PODCAST: Beyond the Team

Recently, I sat down with long time friend and associate Bob Payne and fellow Agile enthusiast George Dinwiddie to chat about Agile and the need for Agile to go beyond the confines of the Agile team.  

We spoke about Lean Value Streams, Agile PMOs, executive reporting and many other topics on handling issues outside an Agile team.  Essentially, it's about taking a "thin slice" across the organization and optimizing the process of releasing into production.

Here's the link to the podcast: http://agiletoolkit.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=456918.

Enjoy!

Agile Metrics Webinar

On April 15th, Sanjiv Augustine and Roland Cuellar delivered a global webinar on Agile metrics that was hosted by VersionOne. In this webinar, we discussed several frameworks for organizing your metrics such as:

• Leading indicators
• Lagging indicators
• Measures of effectiveness
• Measures of efficiency
• The Balanced Scorecard

In addition, we gave example measurements of each type and discussed the development of The Agile Balanced Scorecard. See and hear the webinar at VersionOne.com.

Notes from the Field, Philadelphia Emerging Tech Conference

Agile Track of Philadelphia Emerging Tech Conference

Per my last blog entry, I attended the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies Enterprise (ETE'09) Conference, hosted by Chariot Solutions, on 3/26 and 3/27.

This conference included a number of tracks, and I attended a number of the agile sessions, here are some interesting points.

Focusing on the Wrong Transition

Jim York gave a presentation to well over a 100 people. When he asked how many were working at organizations that have adopted agile, less than ten raised their hands. When he asked how many are working at organizations using waterfall, less than five raised their hands.

This may seem surprising, but in my experience the majority of organizations are using ad-hoc, not waterfall, or agile processes, for developing software. Although it wasn't the topic of Jim's talk, my key takeaway is that the agile community has been focusing on the wrong transition, waterfall-to-agile, while the focus should be ad-hoc-to-agile!

Another key takeaway, more on the topic of Jim's talk, was that as we successfully mature an agile project, it should, over time, become more of a continuous endeavor instead of a traditional project.

Table Based Requirements for Complex Development Scenarios

Ken Pugh gave a presentation on Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) using Fit and FitNesse. A focus was on how table-driven specifications can serve as both requirements and tests, reducing the ambiguity associated with free form text, improve communications, while making it easy to specify tests with good coverage. I have successfully applied Fit on a number of computation heavy applications and found it of tremendously useful. Ken showed that table based requirements can also apply to other scenarios, such as testing complex business rules and state transitions.

Executable Documents

David Chelimsky gave a talk on Executable Documentation, which, like Ken’s talk, was essentially about ATDD. David's talk included table based requirements, and other advanced ATDD tools in a number of languages, including Ruby. He showed very specific examples of how current tools and approaches improve traditional tests, to that the point that they truly become executable documents (i.e. specs), moving us ever closer to the using a consistent language across all development activities.

A Newbie After a Decade of Experience?

Corey Haines gave a presentation on the The Pair Programming Journeyman Tour. A highlight was when he showed a video of an interview with Bob Martin where Uncle Bob told Corey that he was just starting out his career, despite the fact that he has 10+ years experience! The takeaway here is that there are many people to learn from, even after a decade in the field.

Closing

Unlike an agile only conference, the ETE'09 had multiple tracks, which made for a good cross exchange of information and knowledge. In addition to learning from the presenters, I learned a lot from the attendees so I hope to see you at next years conference.

Notes from the Field, Agile Philly Panel, Just Say No to a PO?

Philly Emerging Tech Conference & Agile Philly Panel Discussion

Last Thursday 3/26 and Friday 3/27, I attended the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies Enterprise (ETE) Conference, and co-moderated a panel discussion for Agile Philly that leveraged off the conference.

Agile Philly Panel Discussion

On Thursday night Ahsen Jaffer, of Chariot Solutions, and I moderated the Agile Philly Panel Discussion. This included speakers who were presenting at the conference. They were, from left to right:

• Jim York - FoxHedge LTD
  
• Mike Vizdos - Vizdos Enterprises
  
• Ken Pugh - NetObjectives
  
• Corey Haines - Software Journeyman
  
• Brian Marick - Exampler Consulting
  
• Mike Bria - Industrial Logic
  

Transitioning an Organization to Agile or Choosing to Move On

A fair amount of the conference attendees stayed for the Agile Philly Panel Discussion. There were a number of tracks at the conference, with agile being only one, so many attending the panel discussion were from organizations with little in the way of established agile practices.

As a result, there were several questions about how to transition an organization to agile especially when there are skeptics in senior positions. The response, which I thought was appropriate, was to start small and work your way up. Corey also made the point that not all organizations are receptive to change, so sometimes you need to go elsewhere or choose to live with the situation as it is.

With Agile, Testers Get Involved Early

We also had a fair amount of testers attending, and they wanted to know when they should get involved, which is, as Ken pointed out, as early as possible.

Different Agile Methods Share a Core Philosophy

We had a question about the differences in agile methods (Lean, Scrum, Kanban, XP) and Mike explained that in his opinion, most agile methods, share a core philosophy that makes them more similar than different.

Get Rid of the Product Owner Role?

Brian was controversial when he said we need to get rid of the Product Owner Role in Scrum. Brian stated that after months working with a product owner on an engagement he eventually talked directly to the customers and, for the first time, got real, and useful information. Jim’s retort was that it wasn’t the Product Owner role that is the problem; it is that the person in the role wasn’t playing it right. I agree with Jim’s point, and I think Brian was making an extreme statement to get across just the point that Jim brought up.

Humans vs Resources

Brian closed the meeting with a statement that drew loud applause from the audience. I won’t do it justice here as I can’t remember the exact words, but it went something like this, "We are teetering on the edge (using a the edge of a 3 by 5 card as an example) of treating people like 'humans' versus treating them like 'resources'." The comment was pertaining to the lack of people to people contact, the assumption that people are fungible resources, and the negative results that this has wrought.

See You at Future Agile Philly Meeting

For those of you living the Philadelphia area, I hope to see you at a future Agile Philly Meeting.