We brought one exercise, to be carried out by pair programming. A pair can choose what ever programming language they want to use. We try of course to get an interesting variety of languages to learn from. We ran three 40 minute timeboxes. Each timebox consists of 25 minutes for actual work, and 15 minutes reflecting (about three different solutions presented on the projector accompanied by discussion). Some people switch pairs from one timebox to the next, so they can get hands-on experience of trying to solve the same problem in different languages. The goal of the exercise is not to finish first, or have the cleverest solution, but develop a solution that is idiomatic in the language one is solving it in, so that we could compare notes afterwards.

This time we had three pairs working in smalltalk (cincom smalltalk as well as squeak), two pairs in ruby, two java, and further pairs in Scala and Haskell.

A few pairs wrote examples using Rspec or Scalaspec, most pairs wrote ‘classic’ XUnit style tests. Some worked completely outside-in, other bottom up, and quite a few from the middle outward (me and my pair amongst others).

Some things that struck me:

• at least one of the smalltalk solutions I saw did not strike me as very idiomatic smalltalk (admittedly, the presenter said it needed refactoring, so they went for make it work/make it right).
• Nat Pryce noticed that collections were processed easier (and with less code) in the Haskell and Smalltalk solutions than in Java.
• The smalltalk pairs were the first ones to finish setting up their development environment and getting to work (Rob did a timecheck, the smalltalkers were the only ones working on the problem already). Having an environment that contains almost all the tools and libraries that you need gives a big speed boost at the beginning. What was more striking still was that all smalltalkers used environments they just installed and had not used before; I installed squeak last weekend, the others were using a fresh beta version of their environment.
• Many people had not seen (much of) haskell/ruby/smalltalk style of iterating over collections using blocks/closures, luckily these idioms seem to be trickling down to Java and C#.

As with the previous instance of Flying Horses, the Haskell pair was moving towards a complete solution the fastest. This may be because the exercise we use seems to find itself in Haskell’s sweet spot (parsing and manipulating data).

On the whole, the level of engagement was pretty intense (about half the participants continued working through the breaks, even though we emphatically tried to get them to stop ), participants said they got to see some very different ways of solving a problem from what they knew, so they came out of the workshop with puzzles to investigate further.

As one participant mentioned, code presentations work up to a point. They show what a pair has done, but it is hard to see what steps they have taken to get to the solution. Seeing the sequence of steps (and experiencing it) when you are part of a pair (especially with someone you don’t know) is very valuable. I’m interested in suggestions for getting more of the sequence of events (rather than the solution) out into the presentations.

We have tried letting people work with task lists and presenting from there (works somewhat, but may cause pairs to loose to much time on their small design up front).

Let a thousand languages bloom Below are the flipcharts summarizing some of the things people learnt from the workshop.

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

Tijdens Agile2008 in Toronto faciliteren we de workshop “Agile and labour turnover – Should I stay or should I go?” Op 17 Juni gaan we deze proefdraaien, om met jouw feedback de workshop nog beter te maken

Tijdens deze workshop onderzoeken we samen met de deelnemers welk effect de introductie van een agile methodiek heeft op het verloop van werknemers binnen het bedrijf of de afdeling.

Is het echt, zoals sommigen schrijven, dat 20% vrijwillig of gedwongen vertrekt? Of neemt het verloop juist af, omdat een Agile werkwijze leidt tot een grotere tevredenheid over het werk en de sfeer? En wat doe je met mensen die een hekel hebben aan deze nieuwe manier van werken, maar die, om allerlei andere redenen, toch blijven zitten?

De deelnemers brengen hun eigen verhalen en situaties in kaart met behulp van oorzaak-gevolg diagramman (systeemdenken). Dankzij deze diagrammen worden patronen in kaart gebracht, zodat die een volgende keer doorbroken kunnen worden.

Nieuwsgierig? Lees de volledige beschrijving van de sessie en schrijf je in!
Voordat we naar Toronto afreizen willen we onze sessie graag een keer proefdraaien, zodat we onze sessie met behulp van onze feedback-verslaving nog beter kunnen maken.

De proefsessie is 17 juni op het kantoor van Topic in Best (www.topic.nl).

Het programma ziet er als volgt uit:

17:15 – 18:00 Ontvangst met een broodje
* 18:00 – 19:30 Agile and labour turnover – proefsessie
* 19:30 – 20:00 Evaluatie van de sessie
* 20:00 – 20:30 Napraten met een drankje
*
Wil je ons helpen een goede sessie te maken? En/Of ben je gewoon benieuwd naar wat we in Toronto gaan doen? Stuur dan een mailtje, zodat we rekening kunnen houden met jouw komst.

Hopelijk tot 17 juni!

Nicole Belilos

Willem van den Ende

We had a somewhat smallish audience, so we assembled one team. Team dynamics were great. After strictly facilitating iteration reviews and standup meetings the team started to self-organise these. The team started to quickly decide pair rotation, and many decisions were taken through osmosis – as pairs rotated, information was spread around, so not everything needed to be discussed at the reflection and standup meetings.

One of those things, as we discovered during the session debrief, was that the team did not deliver a drawing, but more of a collage made of cutouts. We asked how that had happened, because we had been present at all of the iteration reflections and standups, and we were still surprised by the result. Cutting was not mentioned during the meetings (or at least, we did not notice…). The team said consensus on cutting was reached within the first three iterations, solely through pairing.

The team also asked difficult questions before the first iteration (I won’t mention the questions here, as that may spoil a future run…). Having one or more experienced testers, who are skilled in looking for holes and asking critical questions, in the team present at the first planning meeting helped in preventing rework early on.

The team had gotten into the zone / flow, where the team operated as one.

Factors that may have contributed to this:

• good mix of experienced agilista’s and ‘newbies’ – getting the ‘innocent newbie questions’ often expose holes in product and process – it also makes the debriefs easier to facilitate, as what happens in the simulation is,through the questions, easier to tie to real life
• Running it with only one team gave Marc and me ample time to discuss facilitation strategies during the drawing episodes. We were also able to pick up more keys from observation.
• Lynne Azpeitia was in the room as well, mostly observing, that gave us even more information to steer the session.
• There was no competion on resources with other teams (if there are more teams, the limited number of scissors, glue sticks and sticky tape rolls leads to resource competition and wait times – teams are not allowed to change tools while drawing, only after the standup and before restarting drawing.).

In hindsight, I did get a key for the team making cutouts. At one point, the team ran out of scissors. We had about five pairs, and four scissors… If they were mainly drawing, they would not need that many scissor.

pair drawing

switched pairs

drawing and cutting a prototype

standup

standup with list of tasks on the flipchart in the background

Editing the task list

drawing signed with business cards (some business cards were created on the spot with mini-index cards)

The team proudly presents their result

See also Other entries about drawing carousel, mainly photos from previous runs.