me.andering

Agile Open NorthWest gave me a lot of energy. The participants were amazing, newbies and old hands alike - because everyone was actually doing stuff with it in the real world, following the theme “Agile for Real”. I got some answers on questions I had and I came out with stuff to continue working on.

This blog entry is a bit late, which is in no small part due to the fact that I’m still buzzed by this event…

I did not take many photos during the event, as I was too busy participating. I enjoyed most of the sessions I went to, and at several timeslots wished I could be in multiple places at the same time, so I could go to other sessions.

Sessions I enjoyed & gave me almost instant business value:

FunctionalTestingTools, Agile Testing with Testers, TDD for Managers (I still have to post the notes for that one… a session on how to let non-technical people experience Test Driven Development), Green Eggs and Ham, Tools/Techniques for Distributed Communication, Filling out SCRUM with XP, CoEvolutionPicnic. Two sessions I wished I could have also gone: AppreciatoriumProject, and FutureOfUnitTesting .

The action planning at the end of the event turned out to be pretty succesful. Future of Unit testing is getting its’ own workshop (hosted by Kent Beck), some people started preparing a product owners’ workshop, to collect experiences from product owners and… yet another Agile Open got initiated - a group from the San Francisco Bay Area got together to plan one :).

This goes to show that open space can be very goal- and action-oriented, and that whatever happens in the sessions is actionable - because people do what matters most to them, just in time.

Some of the few photos.

Elizabeth Hendrickson hosting a session on educational games

Charlie Poole welcomes the participants

Some of my friends wonder where I am from time to time Haven’t been blogging for a while now - ruminating on stuff, writing on a book project with a couple of people, going out on coaching assignments, and this week teaching the tenth eXperience Agile course here in Eindhoven. Oh, and while I was procrastinating on my bookkeeping I redesigned livingsoftware.nl (again :)), now running on drupal, and some minor edits to the text. Because of the book project, I’m having fun in writing again.

It might be a while until you hear from me again, pollen of Agile Open have blown to Portland Oregon, and I’m going there to attend Agile Open Northwest and an Agile Alliance Board meeting. And… a few days off. I travelled to some nice places last year, and did not take the time to see the surrounding. And then, on the way back, thinking, why did I not spend a couple of days extra here…
The Agile Open Northwest Logo is interesting, they crossbred Marc’s logo with a tree You’ve got to love branches.

I’m having an open space themed week:

• I’m going to CITCON in London - the unconference on continous integration and testing, friday evening and saturday.
• Preparations for the International Open Space Technology Training in Berlin (November 2 through to 9) have started. Another participant has created a mailing list, to virtually open the space, and the organisers inform us there are still a few places available (currently 41 participants, 15 places left). I’m looking forward to this. Since leaving university I haven’t been on a course this long… (it’s a full week, including a weekend).
• Two sessions in the XP Days Benelux program have joined forces to form an open space track divided over two afternoons. Thursday afternoon features a themed open space track on How can your business benefit from agile facilitated by Anko Tijman and friday afternoon wil be ‘open’ open space (the session previously known as the planned unprepared session) intended to let the participants reflect on sessions they’ve attended so far and discuss important last-minute topics. We’ve got an energetic bunch of people together preparing these - if the sessions are going to be as much fun as the preparation… A manager says:
  

  I spend a lot of my time dealing with and talking to managers about agility and how the principles of XP are relevant to the non programmers in the organisation. It may seem obvious to us but sometimes it needs to be spelled out. There is a sort of fear of loss of control from most of the management people I talk to. I have to assure them that control is an illusion at the best of times and that trust is a better, more productive way. One of the things I like about the open open session is that it grasps that fear and says “ok lets see what happens if you do relinquish control - will people mutiny and waste time or will they rally and try to address the issues.”. We can use these sessions to show that people will naturally allow the real priorities to surface and in a more direct way than they might otherwise be able to on a rigid agenda.

• Diana Larsen said at Agile2006 there might be an american open space conference on agile. Her company’s event calendar says its on January 30 – 31, 2007 and it goes by the name Agile Open NW in Portland, OR USA. More Agile Opens :). The website isn’t up yet apparently, hope it will be soon.

The unprepared session at agile open prepared us well for the brown bag session Bernard Notarianni hosted subsequently over lunch, to show how they are done in his workplace. These brown bag sessions each deal with a chapter from Quality Software Management (the four volume book series by Gerald Weinberg).

Bernard Notarianni explains the first chapter of Quality Software Management

I’ve participated in many discussions on software quality. Usually, it leads to babble and nothingness… This time was different. Discussion on ‘what is software quality’ was focused, and I learnt a thing or two about it. The format of the meeting is simple. Everyone reads a chapter, there is some discussion on the content, and then the group does one or more exercises - QSM has exercises at the end of each chapter.
They have these meetings every two weeks. At this rate, they’ll be spending the next couple of years working on it. Bernard says it works great for them, and they’ve been doing it for quite a while now - looks like years of fun and learning to look forward to.

Raphael Pierquin requested an unprepared session at Agile Open. I guess many people would feel an unprepared session, even without a formal agenda at the beginning would lead to a conversation like this:

there were two muffins in an oven comic by Adam Hally

People often fear the same of an unconference as a whole. The unprepared session turned out to be exactly the opposite.

The conversation was extremely focused. We used Moo Cow several times during this session. Calling “Moo” helped us to keep laughing, it was a great paradoxical way to maintain focus. Everyone was listening intently, all participants were facilitating the discussion, and we got time to work on some topics in depth. Raphael started off with a difficult question that we delved into, after that we tried a temperature reading because several participants wanted to try it out.

After the temperature reading, we had a discussion on the forces that make it work or not. Because the unprepared session took place in an unconference, participants could (and did) walk in and out of the session at any time. Several people joined in halfway through the temperature reading, after we had done the appreciations. Again it turns out appreciations have a special effect on the meeting. If you join a temperature reading after the appreciations, you miss the atmosphere, and the other participants can not bring you ‘up to speed’, because the atmosphere can not be verbalized.

Neither can the unprepared session. I hope I gave an impression that does it a little justice. I hope to have some more unprepared sessions here at european consultants camp.

I participated in the presentation zen session at agile open hosted by Pascal van Cauwenberghe. Pascal already did a writeup on the session as a whole.

The main reason for me to attend this session is if I want to be better at creating and giving presentations, I might as well go all the way, look what works for other people and see what fits for me.
This is the group I was in, with (left to right) Vera, myself, Kristel and Lieven.

This session worked very well for me. I took some things away that I applied the next monday, while making a presentation for a client - for those of you who wonder whether going to conferences contributes to the bottom-line, agile open did to mine, and quickly :-).
I’ve been to several presentation and communication trainings, when done badly, they had the opposite effect - one made me more afraid of giving presentations rather than more relaxed. So hats off to Pascal for making space for a relaxed and fun session. I guess creating and presenting in groups made it a lot more fun and less scary than it would have been experimenting individually.

Practicing in a group was also very productive. in about twenty minutes we created a presentation with three co-presenters, did a trial run with feedback in a few more minutes , and then a re-run for the other participants a few minutes later.

The second run went already noticeably smoother, even though we had no opportunity to update the slides based on the feedback and new ideas we got from the first run.
We started with an anti-slide, extra filled with bullets in an illogical order. Vera told a long story somewhate unrelated to the bullets.

To see if the participants read the slide or listened to Vera, we inserted some jokes at the end - if people laughed, they were reading, otherwise they were listening to Vera. Our hypothesis was, that people could either read the slides, or hear Vera speak.

Some participants were laughing, others were not, so we concluded that some were listening, and others were reading. We verified it with questions after the presentation, our assumption seems to have been correct. The next slides were in lessig / takashi style: just one to a few words per slide.

That gives much more…

Slides like this are much easier to read from a distance, and are also friendlier to older people (It’s not called senior management for nothing… ) .

In our group we discussed about what presentations are used for. In-company presentations are often used as ‘discussion documents’ ‘process documentation’, and more in general, presentations are often also used as handouts (I do that too in courses). It seems presentations are better considered a separate medium from those. Presentations are less cluttered, and handouts, process documentation and discussion documents are better served with more detail than can fit in a slide.

Getting better at presenting takes practice (lots!) and fresh ideas from elsewhere - this session provided both.

Remembering names and faces after a conference can be difficult. At agile open Raphaël Pierquin suggested we make a group photo, so everyone could add their name to the photo.

To make it easier to find ourselves back in the picture Raphaël used gimp and his daughter’s felt pen to create numbered outlines:

Getting this outline was a nice surprise. If you were at agile open, please add your name to the pictures page on the wiki.

I managed to get the agile open photos online, a big thank you goes out to Marc Evers , who put my camera to good use. Having someone else take pictures as well freed me up to be more present during sessions. (draw parallells with pair programming).

Some photo’s to give a taste (there are many more photos from agile open than I can fit in a blog):

participants making the program

Coding Dojo (Randori)

break

break

Current reality trees don’t bite

round table discussion

Zen presentation

drawing carousel

drawing is released, even though it is not really finished…

thursday’s schedule

Friday’s schedule

Tom and Marc discussing

Bernard and Raphael discussing

xp game

waiting until the closing session wants to start.

I’m recovering from agile open, still feeling somewhat unconfenced / conferenced out :). I liked it a lot, biased as always, because I co-organize it… Unlike at some other conferences I visited recently, I was able to attend a couple of sessions I didn’t organize

last and not least, the planned unprepared session, and after that the unscheduled unprepared session, outside on the terrace with wine and excellent conversation.

I believe we succeeded to strike a balance between structure and un-structure, keeping in mind the goal for this conference is openness, and maximum participation from everyone. On the second day we changed several things in the structure based on suggestions made during the opening that day. I had the feeling everyone was feeling more comfortable on the second day, because everyone knew each other a bit better. We may add some get-to-know-your-fellow-participants activity for a next event.

Raphaël suggested we make a group photo, so we can remember who’s who later. Unfortunately, when we got around to it, some people had already left. The mostly broad smiles say more than I could about this event. Wonder full:

Having Agile Open, is like having a birthday. A big surprise, and i’m not sure what I’m going to get…

It seems we are not slacking off (as I feared in Princess Risk ). We had a standup meeting over skype yesterday, that gave a lot of focus. We have virtual ’standup’ meetings in a chat window. They last a bit longer than ordinary standups, passing the ‘talking stick’ is more difficult. But they are usually good fun, and quite effective.

One thing we were puzzled about, was wether to do a last-minute marketing effort. With twentyfour participants and seventeen ideas for sessions, it is looking to be a fun-filled conference. Maybe more participants would be even more fun? I don’t know. Today is the last day you can still join though

Ideas for sessions will be welcome until the start of the conference, and possibly on the second day of the conference as well.