Finding a venue for CITCON is always a rather stressful and last minute event. So I am happy to report that we already have found one for CITCON Amsterdam, 3 & 4 October. IBM has been kind enough to let us use their premises, South-West of Amsterdam Center. Thanks!
I already have my train ticket. Now, if I could just find a cheap hotel, all will be good.
I have not been able to blog in a timely manner regarding Robert C Martin’s Keynote at Agile 2008. I must admit that I was not really expecting so much energy, presence on scene, and fun. Not to mention his shorts (how could he stand the A/C?! I guess you get used to it after decades in North America).
Besides all the fun and small talk, Bob Martin actually had something to say. His point was to introduce, half-jokingly, a 5th statement to the Agile Manifesto (most readers will know that he was part of the seminal retreat at Snowbird; in fact, I believe, he was the one originally with the idea of getting those people together):
Craftsmanship over Crap
which he subsequently corrected into
Craftsmanship over Execution
(see why he decided to alter his proposal)
His point is that we should always insist to act as professional and insist that well-engineer projects are superior. Yes, there will be cases where executing (ie. delivering early, with little regard to code quality) will be more important. But in general, we should resist simply delivering projects quickly.
A couple of quotes to drive his point home:
Bob Martin also had fun words about methods. Here is one (hoping I haven’t missed too much):
“Scrum is the Open Space of processes. The bugs that come are the right bugs. The specs that come are the right specs… and the managers should all be fired!”
Unfortunately, I forget what he said exactly about eXtreme Programming. It was around the lines of paraphrasing the 10 Commandments or something: “Thou shall pair program!” “Thou shall have common code ownership!”
Making fun of both processes was just to drive his point that neither were self-sufficient. Rather, they would benefit from being used together.
Bob Martin, Uncle Bob, was able to deliver a fun, content-packed speech. This was a surprise to me, not having met him before. I hope you’ll have a chance to see him in action as well.
Yesterday evening, we attended a concert at Salle Pleyel, the most prestigious French venue for classical music.
The host was Ravi Shankar, one of the masters of classical Hindustani music in general, and of sitar in particular.
It was not really a concert in fact. Rather a talk about classical Indian music, with a little bit of demonstration done by the accompanying musicians (Shankar directed the effort, almost entirely improvised). Though I was disappointed not to hear the master playing, hearing him talk was a unique event. Plus, I didn’t know much about Indian music (I didn’t even know there was another style than Hindustani, called Carnatic music, most specific to South India), so it was all new information to me.
Two things came to me mind during his talk:
Though Shankar might be one of the most respected, he is not the only one. Others such as Wynton Marsalis have been known to try teach music to the average laymen.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have equivalent figures in the IT industry? Imaging Jerry Weinberg or Fred Brooks touring secondary schools, explaining why software made them tick, while dispensing information on how these things things work.
There is a parallel with the concept of Shu Ha Ri, frequently refered to in software/agile development. All masters, whatever the domain, insist that we need to follow the rules, the basics, without questioning them too much, before attempting to break free and innovate. So why are we so quick to disregard them (“oh, this part is not for me”, “pair programming won’t work here”) and do things our own way? In software, as in music, modesty would go a long way.
I just came back from 3-week holidays, and I am still coming to grips with all the news that I had missed.
Among them, GWT 1.5 is finally stable! The biggest feature is compatibility with Java 1.5.
This is great, and I hope that even more people will turn to this fantastic platform.
Agile 2008 has been over for just a couple of days, but we are already talking about Agile 2009. This time it will be in Chicago, August 24-28, 2009. I have already volunteered to help.
I unfortunately do not have time right now to post more on the conference. If you can read French, you will find several posts by me and other colleagues on the Valtech Blog. Also, you might want to check out my photos on Flickr.
Until Agile 2009, I’ll be looking forward to Agile Tour France in October, CITCON Amsterdam October 3rd & 4th, and Valtech Days Paris October 21st & 22nd.
Maybe I’ll meet some of you there. But first, I’m going a few weeks on holiday. See you in September!
Interesting presentation from Staffan Noteberg on Pomodoro, a technique of Italian origins to help focus when working. It was very good, as I got exactly what I was expecting: an overview of the technique, with examples and even some experimenting during the session.
Quick overview: the idea is that a kitchen clock greatly helps focusing for a period of time, 25 mins nominally. Then, there are a few techniques to fend external (and internal!) interruptions. A couple simple tools such as a todo list and a tracking sheet are useful too.
I won’t go into the details, but the technique seems worth looking into. Very close to the concept of GTD – Getting Things Done.
I loved the hand-drawn slides! A fresh change from the usual.
Also, check out all my pictures from Agile 2008.
Update (10/08/08): I am happy to report that this session has been selected by the other participants for the re-runs on the last day. Maybe this post helped? ;-)
With just a few days to go before Agile 2008, it is more than time to make a choice in the plethora of presentations (more than 40 simultaneously at any given time!!).
The kind folks at Naked Agilists are willing to help you on that. They have interviewed some of the track organizers and Laurent Bossavit is presentating Breaking Acts, one of the richest tracks, which he organized with help from your truly.
Many people have asked me to talk about the A4 Reports that I have introduced on one of our projects. I’ve postponed this for a look time, but I finally got around to do it.
The idea came from the book Toyota Way, by Jeffrey Liker. At the beginning of the book, the author warns the reader against a classic trap: after reading about the success met by Toyota, many want to implement their practices verbatim. Well, my philosophy is that, if I got only one useful practice from the book, then it was worth paying for ;-)
So anyway, the author is telling about the fact that Toyota employees do “A3 Reports”. The idea is that, when there is a problem, after careful thinking, the people in charge produce a report that fit on an A3 page. The reason for this constraint is that 1) is it quick to read, 2) it can be faxed around the company with the fax machines they have.
Another thing is that they tell about the problem and the solution using Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). Which means that their reports typically contain:
I was personally attracted to the reports, because they force the writer to keep the information concise, though readable. Graphs were good too, as long as they make the contents clearer to the reader.
My personal problem was that, as a ScrumMaster, I have to produce reports every time we complete an iteration. The reports are boring to write, probably boring to read, and they were getting longer as the various stakeholders regularly demanded that I add more information. Other metrics that had to be maintained included productivity, progress on project, etc. I felt that these metrics were not very useful and I had also been getting into arguments with my boss’ boss, especially after a steering committee where it had become clear that I couldn’t make the situation easily understandable to our clients, even with an Excel document containing 6 sheets. So I was feeling some pressure to show goodwill, and to produce something that was actually useful.
One day, my direct boss demanded that I produce not only my usual textual report (generally 2-page long), but also a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation. I was underwhelmed, since I already felt my report was not that useful. I got her, though, to agree that, in addition to what she wanted, it’d be worth trying those shorter reports.
I set myself the following constraints:
The result for the first Sprint to have an A4 report is the following (in French):
Things of note:
When my boss saw this report, she was delighted. It became the main document discussed during steering committees between the various stakeholders, including the CEO of the company. I also sticked it to the walls of the development room, in full colors.
In later iterations, I refined the report a bit, but it stayed largely the same. For a few iterations, I had a tendency to change the charts, depending on the situation (for example, if speed of development was an issue, I’d add a chart showing the number of actual work days per iteration). I have found that it was not as necessary in later iterations. Probably a good thing, as I would not be able to gather all the data necessary.
Here is how it looked in a recent iteration (in French again, so it might be hard to figure out what each box is for):
How I build the report:
For your information, here is a list of the noxes used in the last report. You will want to adapt this to your needs:
I hope all this will help. Let me know your improvements on my design!
With Agile 2008 just around the corner, superlatives abound: “largest Agile conference in the world“, “premier international conference in agile development“, “a production team of highly respected Agile experts“, “spans the whole spectrum of agile practice“.
Participating companies are also guilty of that.
One such is SolutionIQ, who boasts “more speakers than any other services organization in attendance“. I have counted 9 speakers and 9 presentations on their page.
Well, at Valtech, we have “only” 8 presenters, plus one organizer (yours truly): Greg Hutchings, Gilles Mantel, Dave Nicolette, Ryan Hoegg, Mark Smith, Andrew Rendell, Alan Goerner and Tim Walker. But they will host a total of 12 presentations:
So, there! ;-)
I have only mentioned once Sonar in the past on this blog. I should do that more often, as it is truly a great tool. If you read French, please check out my report on a presentation that Freddy Mallet, the Product Owner for Sonar, did on our premises a couple of weeks ago.
For today, I just wanted to mention that Hudson and Sonar, currently two of my favorite tools, have been brought together. This Hudson plugin makes sure that Sonar metrics are obtained from the current job. Good stuff!
I have recently started a new assignment as a member of an architecture team, which had not happened to me in a while. In the past few years, I have been working as application developer and/or agile coach, occasionally fighting/collaborating with architecture teams. This new gig is interesting, in the sense that I get to experience first hand how technical teams create barriers around them.
Here is an example of a talk I had recently in the team.
You might have noticed that I am taking a great interest in the practice of Continuous Integration (especially in the tool Hudson, of course!).
Agile 2008 is just around the corner, and I’m particularly eager to hear the latest about CI. Here is a selection.
Agile Tour is a series of conferences taking place in several cities in France and Switzerland, in October 2008. It aims at spreading the gospel of Agile methods to places outside capitals that have not seen many conferences or user groups yet. It is expected that most of the people coming will be interested in sessions given in French.
So, if you are interested in giving presentations in French, please consider applying as a speaker.
I have refered a couple of times to the presentation by Jeffrey Fredrick and Alistair Cockburn. Jeffrey used it in a “How to introduce CI” session at CITCON London 2006. I also mentioned that a CI Game had been implemented for Hudson that can be seen as an implementation of the presentation.
Anyway, Jeffrey has finally put the presentation online on his blog. Thanks, Jeffrey!
Only 3 weeks to go before Agile 2008, the main agile conference. I am very excited, as Laurent Bossavit has kindly invited me to join him in organizing the Breaking Acts (BA) track for the conference. Also, many colleagues of mine at Valtech, between 15 and 20 (it is difficult to keep count!) will be presenting sessions. More on that later — for now, I want to tell you about my favorite sessions at Breaking Acts.
