me.andering – Willem van den Ende

In other news today:

Emmanuel Gaillot just blogged about our upcoming French Refactoring Training.

January 28 and 29 at the office of Octo Technology in Paris. This training will be in French. We ran it together in-house (also in Paris) and it worked quite well . The training was good fun, we did even more things dojo-style (including demos) than I normally would, and we made time for hands-on systems thinking. I think with the experiments we’ve done this year, that we’ve finally found a good way to do systems thinking with programmers. It seems to be a bit more intuitive for managers and coaches,  but presented in the right way, it turns out developers find it eXtremely valuable. Surprisingly (not ) the topic the developers chose for their diagram was not entirely technical: how too much labour turnover was hindering their productivity and maintenance.

In other other news: the QWAN newsletter is out. It has some instruction on how to do your own temperature reading, conference reports and the public courses agenda. Enjoy!

Now it is time to relax after a  busy and period. Maybe I’ll finally get around to posting photos from all the conferences we’ve been to since october…

I wrote a teaser post about iterative and incremental rebranding of eXperience Agile in September… It’s been four months and almost as many newsletters since then . So time to de-tease the blog…

Marc suggested to do part of the upcoming newsletter as a Temperature Reading, so besides getting some information, our readers also learn a technique, and it helps us structuring our own reflection over the past year. It’s been about a year since Marc, Rob and yours truly sat together after xp days london to discuss closer collaboration with courses and coaching (but still as loosely coupled as possible, because we like our independence).

A Temperature Reading has five questions, the order of which you can vary, depending on the context (see Temperature Reading for explanation and the default order, I’m going to do something different here).

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When I saw the proposed stages for agile 2009 last week, they looked a bit bland to me. A lot of the fun and risky stuff seems to have been taken out (musical stage, breaking acts, questioning agile). Ok, open space (I love open space) is still in there.

The 2008 conference was quite good for such a large event. Things that contributed to it were, in my opinion, scrapping experience reports as a separate track and instead having lots of experience reports everywhere as well as the breaking acts and questioning agile stages. Yes, you can have those topics spread out, but having those topics front and center (what is the first thing you see when you look at the conference? its the stages. So the first thing you see is: ah, critical thinking, wild new cideas).

If you want to support new ideas, and at the very least keep up the outward appearance that the agile community invites and supports them, leave a comment on David Andersons’ blog post “The case for an agile fringe” .

I also left one at Johanna Rothmann’s (2009 conference chair) response “I’m Disappointing Already” outlining some of the forces I’m seeing. Johanna ems to take it personal, which I think is unfortunate. Sometimes folks in the kanban camp seem to do the same – getting their sessions rejected for earlier conferences must have been very painful. The reasons for rejection were probably systemic, and it seems some of the systemic reasons have been fixed in 2008, now 2009 seems to be sliding back (and yes, kanban is now establishment, but it will happen again to new new stuff).

So, let’s stop taking it personal, and improve the system; no regression, if we can easily prevent that please – carry out one refactoring “replace experience reports stage with fringe stage”, that’s it.

That’s it for today, maybe I’ll post more later. I’m going back to XP days London (which is one big fringe lots of new ideas and critical thinking going on, and the open space is an integral part of the program, which seems to work fairly well at this scale.).