me.andering

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.

As Agile Open is drawing near, pascal writes about how we manage risk. We use a simple brainstorming process, filling the risk table from left to right (event/what , probability, impact, mitigation). This has proven very effective. I believe it also helps us to relax, and share our concerns. The biggest concern for me right now is meta - after organizing a couple of conferences (three xp days and now the second agile open), we risk becoming unfocused.

Pascal mentioned the princess risk - the risk that a princess arrives at the conference. To him it signifies risks we did not anticipate in the past. These things will happen. For me, the princess risk entry in the risk table now also signifies as a call for myself to stay vigilant. The probability is stated as 50%. After three xp days benelux and one agile open, we should really have updated it to 25%, as a princess arrived at only one of those four events… (we introduced the risk after the second xp days benelux, at which a Belgian princess showed up, and threw us into chaos).

Unanticipated risks happen. Preparing scenarios prepares us mentally - we are aware that there are things that will not go as planned. Last year there was also at least one good thing that happened unexpectedly for me. Agile Open helped someone change his life.

It changed mine too. Co-facilitating an experiential workshop on congruent communication made a deep impression on me. I couldn’t really believe I was doing that, and yet I was doing it :). We’ve continued to develop this workshop as we are making the tools we use our own. We’ve ran it in various configurations, most recently at SPA and xp days france. We’ll be running it again at agile2006, where it has been accepted as a tutorial (”Balancing act - simple tools for feedback, communication and courage” - I would include a link, but the programme seems to be online as a PDF only).

I’m glad. Risk is only a Princess - Value is King (or Queen ) at agile open.

Johannes Link announced his new weblog My Not So Private Tech Life today.

Johannes has already written a book (on unit testing, in German), now he starts publishing in smaller increments :-). Looks like the blog will be a mixture of working in pragmatic ways and up-and-downsides of actually making stuff , starting with a thread on Ajax programming. (to Dutch people, Ajax remains a soccer team nevertheless).

I was having a good laugh at the waterfall2006 site, until some stuff
started to integrate. (I had some uneasy feelings initially, but it
needed some time to sink in apparently)

I enjoyed Mary Poppendiecks’ presentation at xp2004 about crossing the chasm a
lot. Mary’s advice was to not position agile against waterfall, but
against chaos. I found that sound advice, but very hard to follow.

I gave Joel Spolsky’s “great software writing” to a friend, and he came
back to me yesterday after having read a group is its’ own worst enemy
by Clay Shirky:

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and
vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone
who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see
this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a
big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation
going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding
from their ears, they would get so mad.

It seems waterfall is to agile as microsoft was to open source…

So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an
enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion.

(second quote also from Clay Shirky )

I recently got an interview at a prospective client because of a
reference from someone on ‘the other side’ that I haven’t even met yet. When
I am getting anti-waterfall feelings, I try to remember the ‘other’
people are also striving to build better software.

Which makes us allies with different points of view, rather than enemies.

I know. I was on the ‘other’ side once. I laughed at the waterfall2006 site, because I recognized some of the mistakes I have made (and I will continue to make interesting mistakes ‘agile’ or otherwise. That’s one of my ways to learn). What about you?

With me in this case. The world is also interesting, with many things going on on the energy front at the moment.I just arrived home from the pair programming party in Mechelen. I worked with Pascal van Cauwenberghe on our new project ‘hourensou’ (Japanese for spinach, and for a practice from the Toyota way). We’re building hourensou to help us level out the load for the various events we organize.

The amount of ’stuff’ we have to do is getting to the level that some pragmatic automation will save us time. We’ve got about six people signed up to help already, as this will also be a fun exercise in making a ruby on rails application.

We also talked a bit about blogging. Pascal suggested making small deadlines for yourself and finishing ‘whatever’ within that deadline. So that is what I did, I made up most of this blog entry (and some more) while I drove back.

Agile Alliance election results

I was eligible as member for the agile alliance board, and I didn’t get elected. A friend asked me about the election results today, apparently they haven’t been made public or sent to the members yet.

Looking at the list of board members on the agile alliance website it hasn’t been updated for at least a year, so I’ll break the news then, this is what Rachel Davies mailed me:

The people who were elected this year are:
Mike Cohn, Rachel Davies, Jutta Eckstein, Ron Jeffries, Ole Jepson, Brian Marick, Angela Martin, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.

I congratulate the new board, and wish them a lot of fun in a year where the alliance continuously delivers value.

I worked on my candidate statement for the agile alliance board elections today. Yesterday, at the agile seminar in Nieuwegein, Nynke Fokma, Marc Evers and Peter Schrier spontaneously self-organized into a playful campaign team (we’re not going to take this too seriously, mind you). During drinks they asked around what people expect from the agile alliance.

One of the concerns that came up, was with agile becoming mainstream, there will be a surge in ‘true believers’ who take a bunch of practices from a book (e.g. extreme programming explained or the scrum book) and take it as ‘the thing’ rather than as a gate to further understanding - turning off sceptics through their zeal.

If you want to read more about this, check out the xp mailinglist archives a few years back, or read about Shu Ha Ri on the c2 wiki or in Alistair Cockburn’s book on agile software development. I believe it is good to start out with practices, try them out a hundred percent and then reflect and make them your own.

By drawing in more beginners we, as a community, can support our industry in making a smooth transition towards more effective and enjoyable work. I interviewed a bunch of people recently for the agile2005 experience reports and yesterday at the agile seminar, and one thing that most of them had in common was how much difference they experienced in their working environment after starting with simple practices like stand-up meetings and iteration planning. An older engineering manager told me, that now he saw his engineers have so much fun he would almost consider going back into engineering. Now is a great time to be working in software development.

Ok, so here is my candidate statement, within acceptance tests provided by Diana Larsen : max 150 words, has to contain something about non-profit and community experience and what I would like to do for the agile alliance.

Hi, my name is Willem van den Ende. I’d like to help build agile alliance branding strength by fostering thriving local communities, international conferences, a website and other expressions that model our values.

I work as software development coach, currently based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I enjoy growing communities, so I co-founded xpnl, xp day benelux, agile open, agile systems and systemsthinking.net. Growing up in a tiny country that cultivated its golden age by accepting diversity when that was outlawed elsewhere, makes me realize how big this world is - we can prosper only by learning from each other.

As agile becomes mainstream, I believe we need to emphasize values over practices and individual methodologies. I see the agile alliance as rallying point for pragmatists seeking like minds advancing the “State of The Practice” in management and software development. We’ll be the change we wish to create.