Agile Learning Labs

The June Conference Circuit

By Hillary Johnson

If you're like us, you've dialed-back your conference-going in the past couple of years, but one event that's not to be missed is the Agile Roots Conference in Salt Lake City. Both Chris and Steve will be presenting, and we'll be handing out the very first "samplers" from our forthcoming Agile Dictionary project. Why do we love Agile Roots? Because it takes place in Salt Lake City, near the birthplace of the Agile Manifesto, and opens with a keynote address by Jeff Patton titled Nobody Wants Your Stupid Process. See, you want to go now, don't you?

Steve will be presenting one of Agile Learning Labs' greatest hits, a workshop he designed called Flying Through Bottlenecks. Chris will be doing The Great Agile Requirements Showdown, which could just as easily be called Showdown at the Agile Corral. Both workshops are participatory, and a lot of fun.

On the way to Agile Roots, Chris will be making a whistle-stop at the Better Software Conference in Las Vegas, where on Thursday, June 10th he'll do a little number he picked up from Steve, Eliminating Process Bottlenecks: The Theory of Constraints. I think I like Steve's workshop title a bit better, even though it's less explanatory; who doesn't want to learn to fly?)

Somewhere between the two conferences, Chris is going to manage to stop by Los Angeles to attend my son's high school graduation. What a whirlwind. Good thing he's so Agile....

What Does Your Team Need? Girl Power!

By Hillary Johnson

Last weekend, Chris and I attended a marvelous event called Dare 2B Digital, aimed at addressing the gender gap in computer science careers, and at which 7th through 10th grade girls got to play at writing code, crafting business plans, and other techie things.

We held a session called "Teamstorming," leading a group of enthusiastic students in a series of the same learning games we use to teach teams of software developers on big, important enterprise projects to work together collaboratively.

We were completely blown away. The girls weren't just good: they were great. This was the most quick-witted, productive, outgoing and naturally cooperative group of individuals we've ever had the pleasure of teaching, by a significant margin. Chris and I have both mentioned to several people now our experience of finding the teenaged girls smarter, stronger, faster and sharper than their elders of any gender, and have heard a few theories about why this might be, the top three being:

They are unspoiled.
They are female.
They are female and unspoiled.

We laughed, too. But each of these notions has some merit. First, there is the unsullied youth theory: It seems patently obvious that many adults have a great deal of wariness, and weariness, to overcome before they are open to participating freely in a game-based exercise. Our teaching style is based entirely around games and simulations, and the younger a student is, the closer she is to the memory of learning almost entirely though play. It is not, however, particularly true that children are born collaborators, as any parent whose pre-school has a biter enrolled can tell you.

As for the gender question: Are females, by nature or nurture, better collaborators and problem solvers than males? To whatever extent our temperaments are deterministic, my hunch is that girls would respond better to the collaborative exercises, and the boys to the competitive ones. There is research-based evidence that there are gender-based differences in learning styles, but the same research indicates that the variation between individuals is greater than the variation between the genders.

So yes, the girls may benefit from being both female and unspoiled, but this doesn't mean they are superior to the male and the spoiled, it just means they're naturally suited to collaboration and have nothing to unlearn as they encounter collaborative situations.

But by adulthood, we are all engaged in activities that may or may not speak to our true natures. Girls don't tend to play with toy cars, but they grow up to drive real cars in the same numbers as men. And if you believe insurance companies' actuarial tables, they grow up to be the better drivers. On the flip side, I think this means that boys can grow up to be fine collaborators, as good as or better than their female counterparts, despite their greater inclination toward competitive styles.

I am not a big fan of determinism. Things do come out in the wash, and in the long run, even unlearning can be a productive process. As Chris will tell you, part of the reason he values Agile so much is that teamwork and collaboration do not always come naturally to him--he was once a boy who played with cars, after all. He has enjoyed being in a traditional leadership role, and can remember exactly what it was like to resist the urge to "help" a team, instead letting them solve their own problems through self-organization. Which is why he is good at teaching Agile techniques, especially to people who have a lot of un-learning of traditional top-down management styles to do.

The clear outcome, to me, is that the gender bias in the field of software development that persists today is entirely bogus. If boys have an edge when it comes to math--hence their delight in code--and girls have an edge when it comes to collaboration, then it seems stupefyingly clear to me that you're most likely to have a high-functioning team if you have both styles well represented, with plenty of room allowed for something even more important: individuality.

Better Software = Agile Software

By Hillary Johnson

This year's Better Software Conference in Las Vegas on June 6-11 is all about Agile, to judge by the program. The conference runs concurrently with the Agile Development Practices West conference (with twofer admission). Better Software is also bookended by certification courses in ScrumMaster and Agile Testing Practices early in the week, and the Agile Alliance's one day Agile Leadership Summit , chaired by Polyanna Pixton, on Friday.

In addition to the usual presentations on release planning, user stories and backlog grooming, the program has a lot of emphasis on what are sometimes termed "soft skills"--i.e., the ability of technophiles to interact with carbon-based life forms, sessions with names like: Selecting Agile Team Members, Verbal Agility and Better Decisions Through Collaboration.

There will also be fun and games. Chris will be leading a session called Eliminating Process Bottlenecks: The Theory of Constraints, which has participants building paper airplanes--and running a paper aerospace company--to explore problems and solutions.

InfoQ: Agile Coach Camp Announced

By Hillary Johnson

Chris' most recent InfoQ article is a preview of Agile Coach Camp, billed as the Open Space conference "delivering value to those delivering value." The conference, which takes place in Durham, NC next month, is a bit different than most Agile gatherings, in that aspiring participants must "audition" for admission by submitting a position paper, guaranteeing a high level of professional discourse. Check out Chris' article for a preview of some of the topics proposed so far. Last year, Chris facilitated a couple of sessions, including one on What Makes Agile Projects Succeed.

Agile Open NorCal: Requirements Discovery & Story Mapping Workshop

By Hillary Johnson

Chris and Jeremy Lightsmith proposed similar sessions, and so chose to combine them into one. About 15 people showed up for an exercise-based session on generating requirements using the Story Mapping technique, which Chris first learned about from Jeff Patton. As I’ve done in the past, I served as the putative “client,” in my guise as editor-in-chief of a newspaper—come on, you remember newspapers, those things the Brits used to wrap fish back in the olden days? (BTW, the New York Times is now a mere 11 inches wide. I think this is the next step toward ceasing print publication, as it’s now conveniently laid out to be printed on your home printer.)

For the first phase, Jeremy interviewed me to tease out big picture goals I had for a system to manage my work flow, from story assignment to layout. “Trackability” was one, with the measurability factor being to lower the moment of “Oh s—t!” moments per edition of the paper. Then participants broke into two groups and brainstormed for ten minutes to come up with a handful of goals for a fictional new system for renting videos online, based on Netflix.

In round two, Chris interviewed me to determine the personas involved. Then the groups reconvened and created personas for the users of the Netflix system.

In the final round, Chris conducted an abbreviated interview tracing my work flow and breaking it down into rough-hewn user stories: “Assign a story to a writer,” “Assign a story to an issue,” “Submit story to art department for layout.” After that, the groups worked on their Netflix user stories, and quickly got the hang  of it: “Add to queue,” “Sort by category,” etc.

For being so brief, the workshop operated on two levels:

On one level, the process showed that user stories, however granular they may come, are best woven out of whole cloth, that context is king, and if you get the big picture from the horse's mouth (ugh, mixed metaphor--where's a copy editor when you need one?), your user stories will almost write themselves.

On another level entirely, the exercises introduced them to the concept of the Story Map as a big-picture information radiator that helps developers working on highly granular user stories keep their sense of connection to the big picture, and especially to the end user. You could almost call it an empathy radiator.

Experiential Intro to Agile: First session of the day at Agile Open Northern California

By Hillary Johnson

We're just finishing up with Chris' first session at Agile Open Northern California, an experiential introduction to Agile. Chris led a group of 16 through two simulation exercises, then teased out the basics of Agile during the debriefs. Below is graphic facilitator Elizabeth McClellan's capture of the first exercise, where participants drew and folded paper party invitations--first using a wasteful batch and cue process, next using a more agile, incremental approach:

And here are the group's "aha" moments following the exercise...

Are you coming to Agile Open California?

by Hillary Johnson

Last year, Chris was on the coordinating committee for Agile Open California, a grassroots Open Space conference for and by the local agile development community. This year, the privilege falls on me. I was bit by the Open Space bug last year, and have now been to several. The format lends itself to surfacing all kinds of ideas and expertise, and fostering the kind of feverish engagement that leads people to revolutions in their thinking. If you're a die-hard agilista, or just curious, please do join us this year on October 15 & 16 at Fort Mason, in San Francisco (there's a SoCal sister conference in September). If you register early (as in now), it's a mere $150, which is a pretty good price for guaranteed transcendental enlightenment.

Here's a blog post by David Carlton about a session called I hate Pair Programming that should give you a fair idea of the kind of content to expect. And below are some images to whet your appetite:

Artist Elizabeth McClellan captured many of the sessions for posterity.

Here people are swarming around the "marketplace," where participants have posted sessions they'd like to lead--or attend.

And here is Chris looking terribly dignified and businesslike.

If I'm doing Scrumbut, does that make me a Scrumass?

By Hillary Johnson

... or, enough already! Is Agile dead, alive, stagnant, the future, the past, the ultimate, the end, the Will of God? Am I doing it right, wrong, backwards, sideways, on a boat, with a goat? Should I get certified by the Scrum Alliance, or the Scrum Horde? And should I even care?

Let me back up a moment, to an aha I had a couple of days ago, while attending the Agile Alliance's reception in San Francisco, which was fun and interesting. The Alliance asked us to form small groups and lob suggestions at their draft roadmap. They were serious about it, too: each group had its own board member to listen and facilitate, and the groups' maps were collected to be used in the planning session on the 'morrow.

One fellow in my group worked for a company that is a leader in successful agile practice and has been for years. He said he wasn't going to Agile 2009 this year, nor was anyone else in his company. The main reason he gave was his feeling that the content of past conferences had been pitched too much at entry level practitioners and the adoption process, and that the cultivation of an expert community of practitioneers (as opposed to a community of consultants), wasn't given priority.

At the Orlando Scrum Gathering, the Scrum Alliance took a lot of well-deserved audience heat for making  "Scrumbut" a featured theme on their new website, including scrumbut curriculum (to their infinite credit they listened and acted, and the Scrumbut content is now gone). Meanwhile, the Scrum Trainers had their own, separate conference after the Gathering--but maybe they should have blended in for the benefit of all. Don't get me wrong, I loved every minute of the Scrum Gathering (full disclosure: Chris and Ainsley Nies organized the Open Space). My point is that I think that talking up to the audience, and thus raising the bar, is important to obtaining true buy in, and solves the same problems scrumbut is aimed at addressing. Think about it: when was the last time you listened to someone who was talking down to you, even if they were right?

Everyone wants to be a part of something cool that works. People sweat for two years to get an MBA because it offers them the path to a bright future, not because someone told them they were an ass if they didn't; likewise, when all is said and done, people will learn to practice agile because it makes them better, faster, stronger, smarter, not because it fixes something broken. Accordingly, I think that the conference that sets aside the corrective, remedial tone and charges forward into the truth, beauty and complexity of a brave new world is the conference we all want to go to.

Diana Larsen said we'd all be bowled over by the program at Agile 2009, and I believe everything Diana says, so it's possible I'm just talking out of my scrumbut and this has already come to pass.

Speaking of conferences and smart people, I get to see Kay Johansen tonight at our Agile Games Party (If you're in Portland, come join us!), and I'm looking forward to talking to her about the AgileRoots conference she's co-organizing in Salt Lake City in June, which also sounds packed with top-flight talent. Good times!

What I learned at Startup Weekend SF: Agility is the state of nature

What's a good mother/son spring break activity? Why, going to Startup Weekend and spending 50 hours building a company with ten total strangers. Perfect because my 17 year-old vastly prefers the company of adults to that of other teenagers, and because he's been on the high school treadmill for so long that I thought it would be nice for him to see what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like--that the world of work can be a rather thrilling place.

Several years ago, I visited the very first Y Combinator class of college-age founders when they were only six weeks into their startups and was astounded at the number of fully functioning products. Turns out six weeks is an eternity, way more time than you need to build and launch a startup!

This weekend, 150 of us crammed into a giant room in Microsoft's Market St. facilities. We were given lots of food (thanks to Sana of Women 2.0) and very little direction. After a free-form round of idea-pitching, with coaching from the lovably dyspeptic Dave McClure (our team-member Han Pham describes his style here), we were cut loose to self-organize into teams.

Tyrone and I were interested in Connor Lee's idea for a venue-rating site for event planners (easy to build in a weekend), and Julian Bryant's pitch for a site that would allow people to intereact around pending legislation. As it turned out, Connor, who had legislative experience Tyrone and I all joined Julian, along with developers Marcus Phillips and Philipp Pfeiffenberger, SEO/Social Media/Web Marketer Aris Vlasakakis, marketing gurus Sherbeam Wright and Mariam Ishpahani, journalist Han and a couple of others who came and went over the weekend. Julian emerged as the natural leader, as well he should being a former Senate intern and Georgetown Law grad with a startup around language learning.

I have worked as an employee or long term contractor on three tech startups, one VC funded, one angel funded, and one bootstrapped. This team outshone them all in terms of raw talent, intellectual horsepower, organization, distribution of skillsets, commitment and efficiency. And we were not alone. In all, 23 teams had working demos or prototypes to share on Sunday evening, and a couple had actually launched fully functioning products (I was using Snoozemail in my gmail inbox before the evening was out). There could be no better demonstration of the power of self-organizing teams than this display of exponential creativity and productivity.

Marcus and Philipp--both Y Combinator alumni if I'm not mistaken--were curious about Agile, and we talked about it a little bit, but there really wasn't time to talk about anything but pushing our product out the door. What I found enlightening was that their native values, instincts and practices were inherently Agile. Being Web 2.0 guys who work in Ruby and Python, they have never been exposed to Waterfall. (The only team that did anything resembling a Waterfall process was the one team that had absolutely nothing to show on Sunday, having spent all their time creating specs.)

This makes me think that perhaps the best way to promote Agile is to take a cue from crime prevention and literacy drives: don't focus on reforming those who have already been "lost" to Waterfall methods; focus instead on preventing the destruction of our talent pool in the first place!

Our team, christened "Democlarity," divided rather quickly into two right-sized sub-teams (also quite Agile). Tyrone went with the bus dev side, working on business planning, market research and content creation, while I went with the development side--the first time I've ever worked on a project and not been the writer/editor. I did some HTML wireframing, then turned my attention to CSS styling while the devs blasted in the functionality.

We had technical difficulties here and there--the wifi broke, version control broke, my host account where I was hosting images while designing went down at a critical point. Marcus and I paired on merging the disparate html files, then Philipp and I paired on some last minute CSS (he is 10x faster than I am, so my main contribution was saying things like, "Can you make that greener?").

Everything  got done, and Aris and Marcus had time to practice their demo pitch. We weren't live online, but we were certainly way too cool for powerpoint, and were able to show a site with functionality and an amazing amount of depth.

Aris and Marcus rocked the demo, with Phllip driving the mouse so they wouldn't have to break their patter, and we disbanded feeling like we'd accomplished something fairly spectacular and been a part of something pretty important. The Democlarity team is looking forward to a reunion in a month, and plan to continue developing what we started in an open source-ish sort of way. In the meantime, a demo of our site should be up on www.democlarity.com fairly soon.

Tyrone went back to swim team practice today, and I'm back at work too. But I learned more about teams and teamwork this weekend than I did in the previous year--and that's a year in which I wrote an Agile training manual and helped organize the Orlando Scrum Gathering's Open Space Conference. I'd highly recommend the startup weekend experience for anyone who is seriously committed to working on or with software teams--the pressure of an insane deadline like that compels you to strip everything down to the purest, simplest form: communication, decision making, work flow, product features, everything, and conversely, it also leads one to discover the enormity of one's own personal resources. We were like those people who, in a crisis, lift a car off of a person. Heady, empowering stuff.

This weekend was Startup Weekend World, with 50 cities participating. There will be another soon enough. Hope to see you there!

Microsoft's Anand Iyer has written a superb overview of the event on his blog, along with descriptions of all 23 companies.

Peak Bagging at STPCon

By Hillary Johnson

Today at STPCon Chris led two interactive sessions, one on Most Effective Ways to Improve Software Quality, and another on the  Makings of a Great QA Leader. Both sessions used the Group Wisdom Without Groupthink method to brainstorm and then rank ideas based on the collective experience of the participants. 

For me, the unexpected highlight of the day was the lunchtime keynote speaker, chemist and adventuress Arlene Blum. She described her all-female ascent of Anapurna, and her crusade to remove toxic fire retardants from children's clothing, claiming that the latter was the more difficult project by far. As she told stories from the various phases of her life, I kept having to pick my jaw up off the floor. The STPCon organizers are to be applauded for such a breathtaking choice of speaker. Just the kind of stimulation one needed to dive back into afternoon sessions.

As promised to the participants, here are the results of both workshops, ranked by how many votes they received:

Most Effective Ways to Improve Software Quality

16

• Test environment that resembles production

10-14

• Understanding high level business needs before development starts
• Clearly document requirements

5-9

• Agile--Involving customer early and often
• Group effort, teamwork
• QA and dev pairing and collaborating through design
• Communication between business users and development
• Opt-in for project teams
• Finding champions for the product (end users)
• Good simulation tools

0-4

• Sprint review demo
• Detailed info on defects/review with developers
• Thinking about testability early
• Avoid requirement creep
• Knowledge-based testing by QA
• Dev spec process
• QA & Dev reporting to same manager
• Recognizing impact of architectural decisions
• Investing in analysis of automation
• Clearly defiined mission statement and ccollective buy-in
• Not caring about test results (bad/avoid)
• IT governance process to oversee development

Chris led the same session last year, so it is interesting to compare those results.

Makings of a Great QA Leader

6-7

• Balance of work and fun
• Effective communication
• Empowerment

2-5

• Understands the big picture
• Personal integrity
• Trustworthy advocate
• Respect

0-1

• Effective and informed questioning
• Customer focused
• Keeps their cool
• Remains impartial in problem solving
• 1:1 peer focus
• Recognizes strengths
• Hiring better people
• Open to suggestions
• Attention to details

Compare these results to those from the same presentation at STPCon 2008.