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My Agile Suitcase at XP2010

My Agile Suitcase at XP2010

My favourite session until now at XP2010 has been the Agile Suitcase session by Martin Heider and Brend Schiffer. I dont think it created any ground-breaking insights, though it was an excellent, high energy methods of reiterating the values that we live by to revolutionise IT and champion software excellence. The format was really quite simple. Five experienced Agilists, Rachel Davies, Mary Poppendieck, Joshua Kerviesky, Jeff Patton and Patrick Kua delivered five fast paced Pecha-Kucha presentations to address the following situation.


Heres what I caught from each of the speakers and the points are perphaps a bit paraphrased too.

Rachel Davies

Rachel was carrying a backpack instead of suitcase so it doesnt get lost! Good metaphor. So here are the points from her presentation:

• Environment matters for Agile software development. Keep learning and keep the environment conducive to the learning.
• Great software takes time.
• While building great teams seems like herding cats, teamwork is essential to Agile.
• Stickies, markers, index cards, whiteboards - all will be in Rachels suitcase. Shes big on consensus building.
• She refuses to carry planning poker cards because they dont measure true value in her opinion.
• She focussed on the importance of slicing and release planning.
• Focus not just on pairing for programming but pairing for non-programming tasks too.
• Try tea-driven-development so you can reflect on what youve done after each little salvo.
• Deal with technical debt early - write clean code.
• Ship early, ship often.
• Show courage.

Mary Poppendieck

Marys talk focussed on her husband Toms passion for photography. It was a spell-binding slideshow of amazing storytelling through pictures and Marys objective seemed to be to talk about the way Tom has reached this stage of mastery. Tom is an addict with photography and as a consequence very passionate about all aspects of it. Hes gone beyond the usual novices approach to snapshots - he can tell stories with pictures. His intellection has taken practice, hard work, time and heaps of experience.

Toms persistence with the skill has lead to the fact that hes ready to capture the right photograph when the opportunity comes by. This is a factor of preparedness and skill which again comes from years of deliberate practice.

I think Marys message was quite simple but used a powerful example to show that expertise stems from passion. Magic doesnt happen by magic, it takes time and we need to invest time in our skills or just be snapshot photographers. When Toms done learning, he passes on learning and tools to others. For example he passes on his cameras to his son. In the same way, when we gain mastery at something we need to pass it on to others as well.

Joshua Kerievsky

Again the theme seemed to be around getting better. Here were some interesting points from Josh:

• Make awesome users.
• Values trump practices.
• Agile is about riding two dolphins at a time - the technical and the managerial. Theyre not mutually exclusive and you need to build skill riding both at the same time.
• Begin any Agile transformation with a readiness assessment.
• Discard the iron project management triangle. Adopt the Agile triangle and focus on quality, value and constraints instead.
• Think of a project community that involves all stakeholders; this goes beyond just the development team.
• Educate the anti-bodies. People that are unhappy with you, your approach or your success need you to educate them about why what youre doing is valuable.
• Ship when necessary - the Industrial Logic team doesnt do iterations or so it seemed.
• Perform usability testing, because you dont want to make your users think.
• Unit testing is the USP of Agile, so why arent all Agilists writing unit tests?
• Build the important stuff - itll take care of the rest.
• Measure what is valuable.
• Do your retrospectives.

Jeff Patton

More than anything else, I loved Jeffs typography on his slides so I missed a minute or so because my jaw had dropped. Anyways, heres what I think he said.

The question we need to keep asking ourselves is are we there yet?

• We need conversations which are about words which we hear, then see and then can draw out to create shared understanding.
• Its about learning in a timebox, because we need that as a feedback mechanism and a constraint.
• We need subjective measurements such as how good something is or how valuable it is.
• We need to celebrate success, but more importanly celebrate outcomes over outputs.
• We need to learn how to observe users in their real work context over taking them out of context and asking them questions. Ethnographic research is a key tool in our toolbox.
• Describe your users, role-play them to understand their motivations.
• Keep learning, ship it and change the world!

Patrick Kua

Pat made some rapid-fire points with very interesting pictures and I love the fact that he resonated many of my thoughts about coaching and learning. Heres what I think he said:

• Passion is the biggest thing in any professionals toolbox - we cant live without it and its pointless doing what youre not passionate about.
• There are no silver bullets - context is key.
• Learn about learning - people rarely learn through push so help them learn by pulling what they need and create the context for learning in the workplace.
• Focus on the big picture of the system - a bad system will beat a good person each time.
  
• Share ideas and be open to new ideas.
• Practices we should never forget:
• Retrospectives: they tell us its OK to look back in safety and think of how we can improve.
• Kaizen culture: make changes one small step at a time.
• Timebox: we need constraints to innovate; constraints drive innovation.
  
• Connect with users.
• Whole team: include everyone.
• Celebrate successes.
• Lastly, have fun - its sustains you at work!
  
• Pat also talked about the metaphor of planting seeds and creating the right environment for growth."Trees dont grow overnight nor do people."
• Create safety for people to fail fast and learn from their mistakes.
• Leadership means, getting your hands dirty - action matters.
• At the same time you need let go as well. There will be a time you wont be around and you need to plan your obsolence.
• Invite others with your passion to share ideas and improve the process.
• Prepare for change since its the only thing thats constant.

Massively Multiplayer Agile Suitcase

After all the talks were over, Martin and Brend got the crowd of 80 people to come up with their own Agile suitcase by first working in pairs and then in silent groups of four, eight and 16 people. That ensured that each group of 16 had their best five items in the Agile suitcase. Each team then volunteered someone to go up on stage and stick their post-its on the big suitcase whiteboard beside Brend and Martin. All in all a massively multiplayer Agile suitcase achieved in about 16 minutes. The reason I loved this session was it gave me some great ideas about getting groups to work together to come up with thoughts and also a great way to create an engaging learning experience for people.

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