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I first wrote the title of this post in the form “how small should the stories be?”, leading to the apparently obvious answer: “as small as possible”. It is in fact slightly more complex. (more…)

A journalist from Journal Du Net interviewed me a couple of weeks ago on the tools and (agile) practices we use at Valtech. (more…)

In preparation to our holiday trip in Indonesia planned for August, I’ve taken to read stories and legends about Hinduism and Buddhism (though a Muslim country for 90% of the population, Indonesia is the host of Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world). The legends I’ve been reading contain striking similarities between Buddhism and the Toyota Way, which I have also recently read about. Indeed, those similarities are striking.
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Cédric Dhénin from TV4IT has an interview of me talking about TDD (in French). (more…)

At AgileOpen, A session I suggested was particularly lively: Should Agilists Regroup?
A couple of weeks ago, I had listened to the Naked Agilists podcast, where Brian Marick had expressed his view that the Agile population had been diluted in the Conservative group of the IT world.
My goal in this discussion was to see if this vision was shared by others, and if yes, what can be done about it.

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I just returned from AgileOpen France, an Open Space Technology conference organized by Bernard Notarianni, Raphaël Pierquin and Emmanuel Gaillot, in the footsteps of AgileOpen Europe.
All in all, it has been a good conference.

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The AgileOpen France conference is opening this Wednesday for 3 days, and I am going with my colleagues Etienne and Yannick.

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During the Scrum trainings I give at Valtech Training, I often get asked how the bugs should be estimated. Sometimes, the question is about various architecture tasks or GUI updates.

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Things are starting to take shape for Agile 2008. Submissions are starting to come in. We are at 10 for the Breaking Acts stage, which is pretty good at this point.

Considering that the deadline is February 25th, now is a good time to submit your own proposal. If you feel you might have new, or counter-intuitive ideas to share, consider submitting to the Breaking Acts stage. Many other categories also await your topics.

While you’re at it, read Rachel Davies telling the story of the Agile 2008 conference. Also, check out the video of Grigori that explains how to use the submission system.

I have long wanted to attend a BarCamp but it’s not easy to get yourself to attend a conference on a Saturday after a whole week of work. I was also turned off by an impression that the crowd was interested in creating communities on the web, or micro-credit. Worthwhile themes, to be sure, but not currently part of my interests.

This time, what made the difference was that it was organized by Sun France. Also, it was a chance to catch up with Jean-Laurent.

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I have participated at a few Open Space events, and facilitated some, but the crowd never exceeded 60. So I was a bit apprehensive, when it appeared that the Open Space Technology part at Valtech Days Paris 2007 would gather more than 150 participants. Here are some things we did and lessons we learned.

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I first got introduced to using hexagonal cards for facilitation at AgileOpen. I thought they were pretty neat, and I acquired two packs of them for use at the Valtech Days. Here are some notes on how to use them.
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Wow. I started writing this post on my way back from the Valtech Days conference, which I have contributed to organize, and all I can say is “wow”.

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I was very excited when Squirrel suggested a topic about mutation testing. I had looked at Jester & Jumble before, but gave up after a couple of hours, as they are not very easy to setup, and mostly not maintained.

The idea of those tools is to make changes to the source code (Jester) or the bytecode (Jumble), and check if the tests still pass. If they are well written, they should fail when the code is changed. If not, then the code is not covered properly. Ideally, you should only have one test failing; otherwise, it means that you have redundant tests.

Ivan, the creator of Jester, was present, but admitted that he had not even used it in years. After seeing the interest of the participants, he seems willing to give it more time. Hurray!

Check out my notes on the conference wiki.

The folks at developpez.com (the de facto leading French website for developers) have interviewed me about the Open Space Technology conference that we are having at the Valtech Days on Wednesday.