Partnership & Possibilities

Agile Alliance Announces Full Program for Agile 2009 Conference, “Making Agile Real”

The Agile Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the concepts of Agile software development, announces the full conference program for its Agile 2009 Conference, set for August 24 – 28, in Chicago IL USA.

As the premiere event for the growing Agile community, the seventh annual Agile Conference provides software professionals with the latest knowledge and shared experiences to help foster successful Agile development programs. This year’s conference will feature more than 300 sessions presented by 329 leading Agile experts and practitioners, based on a record number of submissions gathered earlier this year. Visit the website to review the latest schedule of Agile 2009 sessions, encompassing all levels of Agile experience.

FutureWorks Consulting is proud to sponsor the Agile and Organizational Culture Stage and the Agile Adoption Stage. Diana and Sharon look forward to presenting tutorials and workshops on:

Sharon Buckmaster and Diana Larsen will share provocative findings during “The Elephant in the Room: Using Brain Science to Enhance Working Relationships” at the Coaching Stage.

Jim Shore and Diana Larsen will take their CTO research further with “The Agile CTO” a workshop on the Agile Frontier Stage.

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen will reprise “Esther and Diana’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures” for the New to Agile Stage.

Click here to register for this phenomenal Agile event. We hope to see you there!

I’m enjoying lots of tweets from the Lean/Kanban conference yesterday and today. It’s new and fun to “attend” a conference from a twitter-remove, and I still wish I could have attended in person. From all reports, it’s a wonderful conference.

Following the #lkconf thread, I’ve read much discussion about the new Lean Software & Systems Consortium (LSCC) and the organizers’ intention to provide a certification. I’ve read that Lean is a “mindset” shift, not a methodology. [Hmmm, where have I heard that before?] “Unlike Agile” is the sotto voce subtext I surmise.

In one tweet, Aaron Sanders (@aremsan) quotes Karl Scotland (@kjscotland), “Instead of being Agile which may lead to success, Kanban focuses on being successful which may lead to Agile.”

Clearly a perception has arisen that Agile (a value-driven category of software development methods) focuses on “being Agile” more than it focuses on developing running, tested, accepted software that delivers value to customers. I don’t think the perception comes from the Agile Alliance or the seventeen men who crafted the Agile Manifesto. I see it emerging from a marketplace that wants a silver bullet, no matter how often we tell it that one doesn’t exist.

So, I’m going out on a limb. Here’s my prediction: With the success of the LSSC, about five years from now, we’ll read about companies wanting to “be Lean” or “be Kanban” more than they want to deliver value to customers or success to the business. It’s inevitable.

I can say this because after 40 years in the business world I’ve watched the pattern evolve with too many smart initiatives created by smart people who focused on the grand triad of delivery of value, quality of work and quality of work life – e.g., quality circles, TQM, high performance organizations, Theory Z, and more. Each initiative has its own flaws and blindspots, and each one puts forward critical new thinking on the subjects, then “the moving finger writes and having writ, moves on; nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.” (with appreciation to Omar Khayyam) Then the marketplace decides it’s a silver bullet and goes after the marketability value while rejecting the mindset change.

I’m pre-emptively introducing you to your five-years-from-now “silver bullet”: Lean/Kanban. May you live long and prosper.

A group of people in the alt.net community in Seattle have organized a conference in just a couple of months. They decided to use an Open Space Technology format and asked me to facilitate the conference. My company, FutureWorks Consulting, agreed to sponsor the conference by donating my time, so I jumped at the chance. Though I usually hang out with the Agile software development crowd, last November I met a few alt.net guys at the OreDev conference in Sweden. We had great conversations there, and I was eager for more interactions with these really smart people. And it gave me a chance to ride the train to Seattle. What could be better?

The conference opened last night and will continue through Sunday. Session titles and notes are posted to the conference wiki. To follow the twitterstream of the conference, check out #altnetseattle.

As of this morning (Feb 23, 2009), hundreds of potential presenters have submitted 922 possible sessions for Agile 2009. Each of those 922 sessions needs feedback to become the best it can be. Think of it as a massive multi-player perfection game (MMPPG). All of us need your help to make sure our sessions give you what you need when you (and/or your colleagues) show up next August in Chicago.

Commenting is not limited to the review teams. Anyone can comment. Just register on the site and give us your best, most helpful critiques of as many proposals as you can manage.

All of us session proposers have until March 3 to finalize our submissions. We want to know what you (as representative audience members) think.

I’ve collaborated on five session proposals for four different stages. Give them a look. Then look at some others as well, while you’re on a roll.

Esther Derby and I submitted Esther and Diana’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures - a perennial favorite, we hope.

Jim Shore and I proposed The Agile CTO - a follow-on from the research we presented at Agile 2008.

Sharon Buckmaster and I have collaborated on three proposals:
It Don’t Mean a Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing: Shaping the Rhythms of Trust - an exploration of what influences critical trust on teams
Five Tools We Use: Coaching Leaders in Agile Organizations - tools and techniques that have worked well for us
The Elephant in the Room: Using Brain Science to Enhance Working Relationships - introducing the new ideas about your GQ, gender intelligence, and why it matters for software teams

Now sign up here and start commenting!

Jack Milunsky wrote about the Top Ten Activities of a Product Owner. His post included number 6:

6. Participates in the daily Scrums, Sprint Planning Meetings and Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives. There’s always a lot going on and always an excuse to miss the meetings. But each of these Scrum ceremonies is another chance for the Product Owner to inspect and adapt. And as a result being present at these ceremonies is tantamount to success.

In reply, a number of folks commented that they didn’t like the idea of a Product Owner attending Sprint Retrospectives. They don’t consider the PO as part of their team. When Esther and I teach our workshop “Leading Agile Retrospectives” and, pretty much whenever I’m someplace where people want to get their retrospective questions answered, this question always surfaces. Who attends?

Yes, the team uses the Retrospective as time to inspect and adapt their practices, methods, teamwork, and other work processes. Retrospectives answer the team questions, “How’s it going, really? Why? What will we do about that?” So, Agile Retrospectives serve the team.

The answer to “Who attends?” depends on who is participating on a daily, or near-daily, basis as part of the team. If my team’s Product Owner was engaged with my team fulfilling all the ten activities Jack describes, I’d want that Product Owner in our Retrospective as often as possible. They could contribute insights and perspectives about the work that could prove very useful to my team.

On the other hand, if the Product Owner is more of an absentee landlord, coming around just for Release Planning and Sprint Reviews, and hard to find when we need clarification, then I’d think twice. It would depend largely on the focus of a given Retrospective and what the PO’s views could contribute.

As usual, no hard and fast rules exist. And, I’d appreciate, value, and include a Product Owner who is as involved as Jack describes.

Doc List writes about one of my favorite activities on his blog, Circle of Questions. I added a few comments there as well.

Esther and I describe the activity in Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! We knew when we wrote the description that it would be a difficult activity for people to visualize in action, and we did our best. Subsequently, much to our delight, a number of folks have chosen to experiment with Circle of Questions as their practice activity in our 2-day “Leading Agile Retrospectives” workshops. They take a risk, follow the process, and, voilà, every time it has paid dividends–giving everyone in the workshop a surprising (in a good way) experience.

Doc has begun cataloging Facilitation Patterns and Anti-Patterns as blog posts. He’s creating a resource for retrospective leaders and those who facilitate other team meetings, too. Check it out.

We had a great time at Agile Open Northwest last week. About a hundred people gathered together to consider our theme “Agile for Real” and discuss 60+ related topics. At the end of the event, our ROTI score (return-on-time-invested) was 3+ on a scale of 0 to 4. The volunteers and I took lots of pictures on Day 1, not so many on Day 2.

I’ve uploaded the photos from my camera to Flickr. If you look very closely at the marketplace wall, you can see the range of topics we covered. Everything from “Agile Hell” to “System Dynamics” to “Perfect Path to TDD” and much more.

Many (though not all) topic session hosts (or helpers) have written notes from their sessions and posted them on the wiki, linked from the conference site.

Jim Shore posted on his blog about two courses, The Art of Agile Planning and The Art of Agile Development, that he and I will take to Europe this spring. He’s put in photos and and comments from evaluations when we held the class last October. Participants said nice things, like “The facilitators were excellent! I really enjoyed the ‘jump in and swim’ approach to applying what we learned as we went.”

Since Jim did such a great job, I’m not going to try to duplicate it. I’ll just send you here to read about it.

At Øredev 2008, Bob Martin, Scott Bellware, Glenn Block, Gabrielle Benefield, James Bach and I responded to questions from moderator Björn Granvik and the audience about the conference theme, The Renaissance Developer.

In this video from the ÖreDev conference, I present some ideas about the changing role of managers in organizations that have adopted Agile methods.