me.andering – Willem van den Ende

Nicole Belilos and I are hosting a trial run of our ‘labour turnover – should I stay or should I go’ workshop – we’re going to also run it during agile2008. We’re doing a trial run next tuesday (June 17th) at the office of Topic in Best. Contact me or Nicole if you want to join. If you want to know more, read the workshop description, or the full trial description in Dutch (below).
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This was the only ‘red’ card in the retrospective we held today at the end of another eXperience Agile

Further there was one looking ahead (‘Drink & book’ -meaning looking forward to drinks in the bar and receiving the book at the end of the course).

Personally I also loved ‘no more questions’ (I guess there will be more after a night of sleep). One thing we experimented with was shortening the iterations in Day 3′s exercises, so we would have time for a bit of questions and answers ‘open space’ style (or XP style – questions on post-its prioritized by the participants).

We had quite a number of ‘puzzles’ on Wednesday and Thursday, mainly open questions… And some red cards. Most related to traffic jams. Other cards we resolved quickly (not enough overview on the agend for the course – easily done with an extra flipchart, another one was that we had two pairs working off the same repository by accident, we still have some manual steps in installing workspaces that we do not yet know how to automate well due to the environment we are using. ).

Seeing the green cards, and the happy, exhausted faces, there probably was quite a bit of accelerated learning going on – and that is not a coincidence.

I ‘m especially pleased to see green cards where we used to have red and yellow – dilligent work, and keep on trying to improve a few things each and every course. I don’t know what we’re going to change in the next one (we have some ideas around acceptance testing and have been experimenting), but I’m sure we are going to change some things. We, the ‘instructors’ are also part of the learning community, and I strongly believe our own learnings accelerates that of the other participants.

Therefore we hold retrospectives after every course day. Sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes the next day. Where it makes sense we ‘stop the production line’ and fix problems immediately, e.g. answer questions and gather questions for further discussion in a separate block or over lunch. In other courses this also helped us streamline exercises, the build environment etc.

As you might see in the green and yellow cards, much fun (green cards) and puzzles (yellow cards) come from the open source tools and games generously donated to the world. This includes the xp game, ruby, rspec, test/unit (included in ruby), firewatir, and of course techniques like XP, Refactoring and TDD that you can (amongst many sources) still read about on the C2 wiki and the XP mailinglist. And of course retrospectives.

I hope these happy colourful photos inspire you to experiment with retrospectives. A word of warning… besides focusing on what you can do better, don’t forget to celebrate the green cards (I have that tendency – still a bit of a perfectionist) and relax before the next round of improvments. Have a nice weekend

I’m still planning to procrastinating on writing more about cultural patterns. How better to procrastinate than with some light sunday reading:

“[...]a small startup, should be working twice as hard as the bigger companies [...]“

Taken from tales from the WTF company, part II . If you work smart, read part I first…

Excercise for the reader: which cultural pattern does the WTF company exhibit? You get bonus points for identifying coping stances from the story as well ).

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

Marc and I finished translating Belofte maakt schuld to English, we proudly present: Promise is Debt.  In this case study, based on our own stories, we apply systems thinking to a common destructive behaviour pattern in IT organisations: overpromise when you underdeliver, and then overpromise some more…

So far we had a good response on  Belofte maakt schuld, overpromising and underdelivering seems to be even more common than we thought.

Writing papers in two languages is an experiment for me, usually I write in English, and I used to write in Dutch when I was writing articles for Dutch IT magazines. Writing and editing a translation gives me a fresh perspective on the text, and in the meantime I’ve had some more discussions on the topic. In the end, I came to the conclusion that if you really want accurate estimates, and stop overpromising, you have to foster a culture where saying no is ok.

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

And that habit is: ‘overpromise and underdeliver’ Marc Evers and I just pubished a new article on this topic in Dutch, Belofte maakt schuld (‘promise is debt’). It is a case study, in which we apply systems thinking to this highly destructive habit. We plan to make an english translation available later on.

As an aside, I’m inspired to use the word habit today, after stumbling across this interview with Ivar Jacobson in our local industry magazine Bits & Chips (in Dutch), in which he explains to use ‘habits’ over ‘process’, because process has become such a loaded term.

This was registering with me, because Marc mentioned a couple of days ago, that he was looking for an alternative to the word process. After some mulling about, we came up with this:

A process is what happens (as the total of actions by the people), a habit is what people do normally. You want people to change their habits, if you want a more effective process…

A popular way of doing that is by ‘installing new procedures’. Procedure is an even more loaded or dreaded word, that means a process in the narrow sense, what people are expected to do. But basically, if you follow a methodology by the book, that is what you are doing: following, or trying to follow new procedures.

But, old habits die hard. Belofte maakt schuld (‘Promise is debt’) is yet another example of how to let people fall back: ignore the reasons for an initial success, and let the team fall back on its’ old habits by increasing the pressure to deliver… “I already promised this to the customer, you could produce as much earlier (under the false promise of time to make up for any corners cut during a crunch), so stop whining, stop testing, stop pairing, just deliver…”.

And then when the teams’ velocity drops even more, promise even more to the customer. ‘Just’ rely on the teams aim to please…

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

I am one of those people who, at times, propages practices inspired by the toyota way (e.g. lean software development). However, I also have my eyes and critical mind open – I don’t want to be part of a cargo cult, I want to practice and promote practices that make work both more effective and the results of the work more valuable, and make work more fun and sustainable.

A friend of mine recently mentioned a toyota employee who died from overwork. It took me a while to find the full story – at first I only found reports from 2002. Apparently, his widow won a lawsuit against toyota – his death is now officially declared ‘karoshi’ (the japanese word for overwork).

I recommend you watch this report:

CNN on death from overwork

The report not only shows the logs, but also points out the risk of modern practices, like people taking their laptop home or on the road, so there is no end to work.

As I am writing this on a laptop in a Toronto hotel room, I consider myself warned. How about you?