me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I went to Agile Open NorthWest last year, and it was a blast! This year’s announcement is eh, just-in-time, so I won’t be able to make it, but I strongly recommend it. Here is there announcement:

Agile Open Northwest, an alliance of agile practitioners in the US Pacific Northwest region, presents Agile Open Northwest 2008.

Our first agile open event, Agile Open Northwest 2007, was held last year and was a great success. This year, we once again invite 100 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest and beyond to join us in tackling the issues around the theme of agile development in the real world.

The Northwest has a wealth of practitioners with years of real-world experience with agile methods and self-organizing teams. Agile Open Northwest offers an opportunity to strengthen our community of practice and co-create the future for agile development. Your commitment to arriving at the beginning and staying until the end both days will ensure we build on conversation after conversation as we engage important questions like:

• Who practices Agile in the Northwest and what is its impact?
• What is “Agile” anyway? What does it look like in organizations?
• What are the technical challenges facing Agile?
• How does Agile co-exist with project management, process control and other governance structures?
• Can we adapt agile practices to our organizations without diluting them?
• Can agile methods work in big, risky projects?
• Can distributed teams use agile approaches?

This event is designed to allow agile practitioners to meet in self-organizing groups where they can share their latest ideas, challenges, hopes, experiences and experiments. We follow an Open Space format to foster collaboration and allow the conference to take its direction from the participants themselves.

• What: An Open Space event discussing agile practices and techniques.
• Where: Seattle Center, in several of the Northwest Rooms.
• When: March 18 and 19, 2008
• Who: Anyone with some degree of experience in agile methods
• Cost: $100 per person, including lunch both days

Marc and I finished translating Belofte maakt schuld to English, we proudly present: Promise is Debt.  In this case study, based on our own stories, we apply systems thinking to a common destructive behaviour pattern in IT organisations: overpromise when you underdeliver, and then overpromise some more…

So far we had a good response on  Belofte maakt schuld, overpromising and underdelivering seems to be even more common than we thought.

Writing papers in two languages is an experiment for me, usually I write in English, and I used to write in Dutch when I was writing articles for Dutch IT magazines. Writing and editing a translation gives me a fresh perspective on the text, and in the meantime I’ve had some more discussions on the topic. In the end, I came to the conclusion that if you really want accurate estimates, and stop overpromising, you have to foster a culture where saying no is ok.

Clarke Ching posted part 1 and part 2 of the recoding of the Naked Agilists conversation on January the 19th, 2008.

The session was organised by Kevin Rutherford and chaired by Clarke Ching

Presentations:
* Servant Leaders — Nancy van Schooenderwoert
* wevouchfor.org — Laurent Bossavit
* Fit4Data — Adrian Mowat
* Shared data for unit tests — Paul Wilson
* Let them Eat Cake — Brian Marick

You can find out more information – including slides – at  http://www.nakedagilists.com/jan-08.

It was interesting to see how some technology rots over time… Last year’s naked agilists used a skypecast, where the presenters and an audience of about 60 people could participate. This year, we could not get the skypecast to function even for a test run with only a handful of people. In the end, the event ran as a regular skype conference call with the presenters, Kevin, Clarke and yours truly, so we lost the direct participation of the audience unfortunately.

This was the first time I was involved in a ‘talk’ podcast. I have podcasted some of my music, that is ‘just’ a matter of playing, synthesizing and then rendering the result… Things I learnt :

• Have tested options, so you can switch easily, even at the last moment
• Test the connection with all presenters. The connection to Nancy was bad at some points, which made it difficult (but not impossible) to get all of it.
• Using slides does not have to be complicated. Put up a presentation, or a collection of images on a webpage, and as a presenter say ‘next slide’.
• Not having a visual of the presenter takes more concentration
• Many interesting presentations can fit in the space of an hour, so go download the audio

From the department of long-overdue-announcements

First off, the commercial service announcements. Marc Evers has joined the ranks of eXperience Agile facilitators. He is supporting Rob and me in getting a new Refactoring course off the ground. We plan to do trial runs in february (currently talking to a couple of places to do that, drop us a line if you are interested) and then the first public one, eXperience Refactoring, March 4 and 5, near Eindhoven.

Participants in other courses have long been asking us for a Refactoring course, a topic we mostly cover by showing and doing Test Driven Development, where Refactoring is a ‘natural’ step, so you don’t need to talk about it much. This one is going to cover refactoring in more challenging situations (e.g. when there is a bulk of legacy code – code without tests, or the team has been cutting corners for a while). This will prepare participants to stay vigilant in good times, and calm, resolved and focused in bad times…

We’re also planning to run another eXperience Agile near Eindhoven, 25 through 27 February and publish an extended course schedule for the rest of the year. Yesterday’s weather says eXperience Agile runs about every two months, so we plan to run instances near the end of April and June.

More new courses are in development for the second quarter. We’re listening to our customers, and would also love to hear from others what kind of courses they want.

Marc and I have been invited to present Beyond Agile at QCon London in March, which is a further development of the People vs. Process session we ran at XP Days Benelux and London. I’ve heard from several people that it had quite an impact, amongst others, people at other companies giving our presentation in-house).

People versus Process participants exercise at XP days London

The new title was a suggestion from the QCon organizers. It fits well with feedback we got so far, to make it (even) clearer what the relation with agile software development is. We are working on a paper to explain it in more detail, and we’re thinking of running an open enrollment course combining people versus process with systems thinking in June.

I’m planning to attend Agile Open France, which now has a location: Hotel Arnold in Itterswiller, France (it is near Strasbourg, in the Elzas). Contrary to what I stated before, the dates are 5, 6 and 7 March.

To keep you up to date with upcoming courses and places I’ll be, I added two feeds to the sidebar: the Public courses feed and the Events I’ll be at feed . In case you notice I’m in your area, don’t hesitate contact me for a conversation over dinner and/or drinks

And that habit is: ‘overpromise and underdeliver’ Marc Evers and I just pubished a new article on this topic in Dutch, Belofte maakt schuld (‘promise is debt’). It is a case study, in which we apply systems thinking to this highly destructive habit. We plan to make an english translation available later on.

As an aside, I’m inspired to use the word habit today, after stumbling across this interview with Ivar Jacobson in our local industry magazine Bits & Chips (in Dutch), in which he explains to use ‘habits’ over ‘process’, because process has become such a loaded term.

This was registering with me, because Marc mentioned a couple of days ago, that he was looking for an alternative to the word process. After some mulling about, we came up with this:

A process is what happens (as the total of actions by the people), a habit is what people do normally. You want people to change their habits, if you want a more effective process…

A popular way of doing that is by ‘installing new procedures’. Procedure is an even more loaded or dreaded word, that means a process in the narrow sense, what people are expected to do. But basically, if you follow a methodology by the book, that is what you are doing: following, or trying to follow new procedures.

But, old habits die hard. Belofte maakt schuld (‘Promise is debt’) is yet another example of how to let people fall back: ignore the reasons for an initial success, and let the team fall back on its’ old habits by increasing the pressure to deliver… “I already promised this to the customer, you could produce as much earlier (under the false promise of time to make up for any corners cut during a crunch), so stop whining, stop testing, stop pairing, just deliver…”.

And then when the teams’ velocity drops even more, promise even more to the customer. ‘Just’ rely on the teams aim to please…

I was just chatting with Bernard Notarianni. The first Agile Open France is about to happen … Probably on March 7 and 8 (update: it is now March 5,6 and 7), somewhere near Paris – Bernard, Emmanuel and Raphael are finalizing the location details and hope to start marketing next week.

They plan to have the conference site in the general Agile Open website, so I made it bi-lingual, technically at least, translations are probably best left to the french

“France Villandry” by Francisco Antunes

Rob Westgeest has recently become ‘not a resource‘ (he finally started blogging ) Welcome Rob! During our last experience agile course we had some problems with the network – we always bring a bunch of laptops and a wireless network. We want participants to be able to commit frequently and experience what it is like to work with a continuous build. For some reason the wireless didn’t work, and we had to get back to cables. Unfortunately, we did not bring cables… (we did the next day of course) the wireless had been working too well the last couple of times…

After the course, Rob made a continous build system that can run on each laptop as a secondary backup, using GTK and ruby. Rob just posted the source and a video for rbuilder.

Happy building in the new year to all of you I’m recovering from a cold, like many around me. Hope you are doing better…

I am one of those people who, at times, propages practices inspired by the toyota way (e.g. lean software development). However, I also have my eyes and critical mind open – I don’t want to be part of a cargo cult, I want to practice and promote practices that make work both more effective and the results of the work more valuable, and make work more fun and sustainable.

A friend of mine recently mentioned a toyota employee who died from overwork. It took me a while to find the full story – at first I only found reports from 2002. Apparently, his widow won a lawsuit against toyota – his death is now officially declared ‘karoshi’ (the japanese word for overwork).

I recommend you watch this report:

CNN on death from overwork

The report not only shows the logs, but also points out the risk of modern practices, like people taking their laptop home or on the road, so there is no end to work.

As I am writing this on a laptop in a Toronto hotel room, I consider myself warned. How about you?

What?

It’s the Return of the Naked Agilists. What? In case you haven’t guessed it’s a conference. A different one. You can attend this conference from the comfort of your own home- you only need Skype to be able to attend.  Save the date now:

Date:     Saturday 19-Jan-08
Time:   20:00 GMT – 21:30 GMT
Venue:  Your place, or mine

You’ve got until the end of December to propose a few-minute presentation or a one minute question. After review, the most interesting ones will be put on the agenda.

Thanks to Kevin Rutherford for bringing this to my attention.

I’ve just returned to the comfort of my own home, after staying in the comfort of other people’s homes and hotels around XP days London. I’m planning to procrastinating on writing about XP Days, a guest lecture plus live coding on Test Driven Development at the university of Bath, upcoming coding dojos (public ones in the Netherlands, and another one live at the BBC).

More later, perhaps. I was afraid expecting it would be difficult to keep posting a blog entry every day while on the road. I was right… I get more out of conferences by being fully present at the location (real or virtual) and not splitting my attention over the conference, e-mail and blog posting.

Reading the title you might go, what on earth is Smidig? Well, let me help you:

“Smidig 2007 er Norges første konferanse rundt smidig systemutviklin”

I guess that means:

“Agile 2007 is the first conference in Norway on agile systems development”

(Smidig might also mean Lean, I cna’t quite make that out from the context. Agile was my best guess)

And it gets better:

“Begge dager vil bestå av Lightning Talks før lunsj og Open Space etter lunsj”

Wich probably means:

“Both days will consist of Lightning Talks before lunch, and Open Space after lunch”

Now for the disclaimer: I don’t speak Norwegian, nor have I ever been to Norway. However, I do understand lunch (and I have been to lunch) – and lunch is written as some people in the Netherlands pronounce it…

This looks like a promising conference format – the Lightning Talks are probably submitted fairly just in time, and feed the Open Space, which is, as always, as just-in-time as it gets. If you actually understand what is written on the Smidig 2007 page, I recommend you go there, November 26 and 27 in Oslo, Norway.

this picture from smidig.net who seem to be ‘cake builders’ doing ‘fast delivery’ . Fitting

November seems agile conference month, there’s a lot going on… One could theoretically continue on from XPDays Germany 2007 before the weekend to Smidig after the weekend and then on to AgileNorth 2007 in Manchester on the 29th.

… Smidigs’ conference format seems to be ‘more than two days, more eXtreme than XP days‘ .

Or not? I’ll be co-hosting an open space during XP days Benelux next week. Deb Hartman recently ran an open space at XP Day Manhattan 2007 . XP Days London seems to be missing an open space, but it has… The Pub .

And there is the virtual world wide open space called the internet…. the latest edition of carnival of the agilists is out, featuring my post on making more money without certification, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on Challenges When Communicating Designs, Michael Feathers on Elegant Byte Counting, and something about remote work and not washing down shavings in the laundry room.

Check carnival of the agilists out, ladies and gentleman. And then book a place at a Smidig or XP days near you, before heading out for the weekend…