I planned to write individual posts about new and upcoming workshops, but the rate at which we get invited and accepted to conferences this fall outstrips my ability to post new entries I have to post now, before the conferences themselves are over… I hope you’ll join us for at least one of these. We’ll be doing some hard-core programming workshops as well as more enterprise and facilitation oriented sessions this fall.

First up is Scan-Agile next Thursday and Friday in Helsinki, Finland. Marc already wrote about our Story Testing workshop.  I’m also very much looking forward to participating in the Scan-Agile Open Space, which now has its’ own day.  The main reason for me to return to Scan-Agile this year, is that last year it had very strong participants (and presenters, but good session organizers are only part of what makes a conference worthwile). Having my own unit tests ripped to shreds by critical participants was interesting and valuable. So I’m glad this year all participants get more space. We had some discussion on Twitter about ‘is kanban a failure mode of lean? (and what that means if it is so)’ that merits more than 140 characters… should make for lively open space as everybody involved in that discussion will be there . If I haven’t motivated you to join us, check out Vasco Duarte’s series of motivational posts about Scan-Agile.

Next up is the Practical Product Lines conference , October 20 and 21 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. There we will be hosting a value stream mapping workshop, as described by Marc. We decided to try out more conferences outside our regular schedule of agile conferences – preaching to the choir is fun, and helps us improve our understanding, but going out into the world and sharing what we’ve learned is at leas as valuable. We thought it would be interesting to bring our understanding of value stream mapping, and take participants’ experiences with product lines, should provide an interesting mix.

Freek Leemhuis of Devnology asked us to send in some proposals for the Devnology community day, saturday November 7 in Baarn, Netherlands.  We did, and they chose three of QWAN’s sessions for the program:

Refactoring to concurrency (with Scala) grew out of a series of commits I did for a product I’m developing with Marc, micro-ISV style. We needed some background processing to make our application more responsive, and I wanted to take small steps, be sure that it worked and have everything covered with tests. So I first refactored, until introducing concurrency was just a one character change. This session shows you how to do the same thing, with scala or another language.

Flying Horses – cleaner code in other languages. This session was inspired by a dojo description from Emily Bache (I don’t have the link handy right now, will insert it later). Rob ran with it and tried it out at Agile Open Holland last month. We’ll bring an application written in one language, everybody gets their laptops, a pair to program with and translates that to their favourite language. At first as literally as possible, and then make it ‘more like their language’. Then we will discuss what makes code, e.g. pythonic, javaic, C-sharpish etc. based on the examples we just created.

Give your code some love is a demonstration (a series of prepared katas) of us doing tiny refactorings on code that looks allright at first glance. Tiny refactorings then show that there are quite a lot of things we can do to make the code express its’ intent better. This session was heavily inspired by Ivan Moor and British Mike Hill ’s Programming In The Small workshop at the software craftsmanship conference in London earlier this year.

Jfall, conference of the Dutch Java Users’ group, November 11 in Bussum, Netherlands, sees Rob and me doing TDD As If You Meant It, inspired by Keith Braithwaite’s session of the same name at, again, the software crafsmanship conference in London. Keith kindly gave us permission to reuse the name. We are happy to see more people applying unit testing. Very few, however, seem to be really doing Test Driven Development. In this demonstration we hope to give the audience a taste of what test-first programming can do for you.

Xp Days Benelux, November 23 and 24, Mechelen, Belgium I already described Retrospective Hero with Nicole Belilos of Task24 and Agile Politics – (re)discover the politician in you at XP Days Benelux with Emmanuel Gaillot of Pyxis

and Finally, XpDay London, December 7 and 8th where I’ll be pair facilitating the Open Space with Rachel Davies.

Wille Faler asked on Twitter earlier this week about how people who go to conferences a lot do work. All of the conferences above are one, maximum two days, that leaves plenty of time in the rest of the week to do ‘actual’ work.  The other thing is, writing is a poor medium (for me at least, even though my blog does seem to travel reasonably well these days) to show our passion for software development, going out to conferences helps us connect with other people who are equally passionate about our profession. And sometimes this then leads to actual work. Which leads me to the following:

Shameless plug:

At the moment I’m looking for a new project to work on, either as a developer, agile coach and/or project leader. contact me if you know of a place where my skills would add value. Also, all of the sessions above and more are available as customized in-house training.

Sandra, one of the product owners, explains her point of view, Serge listens intently as facilitator

Now, lets' hear the second group of product owners, with their position

Nicole and I thought it would be fun do design a simulation game around facilitating retrospectives. At first we came up with a sort of board game, but after some brainstorming we thought a role-play would work better – our board game was turning out to be a bit too simplistic for our taste.

These are the benefits we proposed for our session at XP Days Benelux 2009, November 23/24:

• Learn new techniques by applying them to a simulated real world situation
• Experiment with techniques you already know – do something different with them
• Hold an emergency retrospective to ‘get to the bottom of it’ and come up with sustainable solutions quickly.
• Get some fresh ideas to do group reflection on emergency situations and longer timespans

At XP Days we have an hour and 45 minutes, for the try out at Agile Open we decided to see what we could do in a 60 minute timeslot to get as much feedback as possible on our game ideas. For the XP days version we were thinking about playing two simulation rounds, in which the participants get to deal with a) facilitating during an emergency situation and b) facilitating a retrospective over a longer period (weeks or months).

We were most curious about facilitating in an emergency; what we expect to learn from these simulations as hosts is observing facilitators ‘in the wild’ under controlled conditions and seeing how they behave, and what techniques work in which circumstances (we have our preferences, but they do not necessarily end up in the simulation). For the longer-term retrospective part we still would like to do a trial run. contact me if you’re interested in hosting it.

Therefore we designed a role play that happens in a Bank, something went terribly wrong and after the facilitator comes in on a monday morning he or she is asked to facilitate a ‘hero retrospective’ : find out what went wrong quickly and get the group to agree on some actions.One or two participants play facilitator, while the other participants play roles like product owners, helpdesk boss, development team and systems administrators. We give everybody an overview of the situation, and then each role receives an envelope with a more detailed description of what happened from their point of view. This leads to a group situation where everybody has partial information, so one of the challenges for the facilitator is to surface all the relevant information quickly. (I won’t say much more, because I fear that would spoil the simulation in case you come and play it…)

We creatively brainstormed the situation and roles based on our own experiences. And it worked. One of the players asked me ‘does this happen?’ about something that I experienced during a meeting; some of the assignments and poses of the roles seem far-fetched, but things get political when people have to divide resources, and as a facilitator you’d best be prepared to not be surprised about that

You might say ‘that is not a retrospective’, and you may be right; that is something that we want the participants to figure out and discuss in the debrief. And at Agile Open they did. Participants found that for effective facilitation you need to find a technique and style that fits you, the participants and the context. Some ‘participants’ preferred a ‘businesslike’ style, focused on only content, while others seemed to prefer also getting the mood of the people on the table.

In writing this sounds like knocking down an open door, but the emergency role play was pretty intense, with at least one facilitator behaving differently from his own expectations. We really did manage to create a stress situation .

Now we have to pick up the pieces and figure out what to do next with the simulations and the workshop. The participants gave us a good amount of useful feedback. The roleplay worked well, so we are going to keep that, but how to fit it into an overal workshop seems to, ehh, depend . We introduced two techniques before the simulation, and encouraged the facilitators to use one of those two. Next time we may only chose one, and see how that compares between groups, or alternatively (especially in an in-house course where we have more time), start out without a specific suggestion, roleplay and learn from the debrief, maybe explain a technique and try again, and see what difference that makes.

In reviewing the session for XP Days, Pierluigi Pugliese suggested we add observers to the list of roles, and give them specific instructions. That seemed to work well.

Jorrit shares his observations with the group

Since we are operating a kind of pull system for workshops, we asked ourselves beforhand: what do we want to learn from the try-out (does the simulation work? This is the first roleplay I helped create.), and what is the least amount of work we need to do to get that feedback. Therefore we created all the role descriptions in dutch…

Deborah Preuss wanted to participate, and while she speaks and understands a couple of languages, dutch is not among them. So we improvised and gave her, as an observer, the task to observe and interpret body language. Because of this the players learned about the effect of finger pointing, and that they were doing it without realizing it… The debrief was interesting. Deb noted that at some point several players’ body language indicated they knew enough and were finished with the discussion.

Deborah observes body language of one group

From the players’ perspective that was partially true: some of the players were finished with the discussion, not because they were satisfied, but because they realized they had nothing to gain by the meeting, as their concerns went unheard (and unacted upon).

For those of you who asked me what Retrospective Hero was, and what it was about, I hope this cleared it up a bit. I welcome your questions and suggestions. For those of you who participated or observed, we’d love to know what you feel about the game after a few weeks.

In any case, we hope you join us at XP Days Benelux 2009 to experience the extended version

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

• Why am I stuck?
• How does it work? Why?
• Does the work I’m doing now bring the project forward?
• Should I inform someone about problems…?”

For a bigger look back, Keith Ray collected links to Pascal van Cauwenberghe’s things I didn’t learn series.

A number of books and techniques I’ve been studying over the past few months have the theme of learning to see. Value stream mapping and causal loop diagrams are two such techniques. Peter Schwartz writes in his book The art of the long view about discussing multiple futures, rather than just the companies’ official future. The book Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future discusses seeing things as they are as well.

While writing, I realize a workshop on Perspectives Nynke Fokma created would be about learning to see as well. Time to start working on that one.

Perhaps seeing things as they are is impossible, since seeing is done by perceiving. Nevertheless, striving to collectively learn too see, enables more robust and diverse forecasting.

Steve Denning concludes Use narrative as well as analysis with:

What hampers the creation of such new narratives is of course the corporate culture, which, as we saw in chapter 7 on Taming the Grapevine, holds the existing corporate story in place with an iron grip. The story of what the business is and how it works is not something that has to be argued for, but rather life as it is lived there, a matter-of-fact down-to-earth common sense apprehension of the obvious realities of the organization, which any wide-awake person would grasp if he would just open his eyes.