Friday, February 24, 2017
Other Sessions I liked at XP2010
Other Sessions I liked at XP2010
Apart from the sessions Ive written exclusively about, here a quick synopsis of the other sessions I really liked. Im going to be quick about it, so let me just jot down the high level notes from each session.
Mary Poppendieck - The Five Habits of Successful Lean Development
Mary distilled down five characteristics of typically lean organisations with the mnemonic of 5Ps - Purpose, Passion, Professionalism, Pride and Profit. Here are some of the subcharacteristics of the 5Ps.Purpose
- The reason why we work.
- Solving real problems.
- Connecting developers to customers to solve their state of pain.
Passion
- An undying fanaticism for results.
- Clean code comes from someone who cares about results.
- Altruistic motivation for great quality products.
Professionalism
- The drive to build the right thing
- "Theres nothing as useless as to do something efficiently, that which should not have been done at all."
- Building the thing right.
- Test automation.
- A state of correctness at any given time.
- Simplicity of design - decoupled architecture, set-based design.
- Feedback
- Diversity of perspectives and heuristics.
- The right vision coupled with the right leadership and focus.
- Eliminating waste of all kinds:
- unevenness;
- non value adding tasks;
- overburdened teams
Pride
- Doing things gains respect.
- Being fast and sloppy
- Its ok to fail - "If you havent failed ever, it means you havent tried hard enough."
- Little documentation aids communication - find the balance.
- Communication fanaticsm - its at the heart of all we do.
- Principles trump processes and practices.
- Value people as professionals not resources.
- Hire exceptional people.
- Planning is everything, but plan to deliver not deliver to plan. So "planning is everything, but plans are nothing".
Profit
- Employees that are dedicated to success.
- Profitability is the underlying measure for success - without this, theres no business measure for what you do.
- Value people - valued people make decisions and are engaged to achieve real outcomes.
Padraig Brennan - What Agile teams can learn from Sports Coaching
Does Agile foster teamwork or require team work? Similar teams have varying results? How is that so? Why is that so? The secret is team work. Teamwork leads to good results. There are several characteristics to Agile:
- collaboration;
- feedback;
- shared workspaces or colocation;
- pairing/ helping each other;
- and heaps more
Padraig then went onto to introduce Woodens pyramid of success (above) and urged teams to start from scratch, by establishing the foundations first before moving to other steps. He proceeded to talk about his interpretation of the science of coaching:
- people self-organise, but within parameters;
- teams bond with leadership;
- theres an external stimulus to aid correction;
- servant leadership comes into place only after the blocks are all in place;
- the coach details the system of play;
- the coach helps people learn through exercises of show and tell;
- the coach directs and leads until the team gets to be a well oiled unit
- Character based: "Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are."
- Committed
- Competent
- Communicative
- Consistent
Marcus Ahnve - Done considered harmful
This was a lightning talk and Marcus basically challenged the notion of the fluffy Done state on Agile card walls because:- the definition varies;
- the context is unclear;
- it means different things to different people;
- it doesnt necessarily capture a true done state (done may not mean business value delivered or feature in deployment for eg.)
- encourages local optimization because people mark as done only what they control
- Instead of done, capture the real state of the card (eg: in production).
- Treat the fluffy done as inventory unless it reflects the real state.
- Capture the handoffs to visualise where work is piling up in the value stream.
- Discourage any local optimisations that create a false sense of effectiveness.
Kjetil Moløkken-Østvold - Who killed the digital nomad?
Not much to say about this, because Kjetil pretty much echoed my thoughts from one of my old posts - No Collaboration without Colocation? Maybe youre not Agile enough! Kjetils a hard nut and seemed very practical and was basically asking the question of our modern workforce, equipped with powerful laptops, hi speed wireless, etc -- why do we still have to travel, show up each day in designated workplaces, in designated time slots? This is an unnecessary waste, because we travel like stuffed sardines, often in hot humid weather (tell me about that).Kjetil dismissed the notion of colocation by challenging engineers who build communication platforms but are reluctant to use them. The culprits are:
- old managers;
- immature and oversold collaboration technology;
- and agile fanatics who wont budge from the stand of "colocation is the only way to collaborate".
Other stuff to be aware of
While that ends the list of talks I want to write home about, the conference itself was a great experience with the amount of networking that we were privileged to, the open spaces, the cultural experience (see here and here for the Jazz performance). I facilitated an open space on "How Agile teams learn" and Ive had some interesting insights about the topic which Ill share sometime in the future.Something I particularly want to draw your attention to, is the Diversity in Agile initiative, particularly aiming to introduce more women to the Agile world. Theres a nomination system thats open for everyone to nominate an awesome woman. Check out the nomination criteria and nominate an awesome woman here.
Ive thoroughly enjoyed this conference and been privileged to meet some great people - I hope to see you all again, next year!
© Sumeet Moghe
Available link for download