IT Lesson

The final day of the conference contained three general sessions.  I found a few people who skipped out on these sessions - too bad for them as the sessions were a great wrap up for the entire week.

Dave West talked about Product-Centric Development and the move away from the separation of business and IT (yes please!).  He asked us to start measuring ourselves and our teams by how much value we deliver and not by on-time, on-budget, # of defects, # of stories, lines of code, etc. We can’t make our teams act as part of the business unless we change our measurements.

Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson provided both comic relief and poignant commentary.  I think Chets comment sums up their talk: "there’s lots of ideas out there and we need to look at every damn one of them”.

Finally, Mike Cohns talk was a great ending to the conference as he challenged us with some practical ideas of how to spread what we’ve learned using the ADAPT model.  Create Awareness of the problem by communicating using metrics and stories. Focus on one or two reasons to change. Increase the Desire to change by communicating that there is a better way. Get the team to take agile for a test drive and focus on addressing any fears. Develop the Ability to work in an agile manner by providing coaching and training. Promote agile by publicizing success stories or holding agile safaris where people can drop in to agile teams for a short time to see how it works. Transfer agile to all non development teams, departments, divisions, etc. Align promotions, raises, HR, and Marketing. Finally, don’t expect an agile transition to happen all at once. Create an improvement backlog and improvement communities and work on a few stories that are important to your community before tackling the next ones.

A final call to action from Mike: “Now we’ve upped our skills, up yours!”  Well said.

Here is a summary of another satisfying day:

I was introduced to some powerful team wireframing techniques that could be incorporated into the discovery phase of a project as another tool to aid in creating and defining the backlog.  I wonder what my UX friends would think of doing UX as a whole team.  It definitely fits the agile model where every team member provides input and takes responsibility for the whole process, not just their specialty.

The 11am session reminded me of the Trident Splash commercials - I wasnt prepared for the amount of information I received from Jeff Patton and Ill have to review my notes and his slides several times.  What I do know is that there was a lot of valuable information on how to do agile discovery.  The techniques were designed to help you get to a definition of ready - ready to start sprinting.  Some quotes I wrote down: "Our job is to minimize output, and maximize outcome"; "Most agile practives emphasize delivery, and not much discovery", and as an example of that second quote: "velocity is a measurement of output, not outcome".  A good reminder to focus on why the project was started in the first place.  Update 8/31: The slides are now available here

The first session after lunch I joined the presenter up front as a timer object.  Brian Marick was explaining OO programming practices to non-programmers by using volunteers who acted as objects.  He explained SRP, encapsulation, MVC, etc.  You can see a partial video of a previous talk he did on the topic at http://vimeo.com/13506935

Not shockingly, in the last session I learned I was using Selenium in the most basic (and mostly abhorred) way.  I was able to spend some time with Patrick Wilson-Welsh after the session in a mini open jam to go through some coding examples of how to do it the right way.  Good thing I havent given my Selenium SDEC presentation yet.  Thanks Patrick for spending the extra time - you are one of many at the conference that have shared your time and energy with me and others.

The day ended when I didnt win an iPad, but I did thoroughly enjoy playing beach volleyball in the dark until almost midnight with occasional swim breaks.  Thanks to everyone who participated - it was a great way to give my brain a rest.

Were at epcot tomorrow night until midnight so I dont think Ill be posting my Day 4 notes until Friday sometime.