me.andering

Agile Open Europe 2008 is over…

This panorama photo of the introduction was made by Harald Walker, who volunteered to be our resident photographer. He’s already posted his impressions :). On thursday it was a bit rainy, so all sessions were inside. Friday was a nice, sunny day, so there were a good number of sessions outside - I spent all day in the garden. The Volksuniversiteit Utrecht has a nice location in the middle of the old centre, with a garden in the back - we always look for a location with nice, green outdoor space and that is easily reached by public transport. Usually these two conflict, not in this case.

We succeeded in simplifying the organisation, and in enrolling some volunteers, so that Marc and I could also participate in sessions I enjoyed (re)newing connections and learning a thing or two from the sessions - maybe more on that later.

Marc Evers and I were a bit buzzed… We hoped, this year, to start announcing agile open earlier (and, unlike last year, not keep repeating ‘we should get started’). Well, unlike last year, we didn’t keep repeating it. We just didn’t get round tuit…

So last week, we finally got together around a whiteboard, decided that we did want to hold it in June (like last year, and as we planned), but we didn’t have a location etc. and didn’t want to spend as much time as last year in sending out invoices, dealing with exceptions etc.

So, we decided to go with an affordable conference location and leave things like hotel, dinner out of the basic package. That means we can send out just one type of invoice - you come two days, or you don’t, and  beside diet preferences there are no options. Well, you can of course volunteer (we got spontaneous offers for that. ) or sponsor.  We also decided to cap the conference at just thirty participants, so we could go with the venue. One of the reasons being, we thought we can’t get that many participants in a month anyway… Surprise, surprise, sending out the invite to a couple of mailinglists, and we’ve already passed the twenty participants mark. And we have some sponsors as well (we didn’t expect many in this timeframe, so we’re pleasantly surprised. Now we have to make sponsor packages and facilitate the other volunteers so we can self-organize )

So, without much further ado, I’m proud to announce the next

Agile Open Europe 2008

will take place in Utrecht, NL on June 5th and 6th. A vibrant place to push the envelope and do business together. And yes, we will find Belgian Beer - one participant listed that as a dietary requirement ;)  Looks like its’ going to be good fun again. See you there!

And if you ’still’ haven’t registered - there’s a handful of places left…

Raphaël Pierquin just put the rough version of the agile open france proceedings online - to enable ‘us bloggers’ to start using the proceedings he uploaded scanned images with an index. A more polished version will follow later. This ‘reduce cycle time’ version already provides lots of value to me. For instance, I can now show you the beautiful notes Antoine Contal made of ‘Beyond Agile’:

Notes of Beyond Agile. Click the image for the full-size scan.

I decided to propose a run of “beyond agile”, so I could try a different way of presenting the cultural patterns before qcon London this wednesday. The runs at xp days last year (then dubbed ‘people vs process’) were well received, and gave us ideas for improvement:

• we needed the question and answer time to get across why we believe these patterns are useful in our work (they help us determine where we are, and decide on a strategy on where / how to go next),
• attendees got the idea that one goes from one pattern to the next in a linear fashion. We then presented it in a linear fashion then, so surprise,surprise…

In this instance, I ditched the slides and presented from flipchart. After presenting the ‘why’, the participants did a round of experiences on the questions:

• ‘did you ever experience people telling you that your mix of ‘agile’ practices is too much process? ‘
• ‘did you ever experience people telling you that your mix of ‘agile’ practices is too little process? ‘

We then gradually constructed the circle, starting with the cultural pattern (’routine’) suggested in the story told by the last participant. Meanwhile, I explained some common choreographies (the arrows), each with their advantages and difficulties through stories:

We discussed more choreographies than could sensibly make the notes, and further discussions over dinner gave me some more inspiration. Even this ‘circular’ drawing follows the same linearity as in Gerald Weinbergs’ books. In wednesdays’ presentation we’re also going to talk about some other choreographies (e.g. going from routine, or routine to oblivious).

As you might guess from the notes, we ran the entire session in french. I needed to ask for some words, and probably my grammar is not up to par, but overall it went much smoother than I expected. The other participants were extremely helpful in letting me and Barry Evans speak as much french as we could, providing us with words when needed, and allowing us to switch back to english when we couldn’t manage in french - less and less frequently needed as the days passed .

So now it’s time to re-order the slides in a quasi-random order - some order that allows us to string stories together in a way that makes sense to the audience, add choreography slides and practice a bit more. I hope to see you at qcon on wednesday.

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

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

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

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 bestÃ¥ 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…

This is a slide I made for a workshop on Refactoring Legacy Systems I ran yesterday. I love the puzzled look on their faces.

The photo was made in the open space at agile2007, featuring JB Rainsberger and two others (sorry, remembering names at large events like agile200* is difficult for me - the guy in the middle was a volunteer in a session I co-hosted at agile2006).

The agile2008 call for participation is out, to give you an idea what is going to happen. Major change for next year is the idea of stages, each stage with a specific theme.

Close to my heart is of course:

Agile and Organizational Culture
Producer: Marc Evers; Assistant Producer: Linda Rising
Agile is not only about changing the way you work and changing the way you think - doing agile in a sustainable way requires changing principles and values. An agile initiative doesn’t take place in a vacuum, it has to interface with the existing organizational culture. It will influence the organizational context and the other way around. This stage provides a space for discussions, teaching, learning, and sharing experiences about agile and organizational culture.

Space for new session organisers and pushing the envelope:

Breaking Acts
Producer: Laurent Bossavit
Agile as it stands today is still a work in progress. For Agile software development to remain relevant, it must incorporate new ideas continuously. This stage is for speakers who bring a fresh and surprising look to aspects of Agile we thought familiar, and speakers interested in ideas that are relevant to Agile but not accepted yet as “mainstream”. First-time speakers are particularly welcome.

And of course, another Open Space

Open Jam
Producer: Esther Derby
The regular program presents a wide range of presentations and experiential sessions. The Open Jam stage is a place to share questions and quandaries, talk to the experts, demonstrate software and techniques, and experiment with emerging Agile practices and ideas.

There’s also a francophone stage, hosted by Emmanuel Gaillot, since Agile2008 will be in Toronto, Canada. I will be visiting Toronto December 6 through 9 for an agile alliance board meeting - that way, board members involved in the conference organisation can combine two things in a trip. Let me know if you’re in the area and would like to go for a beer