me.andering – Willem van den Ende

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 bestå 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

I read in several places that systems thinkers tend to keep their work to themselves, and that stories work best to get more people to do it.

So, here is a story with a diagram of effects – want more traffic? .

Context: Last week, Marc Evers and I were working on a quote for a community website, based on a request for proposal we got. We made the diagram to clarify our interpretations about the clients ‘business’ – a not for profit foundation supporting a community of practice.

I’m involved in a number of websites, e.g. to support my business, conferences and as of recently wyrd web – a budding company to support more of that. The diagram helped me understand this client, and some of my other contexts involving a community and its’ website(s) – e.g. systems administrators don’t always see why uptime and responsiveness provides business value to a community of practice (which if done well supports a thriving eco-system).

We decided to send the diagram to the client, and then I posted it. The diagram itself is isomorphic with part of its message: quality content drives traffic, which in turn drives quality content. The post attracted a nice comment, which helps me to write more about this topic .

We’ll see in the coming weeks whether this diagram helped the clients’ contact person in sharing our understanding of an effective website’s value with the not-for profit’s board.

Tomorrow and the day after sees Agile Open California come to life. With a strong theme “Sustainable Agility: Thriving in the Mainstream” , and a good number and variety of participants, it looks like an interesting addition to earlier Agile Opens in Europe and Agile Open Northwest.

To me (agile) software development is about delivering business value to the customer (by as little software as possible), and doing what works in practice. Today I’m writing a bit about routine versus variable cultures in organisations.

A current project, recent writings by Marc Evers and Nynke Fokma and upcoming sessions on organizational cultural patterns (based on Gerald Weinberg’s work) inspire me to write a little about… routine , so I can explain what the session is about, and evolve my understanding beyond what’s in the book. I’ve been using variations of this model for quite a while now, so it is about time to write about it

My mentoring/coaching clients fall roughly in two categories: those doing some form of chaos development, and those who supposedly have a bureaucratic, routine based process.

Digging deeper, my clients fall into one category: those who have some form of chaos development…

I’ll explain my digging along two lines:

1. Routine processes are uninteresting strategically
2. Routine processes are not focused on results. They only (seem to) work, because result-oriented people find a way to work around it and don’t tell anybody…
3. Routine is boring

Routine software development culture :
“We are developing software – follow The Rules”

Routine processes are uninteresting strategically

As Marc Evers writes in Keep on failing (in the small…):

“Predictable projects are not interesting, not in a strategic sense. If it’s predictable, there’s probably someone who has already done it or even created a product or service for it. Most interesting, strategic IT projects are in the complex space, where cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect and do not repeat. Best practices, recipes and step-by-step methods don’t work here. You need to steer based on feedback instead, through a cycle of probe, sense, respond”

So, if you want to create an entirely new market, you have to work based on feedback, if you want to go somewhere with an innovative product, you have to dance to the beat of life, and create your own beats

Routine processes are not focused on results

Because, to get anything done in a routine environment, you have to bend the rules. “The Rules” are usually made to prevent change of any kind, and “The Rules” have a tendency to grow in volume. As they grow in volume, they inevitably start to contradict themselves. Therefore, my clients only fall into one category

Now, as an investor or product owner, if you start a new project, you might feel tempted by the false idol of “The Rules”. It is easy to find IT suppliers who happily work with “The Rules”, making big, fixed-price contracts and maybe even using some form of Model Driven Architecture / Design, which is a translation of working by “The Rules” in software development terms. . .

As Nynke Fokma writes in Great innovations that help the world

“The intention of MDD, model and routine driven developments, is to make software work routine. It is a focus on the tool rather than on people”

So, why do routine-oriented people get scared when you mention agile. They hear a transformation from:

“We are developing software – follow The Rules”
to:
“We are developing software”,

which would be a Variable culture.

The mental image of a Variable culture for someone in a Routine culture looks like this:

“Variable Expansion”

If you remove “Follow the Rules”, Routine people can’t see the safety net. A Variable culture doesn’t have a safety net, so we don’t want to go there from routine.

However, as a mentor, a Variable culture is a much more pleasant state to start than a Routine culture – there are no “The Rules” to unlearn…

People in a variable organisation know that they are developing software, which makes them more aware than people in an oblivious culture:
“Are we developing software, really?”
“Oh, no, this is not software, It’s just some macro’s I made in Excel and Access” (never mind that these macro’s are the only things that are keeping track of millions of euros worth of business, as I saw in a moderately large manufacturer).

Clients in the variable space are usually a lot of fun for me. They are results oriented, and often have delivered software recently. They know they are developing software, they hire me to do better.

Usually, when they get to the point to hire a mentor or go for training, they know they have a bit too much chaos development. They already have some areas for improvement in mind, maybe some practices too, and with some creative questions, maybe a small retrospective, we collectively find some more.

We keep the results focus and the fun people are having at work, and add just enough process to make the team(s) more productive (deliver less defects, more business value).

What that looks like? I’ll leave that for an upcoming post…. There are loose ends here, some intentionally…

I’m not saying you don’t need any _routines_, which is differently from having a routine culture. Appropriate routines create a stable basis on which you can build and experiment. On the other hand, as nynke says: if you are in control, you are not going fast enough…

Credits:

The beat of life photo by ♥ Cherie ♥

“Variable Expansion” photo by Andreas Kollegger.

Gerald Weinberg, for his work on organisational cultural patterns

Nynke Fokma and Marc Evers for blog entries and discussions.

I’ll be co-hosting exploring the agile space at the Agile Business Conference (October 2 and 3 in London), and it seems at xp days London as well – People vs Process: Cultural Patterns of Software Organisations both with Marc Evers. I also recommend you check out the continuous integration and testing unconference – CITCON Europe 2007 in Brussels, October 19 and 20.

Making someone responsible to be a product owner, might make a development team feel absolved for ‘customery’ things. For a long time my gut feeling has been that the whole team (product owner, developers etcetera) should place themselves in the customers’ shoes. Attending presentations on product ownership in the eXPerience reports track at Agile 2007 confirmed that feeling.

Getting everyone to ‘crawl in the skin of’ their users creates simple to use products that do what they must and no more. Sometimes with amazing, simply beautiful interfaces.

There were presentations by:

• the BBC – Effective product ownership within a multi-component project by Mike Lowery and Marcus Evans,
• Yahoo – Less, Never more; Launching a product with critical features, and no more by Gabrielle Benefield and Scott Gatz, and
• Oxygen Ript (TM): Innovation and Collective Product Ownership by Ken H. Judy and Ilio Krumins-Beens.

The BBC story was on using the time of product owners wisely, I hope to write about that in a separate post.Yahoo’s and Oxygen’s stories are both about strong product ownership, focus on essentials, and last but not least: crawling under the skin of users. In the case of yahoo those were college students, in the case of oxygen women who are planning something, e.g. a home (re-)decoration or a wedding.

Both stories reminded me of ‘The Knowledge Creating Company’ by takeuchi and nonaka (1995). There is a chapter on how Panasonic created the first bread-baking machine. The chief engineer on that project had tried to understand bread baking from reading a book, and failed. Then he went to take lessons with a master baker in an Osaka hotel. He then tried to explain the bread-making and -baking process to his colleagues, and failed. Eventually groups of engineers would do internships with the master baker to get a ‘gut feel’ for breadmaking – this eventually helped them to resolve the myriad of constraints on a breadmaking machine.

Looking through the agile2007 proceedings, the written version of oxygen’s experience report actually mentions the knowledge creating company, I did not see that in the presentation.

If you are interested in product development, and haven’t read the knowledge creating company yet, I strongly recommend you do so. It is not an easy read (quite thorough), but you’ll come back with a more thorough understanding of product development.

The book also has good tips on how to collect knowledge and share it from one project to the next (or at the same time) – collecting and condensing knowledge takes time and concentrated effort – this gives project managers something to do with the spare time they get once their teams start to self-organise…

At Agile Open, I have heard rumours that there is going to be a Guerilla Open Space @ XP 2007. Today I have heard a rumour that the Agile Alliance is going to sponsor it.

I heard good stories on the Open Space being run last year at XP 2006 in Finland – Many attendees, extra rooms needed etc…

This year, the conference organisers decided not to have an Open Space. Charlie Poole, who facilitated it last year, offered to organise it again this year. He heard nothing from the organisers for a long time. At the last moment they said they are not going to have an Open Space. Does the word ‘stonewalling’ sound familiar?

Question: Why would a conference organisation not support a part of the conference that was highly succesful last year??

So, if you are in Como for XP 2007 or otherwise (for the guerilla open space you probably will not have to register), I recommend you check out whether this Guerrilla Open Space rumour is actually true. Quality is guarenteed by the passion of the people who choose to be there .

(Answer: the ‘acadamic paper’ programme at xp200* is weak and people spontaneously apply ‘the law of two feet’ – they go if they can learn or contribute more somewhere else).

I’m proud to announce the next

XP Days Benelux 2006

16-17 November 2006

Mechelen, Belgium

This year, even more than in previous years, we have a program that is balanced along the lines of the agile manifesto, a fairly equal dosis of individuals and interactions, working software, responding to change and customer collaboration.

Quoting xp days london, it truly is more than eXtreme programming, more than one day… Given the amount of interactive and experiential sessions I’d be more inclined to call them eXPerience Days . I’m also very happy to see a growing number of sessions around coaching, facilitation (with many highly qualified facilitators) and management. There is a mix of introductory, intermediate and advanced sessions, and we arranged the schedule so the beginning of the conference contains more introductory sessions, facilitating new participants to join more advanced sessions during the conference.

Official conference blurb follows:
XP Day Benelux is a two day international conference about agile software development, intended for software development and business people from all walks of life. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in agile software development. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.

The number of participants is limited to 120, so we can keep sessions small and highly informative.

Some photo’s from last year (you can see and read more about last year here and here) to get a flavour of what’s to come.

I see Emmanuel is puzzling on why people take pictures at conferences. I take them, not to provide people with shortcuts, but to serve my and other participants’ memories and to give people who haven’t participated in the event (or a particular session) a flavour of it, so it hopefully encourages them to come next time (and that works as I heard for instance from someone who went to the second agile open after seeing the photos from the first). As for safety, I usually ask people for permission before taking photographs, and I don’t publish the ones where people don’t look good . Most of the time, experiential sessions are lots of fun, so that gives photos of smiling, active people – I don’t think there’s many people that object to seeing a happy picture of themselves (and if they would, I’d remove it, but I never had such a request).

So I hope when people see their own picture, it helps them re-live the fun they had when doing the session.