agila sverige day 2 refelections

The second day of agila sverige followed the same format as the first day. See yesterdays post. Compared to other conferences the emphasis on interaction is very refreshing. Lightning talks I attended today was:

• Thomas Nilsson started the day with the talk Flight of the Agile. He argued that there may not be the one agile way. Circumstances, staffing and the like may call for another approach then the purist way. This is a fair call and something that has been iterated over several times these two days. I hear an echo of Alistair Cockburns agile method called crystal.
• Andreas Ekström talked about BDD and cucumber.
• Christophe Achouiantz (wow - avega has an asp site) uses Kanban as a way to organize many scrum teams. The idea is to have backlog items on a kanban board and every team has a row. This brings good overview of the overall progress. It looked really good and is something I will try if I ever get the chance.
  
• Inga-Lill Holmström from Ericsson talked about using anatomies as a complement to the product back log. I am not sure about the point with the word "anatomies" when what it really is is just dependency trees of product features or team activities. (Called system anatomies and program anatomies in Ericsson lingo.) I guess anatomy is just a word that Ericsson is used to. Many of us outsiders probably went huh.
• Agile managers was the title of Tomas Björkholms talk. It was an entertaining talk where Tomas used the agile manifesto pointing out the managers just must love it. And he is right of course.
• Joakim Ohlrogge used the tv series friends to bring a fresh approach. Nicely done and it fuelled the open space about artistic development a bit.
• Staffan Persson thought that lean architecture was worth talking about. I am not convinced that the architecture metaphor is still useful.
• Anna Forss thought that Microsoft Project can ruin a project but still recommended the tool at the end.
• Kristina Josefsson och Carolina Palo Kobak brought experiences from using Scrum in a management team at TeliaSonera to the table.
• Daniel Brolund held an excellent talk about being a goldfish. He argued for staying simple at all times. "What would a goldfish think about this?" is a good question to ask. Very entertaining and thought provoking.
• Anders Nilsson and an author whose name has been forgotten talked about two extremes of agile teams. Extreme chaos or extreme discipline. The point being - naturally - that 'lagom' is just enough.
• David Asarnoj reported from a scrum and ITIL organisation. Two different mindsets that doesn't naturally have much in common. Interesting questions put forward that were elaborated further in an open space.
• Dan Bergh Johnsson presented the agile stack of Scrum, BDD and DDD. At this point I was tired enough to drift away a bit and can not really report anything useful....
• Peter Hultgren presented code sparring - a way to train coding where a group meets and pair programs for a while then throws away the code and start over with new pairs. An interesting concept that surely can complement coding dojos and personal kata practices.
• Finally Marcus Ahnve argued that we need experts but we don't need experts that are only experts. Everyone should try to have a little knowledge about all disciplines needed in the agile team. In that way everyone can work on most tasks.

Today there were only two open spaces since the third slot was reserved for retrospection. I first open spaced about what agile means. A nicely organized brain storm about agile on 6 different levels. The organizers promised a write down of the result somewhere and I will either tweet about it or post it here. The second space was about artistic development. A very interesting subject where we explored comparing software development to performing arts. Many things are similar like timeboxing, a team that needs trust to perform, product owner/scrum master can be likened to producer/director/writer in a performing group. No conclusions were made but I think we all agreed that a creative and artistic mindset is part of a successful software story.

Two questions worth pondering was put forth repetitiously during the conference. Why is the consultant ratio at the conference about 80%? And why do we all agree? Several open spaces were held around these two questions. A skeptic might say that agila sverige is a conference where consultants get together to complain about the lack of agility in their customers. We decide to stay outside organisations with structural problems and sort of hope that they will change by themselves. If we just shout our agile message loudly enough they will understand. Isn't it first when you really are in an organization that you are able to change it? I have no answer to this. In the meantime I will keep trying to communicate my values to whomever I happen to work with. Sometimes it will make a difference and sometimes it will not.

To summarize I must say that agila sverige positively surprised me. I expected a great conference but my expectations were exceeded. Lots of thanks to the organizers and I hope to meet you all next year!

agila sverige day 1 reflections

The first day of agila sverige is over. It is a very intense conference that is not only about agile software development but also claims to be agile in itself. This is manifested with 10 minute lightning talks in the morning and open space after lunch. So there are many speakers to start the day with (about 30 talks in 3 hours) and the audience itself set the afternoon agenda. I think it is a very nice format. The balance between lightnings talks and open space is really good. The lightning talks I attended were:

• Jocke Holm talking about the HUGE misunderstanding that software creation is a kind of manufacturing. He argued that coding is design. I totally agree with this and a previous post of mine addresses the same issue but from the architecture metaphor angle and with a different suggested solution.
  
• Anders Ivarsson on a similar subject - agile language. He argued that agile methods essentially has positioned themselves as opposite of older methodologies and that this has influenced the language we use to describe the method. He made the point that agile methods should be able to stand on their own - not to "just" be something that is relative to something else.
• Carina Meurlinger on how agile meets old style reward systems. This was a talk aimed at scared managers I think and I floated away a bit. You can't do that when it is only 10 minutes.....
• Vim! Niklas Lindström had a really passionate talk on the vim editor. It was interesting for me that just recently decided to finally learn to use vi/vim. The unix command line skills is not complete without it.
• Fredrik Sjöö talked a little about the agile challenges of game development and then showed a commercial of their next game. NOT OK.
• The pomodoro guy - Staffan Nöteberg - a very skilled speaker talked about time boxed thinking - or rather he made us do an exercise to experience time boxed thinking. Very pedagogical!
• Anna Herting talked pragmatically about agile documentation. Write what is needed but not more.
• Måns Sandström argued that the new tester is more of a specifier. Testing should be done as early as possible and can then be the same thing as writing the specification of the system.
  
• Ola Ellnestam talked about the meta activity of leading leaders. (I automatically related this topic to the numerous cases when myself or other team members has micro managed the formal leader to ensure a good result from the project.)
• Elin Uppström used her 2 year old child as an example of how important it is to have a shared goal.
• Then Måns Sandström again - this time about how to use erlang for story driven development. Since erlang is a functional language the normal given-when-then cycle of behavorial test frameworks like cucumber or rspec doesn't work. There can be no given when working non OO - there are no side effects in the functional paradigm. This actually makes it easier to write tests contrary to what some people claims. Måns has written a testing framework in Erlang called Cloudberry.
• Peter Hultgren has started with personal kanban - yet another way to organize your life. The most important aspect - as in 'normal' kanban - is the concept of work in progress (WIP). It makes you focus at one task at a time instead of spreading and waisting your energy on many concurrent tasks. Peter helped us with a couple of mind games. Read more...
  
• Torbjörn Kalin talked about the hard agile life when doing product development. I found his points a bit exaggerated but maybe that was the point.....
• Finally Joakim Ohlrogge said some wise things about bugs. We sometimes talk about bugs that "appears" when it is always the case that the bug has been coded by a developer. Developers should take responsibility for their code.

I started open space with moods - an interesting discussion on how our mood affects our work and how our work can affect our mood too. An idea brought forward was to track moods in the same way as we track progress in a scrum team so that a retrospective can follow up on the moods as well as on the progress. I am not sure this is really useful - a better approach is to make sure that you have leaders with enough skills in empathy so that they can read team members and react when there is a mood related problem. I then went to a discussion on how to get good teams that work together towards a common goal. There was lots of sharing and brain storming to help each other out in the "real world". The last open space was called "does it matter?" and related to methods. Does it really matter which method we use? Isn't it easier to just put a bunch of great developers in a room an let them just do whatever they think is great? Rather than kill them with methods whether or not those methods are agile or not? The group came to no conclusion but held a really interesting and passionate discussion.

The venue - Citykonferensen - a kind of old school conference centre is really nice and well suited to the task. Food and fika was good and the dinner at Tender was really great. It was good to end the day with some even more informal talks around the dinner table. Now looking forward to tomorrow.