me.andering

A newsletter is much like software – if you create a larger batch of items, the work grows more than linearly (editing, translating, scrolling, selecting). It’s still worth it though – creating the newsletter on a regular basis helps to reflect on what we’ve done, but also creates focus: what are we going to do or research to make the next one interesting…. The positive response we’ve gotten so far also helps. Marc was kind enough to create a wordle to reveal more of the content:

Maybe because of the delay (we skipped May eventually) we not only have more items, they are also longer. We try to keep the newsletter short, but the things we discussed at conferences and while making the product development training gave us some inspiration to explain some topics in more detail. If the topics pique your interest, you can read it online or subscribe.

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

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’

Raphaël Pierquin has scanned the first batch of session notes from Agile Open France.
Some of the attendees are excellent (visual) note takers – even notes of sessions I did not attend speak to me. Enjoy (works best if you can read a bit of French, although the glyphs also speak volumes)

Does this look like a place of work to you?

Hotel Arnold at dawn

To me neither. This was my place of work for three days during Agile Open France.  The effect it has on me is hard to explain, I hope the pictures help paint a clearer eh, picture.

Continue reading ‘Agile Open France – refreshingly simple’

Marc and I just got word from Jason Gorman, that our session Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects has been accepted for the conference that has outlawed index cards, post-its and lego: the Software Craftsmanship Conference in London, February 26.

The year is getting off to a good start – we did an iteration on the session proposal January 1st. To fit with the spirit of the conference, we’ve added a coders’ dojo to it. I look forward to going back to the BBC site, having facilitated in-house dojos before.

I’m still wondering what happened with our other proposal – the continuous integration install party. It might not have gotten through, but I guess we could run it as a BoF (possibly at the SPA conference in April, also in london).

When I saw the proposed stages for agile 2009 last week, they looked a bit bland to me. A lot of the fun and risky stuff seems to have been taken out (musical stage, breaking acts, questioning agile). Ok, open space (I love open space) is still in there.

The 2008 conference was quite good for such a large event. Things that contributed to it were, in my opinion, scrapping experience reports as a separate track and instead having lots of experience reports everywhere as well as the breaking acts and questioning agile stages. Yes, you can have those topics spread out, but having those topics front and center (what is the first thing you see when you look at the conference? its the stages. So the first thing you see is: ah, critical thinking, wild new cideas).

If you want to support new ideas, and at the very least keep up the outward appearance that the agile community invites and supports them, leave a comment on David Andersons’ blog post “The case for an agile fringe” .

I also left one at Johanna Rothmann’s (2009 conference chair) response “I’m Disappointing Already” outlining some of the forces I’m seeing. Johanna ems to take it personal, which I think is unfortunate. Sometimes folks in the kanban camp seem to do the same – getting their sessions rejected for earlier conferences must have been very painful. The reasons for rejection were probably systemic, and it seems some of the systemic reasons have been fixed in 2008, now 2009 seems to be sliding back (and yes, kanban is now establishment, but it will happen again to new new stuff).

So, let’s stop taking it personal, and improve the system; no regression, if we can easily prevent that please – carry out one refactoring “replace experience reports stage with fringe stage”, that’s it.

That’s it for today, maybe I’ll post more later. I’m going back to xp days london (which is one big fringe lots of new ideas and critical thinking going on, and the open space is an integral part of the program, which seems to work fairly well at this scale.).