Notes from a Tool User

Misconceptions with Test Driven Development

In the past few weeks I've heard several misconceptions raised about Test Driven Development:

• Does TDD really work? I've written about this before: Advantages of TDD; In addition George Dinwiddie maintains a list of case studies (including one from IBM). Finally Keith Braithwaite has recently done some research on measuring the benefit of TDD. Currently the results are buried in a presentation (pdf). Key message: "measuring a over 20 projects: if you have a large number of unit tests your code will be an order of magnitude less complex."
• Writing the tests after the code has been written is the same as Test Driven Development. Its not, there are significant benefits to TDD that I outlined in: "Test Driven Development vs Plain Old Unit Testing".
• TDD isn't useful for helping to design the architecture of programs.

My Challenge to Agile Tool Vendors

I keep on seeing announcements for the next great Agile Task Tracking tool. I just saw one posted to Scrum Development where it’s author said: “I haven't done much testing, so if you find a bug and want me to fix it let me know :-)”.

My reply: Congrats I'm sure you have an excellent application. I'm wondering if you see the irony - you're posting to an Agile group and say that your app has hardly been tested? What is your definition of Done? Do you use TDD? At least Unit Testing? What was your approach to acceptance testing?

My Promise

Here is my promise to all of my future clients, I won't show you an agile tool that wasn't developed using Agile methods. From future tool suppliers I need to know:

• Your Definition of Done
• Whether you use TDD? Or at least Unit Testing?
• What do you do for Acceptance Testing?
• How often do you release?
• What did you learn in your last retrospective?
• ....

If you can’t answer these questions I’m not interested in your tool.

Update I mis-understood the author's intent. He's not releasing a tool, so much as testing the waters to see if there is any interest. For these purposes I think he did the right thing. I still stand behind the statement I would show a client a tool where the vendor couldn't answer the above questions.

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Code Smells -> Refactoring -> Unit Tests

Two weeks ago now I gave an introductory tutorial on “From Code Smells to Unit Tests” (pdf) at Agile Tour Toronto (thanks to the organizers for a great conference). The slides walk cover  an introduction to Technical Debt, SOLID Principles, The Sea of Complexity, Basic Code Smells, Refactoring and Unit Testing Basics, Good Practices, Bad Practices. As usual the slides are only taste of what was said. In the session two elements didn’t work: First I wasn’t expecting to have to explain SOLID Principles – I was caught off guard and was ill prepared. Second the pair Refactoring Demo tanked. The plan was to invite audience members up to refactor Martin Fowler’s Movie Example (git hub browseable, zip file) – the plan was that people would make small improvements five minutes at a time. The goal was to help people integrate what we had covered in the seminar already by doing it live. There has to be another way of providing an integration event, basically I would need to give the audience a way for experiencing refactoring for themselves.

Please try the Movie Example (git hub browseable, zip file) and see how far you can get with some simple refactorings.

References:

• The Art of Unit Testing: with Examples in .NET (Amazon.ca) – Roy Osherove (.NET and soon a Java version)
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Amazon.ca) – Martin Fowler
• Refactoring to Patterns (Amazon.ca) – Joshua Kerievsky
• xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (Amazon.ca) - Gerard Meszaros
• Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit (Amazon.ca) – Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
• Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit (Amazon.ca) – Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

BTW David Koontz did the hard work of typing in Martin Fowler’s Movie sample – I just modernized it (Java 1.2 –> 1.6).

Caveat Emptor - if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Don’t Do Agile

Via the Agile Ottawa Blog: Don’t Do Agile:

Tim Bacon will be talking this month about the focus in an Agile rollout is the change required and not so much on “Agile”. This will be an exciting discussion and will certainly give pause to think of Agile in a different light.

Tim specialises in assisting teams or organisations to introduce Agile software development methods such as Scrum or XP. He is a passionate “people person” and an advocate of test driven development and software craftsmanship, with over a decade’s experience working with software development teams in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. Tim enjoys his work most when helping teams to see that they can produce more and better software with less stress.

Time and Date: Tuesday November 10^th: Networking from 6:00 – 6:30; Presentation from 6:30 to 8:00

Location: the Code Factory (2nd Floor – 246 Queen Street), you need to buzz for the elevator.

Learning Best Approaches for your Brain Slide Deck

As regular readers of this blog will know I’ve given a talk based on reading’s in Neuroscience, called “Learning Best Approaches for Your Brain” – several times this year (Agile 2009 and Agile Ottawa). After several requests I’m posting the slide deck (pdf) here – but I’m afraid that it will really only be useful to the people who attended the talk. Here’s the promo I’ve been using:

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights into what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.

Top 5 Reasons that traditional approaches to learning and mentoring fail:

• Lead with the Abstract
• Not Grounded in the Listeners experience
• Passive students – i.e. Those just listening and taking notes, aren’t using all of the brain. They retain knowledge but don’t really understand it.
• Rewards don’t work
• High Fructose Corn Syrup

Benefits:

• Students and Mentees will remember
• Learn how to correct mistakes
• Workshop Attendees will stay awake

References:

• The Art of Changing the Brain (Amazon.ca) - James Zull
• Brain Rules (Amazon.ca) - John Medina
• The Brain that Changes Itself (Amazon.ca) - Norman Doidge
• Presentation Zen (Amazon.ca) - Garr Reynolds

I promise that sometime in the next month or so I will publish the paper that Linda and I originally promised (threatened), that will include all of the details missing from slide deck. The only caveat no paper will every be as good or help you learn as much as an interactive, example driven presentation.

Download: Slide Deck (pdf)

Caveat Emptor - if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Central Agile Calendar?

As an organizer of a small Agile user group and potentially a small Agile conference I’ve noticed that the Community lacks one good central calendar with a list of events. If we created one – would you find it useful?

I’ve suggested that InfoQ create one and need to determine what the minimum feature set would be:

• Events are tagged with their geographic location, time, date, cost – with everything else in free form text
• Only not for profit events are allowed I’m not quite sure what test to apply here I just know that we would drown in Scrum/Agile training announcements if they were permitted on the same calendar.
• Subscribe via RSS
• Subscribe via monthly/bi-weekly email.
• Moderated to prevent spam
• Anyone can submit an event

In the wine world something like this already exists: http://www.localwineevents.com/events/listing/all/76

My questions:

• Would this be useful to you?
• Would you subscribe?
• What features am I missing from the minimum feature set?
• Would you be willing to help moderate this?
• Is there any existing open source/free software that can be used to this job?
• Would you think to look on: http://planet.infoq.com/ to find the calendar?

BTW I've seen a couple of other efforts at: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/2228/ and – Google Calendar but neither appear to have taken off.

Please share your ideas.

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Introduction to Agile - Ottawa, Canada - Oct 22-23 only two spots left

I’m teaching an Intro to Agile course next week and have only two spaces left.

Details:

http://mayford.ca/training/introToAgile.html

This is a 2 day course that delivers an in-depth look at the fundamentals of Agile Development, and is intended for individual project team members, or complete teams. Ideally, the students are a mix of end users, business domain experts and development team members, although that is not required.

Through lectures and interactive exercises, this course conveys the principles of Agile Development, and focuses on communication as the foundation of Agile Development success.

Course Outline

• The Basis for Agile Development
• What is Agile Development?
• What Agile Development is Not
• The Economics of Agile Development
• The Project Community (Roles and Responsibilities)
• Project Structure
• Agile Principles and Practices
• User Stories and Estimation
• Project Tracking
• Review
• Sample Project
  • Defining the User Stories
  • Story Estimation
  • Release and Iteration Planning
  • Iterations 0 to 3
  • Release!
• Review

Agile Ottawa Presents: “How to Communicate so your Clients will Remember”

I’m presenting at Agile Ottawa this month. The presentation is a reprise of my Agile 2009 session:

“Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain”.

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights into what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.

Top 5 Reasons that traditional approaches to learning and mentoring fail:

• Lead with the Abstract
• Not Grounded in the Listeners experience
• Passive students – i.e. Those just listening and taking notes, aren’t using all of the brain. They retain knowledge but don’t really understand it.
• Rewards don’t work
• High Fructose Corn Syrup

Benefits:

• Students and Mentees will remember
• Learn how to correct mistakes
• Workshop Attendees will stay awake

Time and Date: Tuesday October 13^th: Pizza + Networking from 6:00 – 6:30; Presentation from 6:30 to 8:00

Location: the Code Factory (2nd Floor - 246 Queen Street), you need to buzz for the elevator.

Agile Ottawa is a group for anyone interested in Agile Software Development in the Ottawa region. The group organizes events the 2^nd Tuesday of every month at the Code Factory (2nd Floor - 246 Queen Street) – events usually begin at 6:30pm.

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Agile 2009 Post Roundup

Last Year I did: Agile 2008 Post Roundup and so thought it might be fun to do again this year. As usual InfoQ has a number of items, including presentations and now MP3 downloads.

Retrospectives

A Personal Retrospective on the Agile 2009 Conference - Johanna Rothman’s notes on running and surviving the conference.

Agile2009 Drawing to a Close – Steven “Doc” List

Reflections on #Agile2009 – Karl Scotland

Thoughts on #Agile2009 - Mike Cottmeyer

Agile 2009: Appreciations, Agile 2009: A Retrospective - Portia Tung

Agile 2009: a retrospective - Pascal Van Cauwenberghe – see also:

     Agile 2009 report: Monday , Tuesday , Wednesday, Thursday , Thursday afternoon

Looking back at Agile 2009 - George Dinwiddie – the comments include good discussion about ways to improve session selection.

Agile2009 – A buffet of Agile, Agile2009 Day 2 - The Festival Continuous  , Agile2009 - Day 3 Program - Martin Olesen

My Agile 2009 Summary - Adam Goucher

Agile2009 Trip Report – Mike Jones of OutSystems

Why Bother Going to Agile 2009 or Agile 2010?? – Damon Poole

Agile 2009 Chicago - Xavier Quesada Allue

My Agile 2009 Personal Perspective - James Martin

Agile 2009 trip report - Dave Nicolette

Agile 2009 Reflections – Eduardo Scoz

Feeding the Agile Beast – Dennis Stevens

Group posts from KlocTalk: Agile 2009…Day 1, Agile 2009…Day 2, Agile 2009…Day 3, Agile 2009… Day 4

Agile 2009 - Mark Mansour

Agile 2009 summary – Kenrick Chien

Agile2009 Conference Debriefing - Wojciech Seliga

Agile2009 Take Aways - Slawomir Ginter

My #Agile2009 Conference Thoughts, Some enjoyable quotes from #agile2009 - Peter Edstrom

Agile 2009 Roundup – my own effort

Agile2009 Recap - Fitzgerald Steele

Agile 2009 – Jason Fox UX Designer

Agile 2009: Product Management/Ownership and Business Agility - Luke Hohmann

Agile 2009 Experience Report – Brandon Raines

Agile 2009... Thank You All – Jurgen Appelo

Agile 2009: Looking back – Tom Hume

Agile 2009 Report - Renzo Borgatti

Reflections on Agile 2009 - Brian Bozzuto

Agile 2009 – The General Highlights – Jesse Fewell

Agile 2009 wrapup - Michael Longin

Thoughts on Agile 2009 Tom Grant and Dave West

Reflections on Agile 2009 Dennis Stevens

Why big Agile Conferences don’t have anything New? – Naresh Jain – I don’t agree with Naresh’s thesis but it’s still thought provoking.

Specific Sessions

What I Learned Programming With the Stars and Building a Learning Culture on Agile Teams (Slides) – Declan Whelan

Leadership Game @ Agile2009 Chicago, Rally Chalk Talk: The daily meeting – Yves Hanoulle

How to Create Rapport with your Customer, The Responsibility Model Revisited, Mapping the Agile Enablement Battlefield, Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns, The Bottleneck Game - Portia Tung

Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Workshop – 3, Esther and Diana’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures, Selenium Open Jam at Agile2009 - Adam Goucher – and many more see: his agile summary for all related posts. Adam where do you find the time?

Powerful Questions and Powerful Requests and Agile Team Start-up: one of the first agile adoption activities, Build your team’s collaboration muscle – Lyssa Adkins

Prioritizing Your Product Backlog by Mike Cohn -  Martin Olesen

Scrum intro, A3 Problem Solving template and example - Henrik Kniberg

Balanced Software Development – Karl Scotland

The importance of identity and vision to UX designers on agile projects - Johanna Kollmann

Visual Management Workshop at Agile 2009

Create a Vision and Reward Failures #agile2009 - Peter Edstrom

Coaching Workshop – my own effort

User Stories, Mission Possible, Guerilla Research Methods  - Fitzgerald Steele

New Approaches to Risk – David Anderson

Agile Infrastructure - Agile 2009 - Andrew Shafer

Herding Cats - Managing Large Test Suites, Agile UX Design Emergent Practices, Ambassadors & Carrier Pigeons – Tom Hume – BTW Tom has written posts for many more of the sessions he attended.

Agile for Families – David Starr – while I wasn’t able to attend – it was on my stage and I love to see Agile outside of software.

Agile 2009 Session Results Posted , Day 3 , Day 2 , Day 1 , Patrick Kau

Agile 2009 - AA-FTT Workshop & more – Lisa Crispin

Day 1, Day 2 - Shannon Cornish

Notes from Keynote at Agile 2009 - Keith Swenson

The Scrum Bestiary, A Behavioral Taxonomy – Ade Miller

The impact of Agile Architect Teams in Scaling Enterprise Efforts – Mike Dwyer

Irrational Loss Aversion Slides - Brian Bozzuto

Agile2009: Mapping the Change Battlefield - Giora Morein

Agile 2009 and PMI – Jesse Fewell

The 7 Deadly Sins of Almost Being Agile (slides and handouts), Cuke4Nuke: Cucumber for .NET Teams (born at the pre-conference Functional Test Tools Workshop) – Richard Lawrence

Coding Dojo: Kake format at Open Jam - Danilo Sato

Selenium Open Space, Applying modern software development techniques to automating the web UI, day 4, The test step sweet spot - Michael Longin – Michael has a number of other posts from the conference that are well worth reading.

Agile Coaching Roles – Notes from OpenJam,  Top 10 tips for coaches, Taking Responsibility to Learn and Grow - Michael Sahota - Michael is another writer a great set of posts.

inspiration, trends, thoughts - Mads Troels Hansen

A look back at Day 1, A look back at Day 2 », A look back at Day 3, A look back at Day 4 » - Kevin Minnick

Micro-Interval Exercise with Alistair Cockburn – Bruce Onder

Interviewed by François Beauregard - Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Agile in the Very Large – Sam Guckenheimer – David Starr

The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Applying Game Theory to Agile Contracting

Where Does Developer Testing End and Tester Testing Begin? Abby Fichtner, Nate Oster

Agile 2009 Notes - Thursday, Wednesday,Tuesday, Monday Scott Duncan

Videos

Apple’s view of the future as seen in the 8o’ties – the video that Jared Spool shared with us during his keynote.

Paired Juggling – Declan Whelan and Uncle Bob

A funny but true thought about how developers act when solving problem – Patrick Welsh

Agile2009 Developer Jam: Ugly Code vs Clean Code – Patrick Welsh

User Story Mapping – David Hussman and Jeff Patton

More videos: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=52E5DFBB0E317163

I hope you have as fun reading this as I did, if I missed your post – sorry I scanned through the top 200 google hits, a number of twitter references – but in the end there is only so much I can read.

One last thought – it was difficult to find proper names for everyone I quoted, please make it easier – your name should featured on the main page of your blog, if not there then at least on the about page. Also if you want to make your blog easy to quote – check if post titles can be easily selected? Do they link back to themselves or do I have to get the link as well?

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Agile 2009 Roundup

I’ve been home for a few days and have some time to digest what I learned. More of sessions were interactive this year so I’ve fewer notes and can write fewer articles than last year (Agile 2008 Post Roundup).

The Good:

• I found only one bad session
• I saw a lot of old friends and made some new ones (Kari, Mike S, Gerry, Xavier, Rachel, Liz, Doc, among many)
• The food was a bit better than last year. Although as Rachel Davies explained its very difficult to get good quality nutritious food from a hotel at a price the conference can afford.
• Open space – I made some use of it to join random sessions, but mostly I just networked.
• Free one-on-one consulting – I managed to help one free client over the course of an hour.
• It was easy to find stuff
• Most of the sessions were in rooms big enough to accommodate their audiences.
• The hotel bar was open and easy to get to. I spent a few hours hanging out with friends there. Its openness made it easy to survey for friends before you entered.
• The wider scope of the conference was interesting – its good that people are recognizing that our biggest challenges aren’t always technical/process but frequently people. To that end I liked the Manifesting stage with its coverage of cognition etc. Caveat I was a reviewer and also presented on that stage. I also like the idea of the Frontiers stage.
• The Cyrus Innovation’s Party – good food, good drinks, great friends.
• The openness of the community – I met several of the “big” names this year and discovered they’re friendly and still have their feet firmly planted on terra firma.

Coaching Workshop

Yesterday (Monday) Liz Sedley and Rachel Davies ran a coaching workshop “What Does an Agile Coach Do?” that helped me spot several things that I just never think to pay attention to. From Richard Hackman’s book “Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances” (which they highly recommend) they provided a number of observations. First we have to appreciate that there is distinction between a Leader and a Coach. A Leader is part of the team were as a Coach shouldn’t be part of the team and must set the stage for the day they leave.

Hackman identifies three types of coaching intervention and three opportunities to use those interventions effectively. Types:

• Educational – improve the teams understanding/knowledge
• Consultative – improve the teams process/actions
• Motivational – improve the teams effort

And then three opportunities to use these interventions most effectively:

• Beginning – Motivational
• Middle - Consultative
• End – Educational

Like Paul King, I found this counter intuitive at first until they suggested that we think of this a the iteration and not release level. So the start of the iteration we provide the team the motivational push to help them get the most done. In the middle of the iteration we can provide guidance and suggestions to improve the flow and progress. At the end of the iteration we reflect and find ways of learning from what happened. Each table was given a number of problem scenarios and we were asked what would we do. After describing what we would do we were asked to classify each intervention as Educational, Consultative, Motivational or other. Again like Paul it quickly became obvious that I do very little in the way of motivational intervention. In addition I spend a lot of my Educational efforts at moments when the team is less receptive and they will be less effective.

In addition I discovered a few other interesting things:

• Breathe, Pause, Wait – don’t act in the heat of the moment. Instead relax and assess what tool will suit your needs best.
• Ask questions and understand not just the what, but the why did the situation end up the way it did in the first place. Intervene only when you understand the whole situation, especially the history.

Finally Liz Sedley told me: Don’t ask why many people will take ‘why’ as an attack and go on the defensive. Instead ask ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions. The exception of course is doing root cause analysis (i.e. 5 why’s) and in that case you should explain what your doing.

Along with Richard’s book I’ve also had several recommendations for books on Systems Thinking: Bas Vodde and Craig Larman’s book Scaling Lean & Agile Development apparently contains a good chapter on Systems Thinking and Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. I’ve heard of the latter book many times but never knew that the Fifth Discipline was Systems Thinking (Thanks Declan).

Other blog posts that I’ve spotted from Monday: Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback (my writing on InfoQ), Paul King’s: Counter-intuitive Agile Coaching Tips (also from this workshop), Masti, Co-Creator, Pair vs. Review, Agile Games – Agile 2009, Day 1 , FitNesse vs. Robot Framework – Agile Testing Tools and A conversation with Neal Ford.

Caveat Emptor - if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Reviewers for a Distributed Scrum Book

Some of my former colleagues at IBM are producing a book “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum”. If you’re working in/with a distributed team go read the book and ask Elizabeth and Co some difficult questions.

The purpose is to help teams in a large-scale, distributed environment to effectively use Scrum.
The first drafts of chapters were developed through brainstorming sessions with IBM teams from all over the world. And now we'd like to enhance and expand with feedback and thoughts from the broader Scrum and Agile communities.

So please go check out: http://www.distributedscrum.com./ it will be worth your while.

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The book is now at the publishers and so the review site is no longer active.

Agile 2009 Tuesday Conference Picks

Following: Agile 2009 Monday Conference Sessions that catch my attention I writing about Tuesday sessions that attract my attention.

Tuesday – keynote is first thing in the morning and so we only start the sessions at 11:00:

Death by Scrum Meeting Pete Behrens (90 minutes) – we’ve all had them, those long meetings that run on and on. At a certain moment we start thinking about how to leave, what excuse we can find to get back to “productive work”. Pete promises to help us find a cure.

Pragmatically "Crossing the Chasm" from Project-level to Enterprise Adoption Ahmed Sidky, Chris Sterling

Risk and Risk Management – Theory and Practice Chris Matts, Todd Little

When Agile Just Works - Exploring Group Coherence Joanna Zweig, Cesar Idrovo

Don't Sell Buzzwords to Business Leaders, Learn How to Describe Real Value Richard Sheridan, Clement "James" Goebel

Top Ten Tips for Agile Coaches Rachel Davies, Liz Sedley (45 minutes) – again they wrote the book, this would be an 11:45 start.

My Choice: Risk Management Theory and Practice – I’ve been following along on the Real Options mailing list (see: Agile Mailing Lists) for sometime now but it hasn’t all gelled.

Afternoon

14:00 – 15:30

Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns Steven "Doc" List (90 minutes) – I see myself in several of Steven’s anti-patterns so maybe I better go.

First, Kill All The Metrics! Niel Nickolaisen, Chris Matts (90 minute) – “How well are we served by our current metrics? Do metrics such as developer and tester productivity, ROI, and on-time / on-budget help us improve results? Or, do such metrics drive us towards negative behaviors? In this workshop, we describe the foundation for meaningful metrics.”

Deliberate Practice in Software Development Mary Poppendieck – its Mary she is always good.

My Choice: I’m flipping between Faciliation Patterns and Kill All the Metrics.

16:00 – 17:30

Debugging Pair Programming Matt Wynne – a participant driven session that will examine the touchy feely problems that inhibit pair programming.

Can you hear me now? Good... Mark Rickmeier “This tutorial focuses on the detailed specifics that will make distributed agile meetings effective. We will demonstrate several key agile meetings, run in a distributed fashion, so teams can immediately improve their projects. To do so, I will highlight specific tools available in the market place to facilitate each of these different kinds of discussions (retrospectives, planning meetings, stand ups). I’ll demonstrate the processes to enable more effective communication between remote locations and describe the key roles required on a project to encourage the best exchange of information.”

How to Develop Your Leadership Power Daily: An Agile Approach to Growth Christopher Avery “Your mind offers two alternate—and generally unconscious—responses when things go wrong. One response solves problems with snap judgment, hasty advice, and evident policy. The alternate response expands the problem space for new awareness and new-found truth. You are completely equipped for both. The first is fast and solves anxiety about the problem. The second is slower, produces learning and growth, and addresses the real problem.” Hmmm rushing to judgement is one of my big issues.

Agile Project Metrics Dave Nicolette – so what would good Agile Metrics be?

My Choice: I’ve flipping between: “Agile Project Metrics” and “How to Develop Your Leadership Power Daily”.

Must run and do more conference related prep.

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Agile 2009 Monday Conference Sessions that catch my attention

Last year just before Agile2008 I wrote a series of posts about my the sessions I was planning on attending. Last year was used to help coordinate a diverse group of IBM’ers, this year the audience is smaller: me.

Monday Morning 

9:00 – 11:00:  will likely be open jam time for me. Come find me there and lets have a conversation.

11:00 – 12:30

Kanban adoption at Software Engineering Professionals (SEP) Chris Shinkle (45 minutes) - “In 2004, SEP tried adopting Agile practices. However, Agile failed to have the desired lasting impact across the entire organization. Things changed in 2007, when SEP implemented Kanban for the first time.”

The Agile Playground Tobias Mayer (90 minutes) - “Agility in Action… This session will introduce five interactive games that a facilitator can add to their toolkit for team and management training. The games all illustrate the principles and dynamics that support Agility. The rationale for this session is that people learn best by embodying the learning, rather than just receiving knowledge at a head level. All participants will be immersed in the games; there are no observers. At the end of the session the participants will have a set of games they can introduce into their own organization to enhance their own Agile adoption process.” From my own recent experience: Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain – I can say that games are a vey useful way to integrate knowledge.

Using the Agile Testing Quadrants to Plan Your Testing Efforts Janet Gregory (90 minutes) - “Different testing approaches are needed because quality has many aspects besides functional requirements, such as making sure the code is reliable and secure. How do you know you’ve done the kinds of testing and quality processes are necessary for your product, especially on an agile project?”

My choice: Tobias “Agile Playground” Caveat Tobias said he wants at 16-24 for this workshop, please don’t overwhelm him based on my recommendation.

Monday Afternoon

14:00 – 15:30

Help already too many amazing options. First a bunch of experience reports:

Enterprise Agile Transformation: The Two Year Wall Chuck Maples; Weaponized Scrum Michael Marchi; Accidental Adoption - The Story of Scrum at Amazon.com Alan Atlas; The Amazing Team Race – A Team-Based Agile Adoption Gabino Roche, Jr., Belkis Vasquez; The Covert Agilist Ken Howard; Descending from the Architect's Ivory Tower Andrew Rendell – I’m interested in all of these but they have some stiff competition:

In the end its coming down to three options:

When it just *has* to work: Agile Development in Safety-Critical Environments Brian Shoemaker, Nancy Van Schooenderwoert

What Does an Agile Coach Do? Liz Sedley, Rachel Davies – They just written the book on subject.

Creating Agile Simulations and Games for Coaches and Consultants Elisabeth Hendrickson, Chris Sims (3 hours) – This one is on the Manifesting Stage for which I was a reviewer and I championed the presentation. I love the idea of learning how to create games. I’m really hoping that Elisabeth and Chris distill their knowledge into an InfoQ article.

My choice: I’m torn between Rachel and Liz – What Does an Agile Coach Do? – I’ve got to work this a bit myself and Creating Agile Simulations and Games.

16:00 – 17:30 I may be meeting with Linda in this time slot so I will play this one by ear.

Team Start-up: one of the first Agile Adoption activities Lyssa Adkins (90 minutes): “Starting up an Agile team is one of the first things you might be asked to do when a company wants to “go Agile.” What do you need to know before starting up a team? In the start-up, how much do teams need to know about Agile before they “go”? What do they need to know about each other…what the project is all about…who they will become as a team? These and other questions are answered as we walk through good ways to start-up Agile teams.”

Giving and receiving effective feedback Elizabeth Keogh (45 minutes) – “Find out why we give personal feedback, how to provide effective feedback, what makes feedback ineffective and how to deal with poorly phrased feedback. Learning what makes feedback effective helps you to seek your own feedback and improve, whilst being able to support the people around you.” echoes of “Giving an Taking Design Criticism with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock”

10 Temptations of an Agile Coach (new or experienced) Stevie Borne (45 minutes): “Regardless of your coaching experience, there are a wide variety of temptations you can fall into that affect the quality of your coaching”

Effective code reviews in agile teams Wojciech Seliga, Slawomir Ginter – I was tempted by this one but as I read the description it feels a bit like a vendor talk. “The session includes a demo on how Atlassian Crucible integrated with leading IDEs via Atlassian IDE Connector facilitates the whole process”  Not interested. To be clear I like Atlassian and their tools, but it feels like the talk has less value without their tools $$$. See the exchange in the comments below.

My Choice: Team Start-up: one of the first Agile Adoption activities Lyssa Adkins

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Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain

In the past year I’ve been doing alot of reading on neuroscience and improving my understanding of how the brain works. It started with Norman Doidge’s book: “The Brain That Changes Itself” which I read for fun on vacation last year. As a I read this book, I kept thinking that there has to be a way to apply a better understanding of the brain and neuroplasticity to our approaches to teaching and training. This lead me to read a large number of books: John Medina’s “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving”, James Zull’s “The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning”. Tangential I also tried: Torkel Klingberg’s “The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory” and Larry McCleary’s “The Brain Trust Program”. Finally I found a few interesting blogs: SharpBrains and Neurons Firing.

From all this I started to realize that much of what we do to teach, coach and mentor in our profession is haphazard. The best teachers succeed in doing well, but often without knowing why it works. The rest of us struggle from session to the next wondering why people don’t understand and remember what we taught. In that spirit I decided to create a workshop/presentation with Linda Rising for Agile 2009, that aims to explain (and demonstrate) some of what works and what doesn’t.

As an added bonus we will get to talk about the food that the conference hotel supplies and what effect it will have on your ability to remember the session. Please come on join Wednesday August from 2:00-3:30pm in Columbus GH: “Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain”

Here is the agenda that you will find online:

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights in what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.

Process/Mechanics

Agenda

Introduction

Top 5 Reasons that traditional approaches to learning and mentoring fail:

• Lead with the Abstract
• Not Grounded in the Listeners experience
• Passive students – i.e. Those just listening and taking notes, aren’t using all of the brain. They retain knowledge but don’t really understand it. – Habituation
• Rewards don’t work

Survey the audience for:

• Background
• Motivation
• Prior Knowledge

The play: At the end of the session, tables (groups of 5-6 people) will be asked to present a short play (1-2 minutes) representing what they’ve learned. After each 10 minute lecture section we will ask the audience to prepare a little bit of the play. Along with sharing our experiences the goal is help attendees integrate what they’ve learned. Even if you’re not comfortable in helping to stage the play you can still gain the benefits by planning for it. With the help of the audience we will summarize the plays and include the insights gained in article that we will publish after the conference.

Introduction to Neuroscience

15 minutes – just a very brief summary of some basics - with the intent of building on what we discover the audience already knows

• Kolb’s Learning Cycle
• What are memories/things we learn?
• Role of Hippocampus

Introduce an Idea & Explore with a Discussion and Play preparation 60 minutes (alternating 10 minutes of Lecture and 10 minutes of discussion/preparation) . The audience will choose 3 of the following 5 sections

• David Ausubel. explains, “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach accordingly”
• Mistakes/Misunderstandings are prior knowledge (i.e. neural networks), focus on the error and you might reinforce the incorrect network.
• Appeal to the senses sight/sound, even use smells. Maybe we should open a bag of fresh roasted coffee beans at this point.
• Role of Emotion - Fear is a great inhibitor of learning - who do we reduce fear?
• Integration - until its fully integrated knowledge is just a series of facts that may or may not be useful to us. How do we help our students make the knowledge their own.

Wrapup

• Reiterate key points
• Top x further ideas (no supporting details)
• References/Further reading

Retrospective 5 minutes

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Giving an Taking Design Criticism – with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a webinar “Giving and Taking Design Criticism” with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. The session teaser was: “Have you ever engaged in a design review where people didn't play fair? Do you have trouble giving design advice that sticks? An effective software developer or designer needs to be skilled at giving, asking for, and reacting appropriately to criticism.”

As someone who has done design/code reviews – I’ve always wondered why the advice didn’t stick and needed to be repeated time after time. As the victim of the same reviews I wondered why the reviewer needed to be so picky and unpleasant ;-) Two sides of the same coin?

In this Webinar Rebecca reminded us of what is going on and gave us some tools to do better reviews and be better listeners. She talked about Cognitive Biases (an excellent list >75 biases) and their effect. Key take away: everyone brings a different set of biases to the table and they cause use to react rather “think and behave logically”.