me.andering

One of the things that made the xp2009 conference exceed my expectations was the beach. Here you can see photos from thursday, May 28th – Patrick Kua hosted an Open Space session on ” is there a lean versus agile versus kanban divide?” that turned into one of the best sessions of the conference. The guys from agical organized an unplanned barbecue, which was great; most participants were there, and the hotel management was very supportive.

I’ll process and post the rest of the photos when time permits – I decided not to do everything in a big batch this time (which sometimes means the batch never gets executed and photos are not published). Tomorrow Marc and I depart to Luzern, Switzerland for the first instance of our Agile Product Development training, so there is not much time left.

In our quest to put into words and pictures how important context is to choose practices, to show that there is no one-size-fits all solution for process and change strategy, Marc Evers and me went on tour last year with a presentation on Cultural Patterns. Take a look over at InfoQ – Beyond Agile: Cultural Patterns.

Willem and Marc introduce cultural patterns that can be found in software organizations. By understanding the cultural patterns then you can better adapt your practices. Continue reading ‘Beyond Agile: Cultural Patterns video on InfoQ’

I haven’t gone to XP200* for a while. This year is different   It has a very strong programme with an excellent balance between practitioner workshops and tutorials and a more focused academic track. Amongst other things, sessions by agile regulars like Jeff Patton on User Story Mapping, David Anderson on Kanban, the Poppendiecks on Lean, Diana Larsen on Retrospectives, Steve Freeman on Mocks, american Mike Hill on CRRAP as well as  workshops by  people you may not yet have heard about: the Scrum Board Game by Wim van de Goor and Stefan van den Oord looked like a lot of fun at the last XP Days Benelux, and the Agile Analysis tutorial by Joke Vandemaele should be very good as well – she is part of a ‘new wave’ of what I call example driven business analysts (a shorter version will also run at mini XP Days in Mechelen, May 11). And there is an Open Space of course, for the latest and greatest insights and the most difficult of problems.

It’s back in Sardinia, in the beautiful town of Pula so the place itself is worth a visit – I was in Sardinia once for XP2001 – it is stunning.

looking to the Sea from Pula fourtress by Alistair Young

Temple of Augustus, Pula by yellow book ltd

Mike Hill and me will be co-hosting a haskell coding dojo at the eXtreme Tuesday Club in London this tuesday.  Prior experience of Haskell not required, just bring your intention to have some fun A dojo is a great way of learning together, and I see we have at least one participant with quite a bit of haskell experience; so register to join the fun…

Spa 2009 was an experience grenade, I am somewhat recovered from the blast I had there, but not quite, so here are some impressions and photos.

Haskell

This years’ conference had many sessions on a hitherto rather obscure programming language: Haskell. I knew the guys from the Paris CodingDojo (at the very least EmmanuelGaillot, ChristopheThibaut and ArnaudBailly ) have been jamming on Haskell for a while, I was surprised to learn Ivan Moore and Mike Hill, this years’ programme chairs also have taken an interest in it.

I am not exactly sure why. Continue reading ‘SPA 2009 was wicked: Haskell, Beatboxing and Anarchy in the UK’

A bit late, as the first conference – SPA2009 – has already passed . It was great, more about that later. We already put the write-up for Consulting Without Secrets up on the SPA wiki, Sea Stories and Fairy tales is yet to follow. Continue reading ‘Conference workshops – the second quarter’

Jurgen Appelo writes in Communication = Information * Relationships that “top-down systems thinking is a management fad“. I agree. Systems thinking works only if it happens in all directions at once. It seems to work when a group of people is doing systems thinking  in the same room at the same time. All combined, these people bring the perspectives that are necessary to come up with changes that work. Continue reading ‘Bottom Up Systems Thinking’

Johannes Link is starting something that I would like to support and promote:

a “ development project for bored consultants”

contact Johannes if you’d like to spend (at least) one day per month in a project with other agile consultants and you are willing to give this project priority on that day.

Continue reading ‘Keeping up is not enough’

Chris Matts is drafting comic strips on real options and financial options in the new decision coach blog he and Olav Maassen started yesterday.

I particularly liked the draft on Financial Options, it explains a number of not so intuitive financial instruments and techniques (e.g. naked short selling and futures) in such a way that I find them easy to understand, and possibly explain them to others. Not a bad thing to have in turbulent financial times. Chris’s goal is to make them  understandable by ‘basically everybody’ – I encourage you to go and read it, and give him some feedback on bits you don’t understand.

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…