinkedIn Engineering at Monday night's Birds-of-a-Feather gathering.

8) Get around the Scrum pyramid scheme. Learn about the agile method,
using the agile method in Mike Vizdos's half-day tutorial on Tuesday,
March 10.

9) Tuesday's Booth Crawl through a jam-packed expo floor, featuring
platinum exhibitors IBM and Intel, along with a host of other leading
software development companies.

10) The most comprehensive and complete C++ training available
anywhere, taught by such C++ Gurus as Dan Saks, Stephen Dewhurst,
David Abrahams and more…

11) IBM's Scott Ambler and Terry Quatrani debate agile and traditional
software development in their Wednesday afternoon keynote.

Etc.

Read the rest here, and go here to register for the conference.

Chris is on the Cranky Middle Manager Show talking about Agile

If you want to hear Chris explain agile in layman's terms, have a listen to this episode of the Cranky Middle Manger Show, where Chris is the featured guest. The show is hosted by our friend, Wayne Turmel, who is jovially cranky in a way that only a stand-up comic-turned-management trainer can be.

We did a pilot for a two day course with Wayne in Chicago last year, aimed at introducing newly-promoted individual contributors to the dark arts of management. It was a lot of fun, and would be even more fun to do in-house at your company now that you have a hiring freeze and need to bootstrap your junior people into management... but I digress.

Wayne dedicates each show to a historical figure; it's always someone fascinating you've never heard of, and it's always eerily apt--don't know how he does it. This episode is dedicated to Gaius Marius, "reorganization consultant to the Roman Army."

Another Cranky standard, the quote of the week, is from the Kaballah, and is also astonishingly relevant to agile practice:

"Every phase of evolution commences by being in a state of unstable force and proceeds through organization to equilibrium. Equilibrium having been achieved, no further development is possible without once more oversetting,"

Don't talk about Scrum Club

This week Chris wrote his Monday morning InfoQ Article on Scrum Club, which organizes software developers to train in scrum practices (which can be applied to their Certified Scrum Practitioner requirements) by working on projects for charity. Their promo video looks eerily like something written by Chuck Palahniuk and directed by David Fincher. To call it irreverent is a drastic understatement:

How often do you see non-profits that are this in-your-face and edgy? And with no corporate constituencies to please, why shouldn't they be? I'm tired of charity work being seen as weak and warm and fuzzy. Clearly these guys are too!

Agility is about discipline, not control...

I read Jurgen Appelo on The Decline and Fall of Agilists this morning, in which he calls out those who insist on defining agile as a set of static procedures: "According to these agilists, being agile is not about being adaptable and doing whatever it takes to make your project a long-lasting success. These days, agilists simply claim that agile is about following practices X, Y and Z." On the contrary, he says, “Agility is about moving software projects to the area of complexity, right between order and chaos.”

I visualize what he’s talking about as resembling surfing (at the beach, not online): If chaos is the motion of the ocean and order is the rigidity of the land, then agility is the skillset we use to ride the waves at the juncture of these two forces.

The agile adoption processhas no ideal form, Jurgen says, and will look and feel very different for each team that undertakes it, depending on the weather and the waves, so to speak: whether they are starting from a position deep in chaos (like a growing startup) or from an ordered position (like a waterfall team at a large company).

To add to the surfing metaphor, once you’re “up,” being agile has nothing to do with control, but everything to do with discipline: it is all about learning to keep one’s balance and adapt to ever-shifting contexts, exercising strength, flexibility, muscle memory and anticipation to stay on top of the wave and ride it forward—the minute you stiffen up and start to second-guess yourself, that’s when you lose “control” and wipe out.

So why this rather dull tendency among agile proponents to want to exert control, to nail down a definition of what is agile, and what is not? It is almost always the case that our strengths are also our weaknesses, and I wonder if it isn’t also the mathematical mind of the programmer that yearns to establish acceptance tests for what makes a project agile or a person an agilist.

Agile Open Northwest - What Makes Agile Projects Succeed?

For the last session of Agile Open Northwest, Chris pulled out a Greatest Hit, his Group Wisdom Without Groupthink workshop on the topic, "What Makes Agile Projects Succeed?" This workshop teaches a structured brainstorming technique while exploring the topic--a two fer one proposition. First, participants brainstorm silently on the topic, then there are several rounds in which people list their ideas while a scribe posts them on the wall. We had around thirty ideas from this group of around fifteen people. Next, everyone got eight stickers and voted for their top choices. At the end, we rearranged the items according to their popularity and discussed the results.

The winning notiions, as someone pointed out, emphasized teamwork over the technical aspects of agile. "How can Continuous Integration rank so low!?!?" one developer cried. Well, it's possible that in a room full of technical experts, these things are taken for granted and thus don't rank as "important" even though they are essential! Every group we lead through this exercise has a different outcome, as you can see here and here.

Below are the rankings for this group:

10 votes

Agile coach

 

9 votes

Freedom to fail

 

8 votes

Short iterations

Cutomer driven goals

Team dynamics

Commitment to the process

 

7 votes

Continuous Integration

 

6 votes

Empower product owner

Sustainable pace

 

5 votes

Adaptable people

 

4 votes

Knowledge  sharing

Technical competency

Communicate status

Active product owner

 

3 votes

Management understanding

Good scrum master

People who fit the process

Unit testing & tools

Definition of done

Prioritize

 

2 votes

Realistic expectation of velocity

Trust and accountability

Lessons learned

 

1 vote

Reward

People

PM tools

Trust the process

 

0 votes

Team brainstorming

Management support

Good people manager

Desire to learn

Agile Open Northwest: My Personal Retrospective

There was a moment, sitting in a session billed as "An Oral History of Agile," when Ward Cunningham mentioned that he had the idea to call the Agile Manifesto a manifesto because he'd read Cluetrain, and I realized suddenly both where I was and when I was: My God, I thought, I have shoes in my closet that are older than the Agile Manifesto! I'm here at the very beginning of something big.

This was a terribly exciting revelation: Agile is so brand-spanking new that it's pretty easy to find yourself in a room full of people with first-hand knowledge of the very 'aha' moments that led to its inception. That who was there this week at Agile Open Northwest, people who have done a great deal of very original thinking on what amounts to the future of work.

Yes, I think that how we do software will be important beyond the realm of technology, because software is to this century what auto manufacturing was to the last: when Henry Ford invented the assembly line, he was inventing the human experience of production--how the individual relates to others, and to the process. These agilists may be doing just that for the next century. Only time will tell, and I am happy to be there to find out.

Here in no particular order are the highlights, for me, of the two days of sessions:

My first aha of the conference came during Jim Shore's session on Agile Adoption Strategies. Jim said that, in his experience, gradual change doesn't in fact ease people in, it just burns them out on constant change and makes them unreceptive to the big insights. He elaborates on that idea, and on transition vs. transformation, here.

Jim also noted that it takes any team 3-4 iterations to achieve "familiarity" with agile processes, but that it matters not whether those iterations last 90 minutes or four weeks. This suggests to me that agile learning games and simulations are more valuable than I'd previously thought...

Speaking of which, Chris ran an agile games session (twice as it turned out), the crux of which was "the chair game," which pits teams against each other to solve a physical problem. After watching three teams spend twenty minutes trying to solve it and finally succeed, Jeremy Lightsmith observed, "It wasn't the great idea that solved the problem, it was the listening."

A comment all the more remarkable as the exercise was conducted in silence, evidence that listening takes place on more planes than the auditory.

In the last session of the conference, Chris pulled out one of his "greatest hits," a structured brainstorming exercise on "What Makes Agile Projects Succeed?" The number one factor: having a good agile coach. Number two: freedom to fail.

That was a recurring theme: that agile processes leverage failure well. It's clear that one way agile leads to quality software is by allowing us to quickly identify errors and convert them to learning, rather than waiting until they are "problems" that cost us time and money. Llewellyn Falco showed us a skit using pennies, quarters and dice that neatly demonstrated something I am hereby dubbing the ROE, or Return on Error. Maybe that should be a new metric?

In the same vein, here's a quote I heard third hand during the conference closing, which sums up the Agile Failure Ethic nicely: "Broken gets fixed; shoddy is forever."

Another big aha for me revolved around my use of Twitter (#AONW). I tweeted my favorite quotes and insights throughout both days, and I found on reflection that even during sessions I deemed to be relative duds, I was gleaning insights, like "Done right, a 2 sentence user story is harder to write than a 40 page spec." That came right before I bailed on a session where I didn't think I was learning anything!

Twitter also enhanced the social potency of the conference. During a break, John Wilger approached me to talk about something I'd tweeted during a previous session, Ward's remark that 'Rails is a post-XP environment,' and we had a conversation about that. What a great way to capture extra goodness and be in places you aren't.

I'm looking forward to applying all of this learning to Agile Open California 2009 in October.

Agile Open Northwest - Agile Games 2

The only game that we played at both of the agile learning games sessions was 'Arranging the Deck Chairs.' It's a very simple, if physical, game. There are only 3 rules that the players must abide by:

• No talking
• No ambulances
• Nothing that will require HR to get involved

There are many ways to set up the goal, or goals, for the players to achieve. Without the ability to speak, it's interesting to see how quickly people fall into automatic, yet dysfunctional, modes of behavior and interaction. Many thanks to Deborah Hartman Preuss for teaching this game to me at Agile Coach Camp 2008.

Here is what the game looked like yesterday, at Agile Open Northwest.

Thanks to Currious Attempt Bunny for the video, and his comments about the session.

Two sites that agile learning games fans should know about are: Tasty Cupcakes and Thiagi.

Cheers,

Chris