Gangplank Academy

Gangplank is a wonderful dream made real by Derek Neighbors, Jade Meskill and other community minded people.  It is community centered co-working at no cost, and therefore priceless.  Visit their site to learn more about their work.  Especially read the Gangplank Manifesto which, in my opinion, drives Agile values into the realm of community building.

One of the efforts of Gangplank is to provide education opportunities for the community.  They work to provide the infrastructure for people to share expertise and learn from one another.  Regular business and technical “brown bag” sessions happen every week.  Other conferences and events are scheduled regularly.  All of these events together are create The Gangplank Academy where learning on many subjects and for all ages takes place.  This workshop is designated as “AGL-101″ since it is part of the classes of Gangplank Academy.

AGL-101

I am hoping for a great mix of Agile and Scrum knowledge as well as a mix of work focus in this class.  Software projects have traditionally been the focus of Scrum application.  This is logical since it was created from that industry.  However, creators of software product aren’t the only ones who can benefit from Agile values and Scrum.  Management, marketing, operations and other facets of the business of production can be improved by application of high interaction and clear communication.  I encourage you to invite your peers and people “outside” of software and engineering work to spend this bit of time to learn with us.

RSVP

The event is available on Facebook.  If you would, please RSVP on the page.  This will help us plan for the proper room and tailor the class appropriately.  Comment on the event page too.  All the communication we can get helps us help you!

Last Saturday, May 15th, was the seventh incarnation of Desert Code Camp.  As I briefly announced before, Code Camp is a day of volunteer presenters and attendees bent on learning from each other.  I throughly enjoy these events.

Deeper Into Scrum

My first session was “Going Deeper Into Scrum, An Agile Journey” where the goal was not to teach Scrum but to find places where using the framework is difficult for the attendees, and then talk about those places.

The room was full and quiet, too quiet at first.  We soon got things going with a definition of the Scrum framework.  I drew the flow, cerimonies and artifacts on the board, answering a few questions as we went.  I then invited the attendees to write on the sticky notes distributed around the room.  They wrote one point or item of difficulty with Scrum on each note.  They were invited to the front of the room to place their notes on or near the part of Scrum effected by the note.

The resulting board was awesome!

I then did my best to bring out the issues on the sticky notes, grouping them or pulling them into the discussion as the conversation flowed.  Several of the attendees were very helpful with questions and answers as we shared possible corrections to the difficulties.  I’m sure we did not address all the notes in the remaining time for our hour.  I do hope people learned and shared some gems of help that they can apply to becoming more Agile with Scrum.

Lunch Time

30 minutes was set aside for lunch time.  This started directly after my first session.  Due to the nature of such a conference, scheduling is done as best the volunteers can with the knowledge they have.  In my case, the second session I was teaching immediately followed lunch.  By the time I finished excellent after class one-on-one discussions and clean-up, it was time to setup the next class in a different room.  Lunch for me would have to wait!  (Thank goodness for granola bars!)

Agile Manifesto and Code

I encountered a difficulty with this session because of the classroom layout.  My plan was to use slides with the four values and twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto and use the marker board for supporting discussion visuals.  The projection screen covered the marker board.  I opted to use the slides, since the Agile Manifesto was the text and writing out all of it would kill the flow

The title of the presentation was “The Agile Manifesto – What it means to the code and the coder.”  We approached this by defining each value and principle of the manifesto and then discussing what the code would look like and the coder would be doing if they follow the manifesto.

The discussion resulted in many mentions of continuous integration, TDD, paring, refactoring and many other development practices.  There were also questions around supporting the manifesto in different business environments such as large vs. small projects.  I enjoyed the banter and peer education that was going on.

Community

A large thanks to:

• DeVry University for providing their campus and classrooms for the event.
• Joseph Guadagno, Camp Director, and all the other volunteers I didn’t see but must have been helping.
• The people in the sessions I led.  There are many people in the Phoenix area working to improve and learn.  They have many questions.  They are bravely working on many impediments.  They are awesome!

The first session is scheduled for 11:30 AM: Going Deeper Into Scrum, An Agile Journey.  Lunch follows so we have some incentive to end on time!

The next session is right after lunch at 1:00 PM: The Agile Manifesto – What it means to the code and the coder.  I promise to make the conversation interesting so we won’t fall into food sleepiness!

Even if you can’t attend my sessions, please come out to the camp to learn and interact with our great technical community.  Desert Code Camp is always no cost to everyone.  And we will get a free lunch to boot!

Meeting details are available at the PhxSUG website, where you can sign up for this event and to hear about other group meetings.

I’d love to meet you there!

Slides

This presentation is the first I have posted to SlideShare, an interesting experiment of itself.  Please have a look:

Questions

At the end of the presentation and after the presentation time, two smart people had some interesting questions.

Question 1 – When the client is expecting to know when it will be done and how much it will cost, how does a provider using Agile respond?

Dallin Harris of Skyhook Internet Marketing brought up this difficult topic.  Agile practitioners everywhere work at the difficult balancing act of providing the information the customer wants and educating them to understand the benefits of Agile iterations or sprints.

We discussed the finer points of productivity, such as always working on the currently most important feature, delivering finished parts as they are done at each sprint end and the ability to stop before every possible feature is created if the current version is enough.  We also found a direction point to the Product Backlog and how it feeds a release plan for the client to interact through.  I pointed him toward Mike Cohn’s excellent material around estimating and planning.

Question 2 – How do we get team cohesion if the Program Managers are assigning tasks?

David asked this question about a common problem in an organization transitioning from a more traditional structure.

The short answer: In such an environment, cohesion on the team is not possible.  Or, at least, it’s very hard!  When people in authority direct individuals on the team, the team cannot self-organize.  And, it’s not Agile.

We discussed how David needs to help the Program Managers direct desired work per team instead of per individual.  This has many benefits to the team, the Program Managers and the company.

• The team has a chance to become self-organizing.
• The team members are not wondering what they will be doing next, as they have a full sprint to work the plan.
• The Program Managers will see completed work sooner.
• The Program Managers will drive the company to ensure it is working on the most valuable features and projects first, providing focus.

These are the things David and I discussed.  I wish him well in his quest to increase agility where he works.

Twitterings

After the event I finally had a chance to look at my phone.  The mentions on Twitter had exploded!  That was very gratifying and I thank you all for the attention.  In particular, Bold Avenue was in the audience and live tweeting many of my significant points.  (Thank you, Stephanie!)

A great experience.  I learned a great deal and hope the community enjoyed my small contribution.

This Wednesday, March 24th, I will be the featured speaker at the Brown Bag session. I’m very excited to give and get some education with the Phoenix creative and small business community! My presentation will be:

Business Benefits of Being Agile

Agile practices such as Scrum and Extreme Programming are touted as a way to improve software development teamwork and their results. There are benefits to the business in and out of the team that are not always obvious at first. I argue these benefits are large enough, any business should jump to apply Agile any way they can!

Please come participate in the discussion. I’m sure you will enjoy it!

Come join us for free food and great discussion about the Product Owner role!

The True Measure of Agile

I’m passionate about Agile and the power it brings to the people who apply it as intended.  I’m also frustrated by strong evidence that many who speak the words of Agile development are only wrapping the same old practices in buzz.  This is very bad for Agile and developers everywhere.  So many times I’ve talked to engineers who “did Agile” or “did Scrum” and then proceed to describe a broken and painful experience of micro-management or loosely controlled chaos to failure.  Coaching someone back from such a false agile implementation is often harder than pulling them out of waterfall.

The goal of my presentation was to point people back to the Agile Manifesto, to consider that there are meanings and values behind those words.  Pick a framework, like Scrum or XP.  Combine with practices like TDD and continuous integration.  Do your “stand-up” meeting sitting down if you want.  But make sure you check against the Agile Manifesto to keep driving to what Agile really means.  That if those values are promoted by what you are doing, whatever it is, you are on the “true Agile” path.

My slides are available below for download and reuse.  Because the Ignite format allows only 15 seconds per non-stop slide, there are few words, if any, on most of them.  Perhaps you will find better words than mine to fill in!  Let me know what you think of the message you get from them.  The video will be posted soon at the event web page.  Then you can compare what you thought to what I said.

• Download presentation as an ODP. (Open Document Presentation format, as with OpenOffice.org Impress)
• Download presentation as a PDF.

What I Learned

All of the presentations were great! A few points that stood out for me were:

• Tomasz Stechly (@tstechly) introduced me to the concept and benefits of immutable code.  I’m now sorry to say it’s not a technique I have looked into very much.
• Derek Neighbors (@dneighbors) highlighted that we have too much information to slog through every day and that geo-location is one of the ways we can filter the flood to get at what is relevant where we are standing right now.
• Leo Godin (@leogodin217) re-enforced many of the things I read about getting to done and giving what the customer wants, a solution.
• Clayton Lengel-Zigich (@claytonlz) told 10 fables from Aesop and applied each of them to software development, including pair programming and TDD!

All of the presentations were great! I said that already and I’ll say it again, if anyone asks.  Such talent in the Phoenix area!

Thank You

I give thanks to everyone who sponsored, organized, promoted and spoke.  Especially I thank the audience for an awesome experience!