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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
We did a rehearsal of our coming OpenSpace even at Valtech Days. The signs were “beta” versions of what we’ll get in two weeks.
As a side note, we have also started displaying (and renewing) pictures of Valtech events on the same wall, which is the first thing visitors see when they get to Valtech. Good for consultants that check in; good also for candidates that we interview.
The 3rd edition of the Valtech Days is taking place in Paris in October 23 & 24.
It is going to be a great edition (hey, I’m helping to organize it! ;-) ); I had confirmation that Laurent Bossavit and Régis Medina will be there, as well as Pascal Roques, and many others. Laurent will talk about “DIY Agile”, while Régis will expand on Refactoring, his pet topic. Pascal will discuss UML and Agile.
Other talks will focus on JBoss Seam, Spring, Agile & Offshore, Adobe Flex, the future of Web, Google APIs, SOA, XForms, Agitar Agitator, and Rally!
And that’s just the first day… on the second, an openspace technology event will take place, possibly the first such public event in France. Facilitation will be handled by yours truly. I hope that, experienced or not, all will be able to have their say, suggest topics to discuss, get together to talk, and get in touch with other members of the IT community (mostly Agile, if all goes well!).
OpenSpace Technology is now recognized as a fabulous way to harness energies and run productive meetings. It has been used in such conferences as CITCON, AgileOpen and the Agile conference series.
To learn more about OpenSpace Technology, see this explanation in French (translation is Forum Ouvert), or this one in English.
Come join us for these exciting 2 days!
This year, I am going to attend the conference on Continuous Integration and Testing, in Brussels on October 19-20. The last edition I’ve been to, in London last year, was enormous fun, so I cannot wait to get there.
This year, I am also helping in registering participants, so you’ll probably hear from me.
David Gageot has posted a round-up (in French) of the OST conference that I facilitated at Valtech recently, with pictures. My post on the subject is here.
To my question “how can we demonstrate the validity of Agile using figures” the disappointing conclusion was that it was not actually possible (thank you Jamie and your “when you know, you know” ;-) ). For more on this, I’d like to refer you to the presentation Agile - Les chiffres pour convaincre (The Figures that Make a Convincing Case for Agile) from XP Day Paris, as well as the book Lean Software Development - An Agile Toolkit. These two documents explain how you can make more money when using Agile methods. This is not proving the validity of Agile from an engineering point of view, but it should still help!
Concerning measuring the ‘agile-ness’ of a team, Rachel Davies shown that she likes to identify the Agile practices that a team should use (such as Continuous Integration), and then give a mark from 0 to 10. If a team is given less than 10, she also adds what is missing to reach the highest mark (”the CI should run integration tests”). I must admit that, though simple to put in place, I am rather sceptical of this approach. It seems to ignore the fact that a truly Agile team should always try to do better, regardless of whatever mark they got.
One option presented at XP Day might help: the idea is to ask team members, at each iteration retrospective, to evaluate themselves their agile-ness on a 0 to 5 scale. After adding questions such as “how happy are you on this project?” and “how well do you feel we responded to business needs”, you end up with a good-looking radar chart that evolves in time. This is very appealing: it helps keep Agile in the mind of the team members, become more autonomous (no waiting for an external consultant to tell them the gospel), prevent the “checkbox list effect”… plus, it’s cheap to put in place!
My hand-written notes taken live are available in the Book of Proceedings.
After a session on Agile Tooling, I suggested a demo of Hudson. I thought that went rather well.
For me, Hudson is definitely the best CI tool today. It is still a bit young but it is so easy to use that it is a breeze to switch to it.
There were 4 French people at AgileOpen, so inevitably the subject of holding the equivalent of AgileOpen in France came up.
It appeared that the people at Octo are using OpenSpace internally. They are also starting to apply it with clients.
As for Valtech, we have of course been using OpenSpace internally for a while now. And our next big thing is the one-day long OpenSpace event will take place during the Valtech Days, on October 24th (watch this space).
Apparently, there are also rumors of people organizing a French edition of AgileOpen, but there is much to do before that to happen.
In the evening, there was a session called ‘games’. That was interesting (and fun). A number of games were named.
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