2009 January | Agile Pain Relief

Manifesting Agile Stage – wants proposals

January 29, 2009 in Agile, Agile 200x Conferences by Mark Levison

Our stage at Agile 2009 wants your proposals. The name is a little obscure and some people are having a hard time deciding if their talk belongs there. Here’s the deal: “This Stage is all about tools and techniques for rapidly developing a deep understanding of the empirical Agile mindset, and then rapidly applying it—as individuals, and as groups. We are looking for hard-hitting sessions focused on enabling immediate understanding and effective application of the Agile approach.”

Among the types of sessions we’re looking for are:

Cognition and Psychology- techniques and tools that develop awareness and cognition of real Agile thinking at the individual and group levels. Also subject matter on group dynamics and group psychology. This includes material on behavioral topics such as belief change, cognitive psychology, and group-level dynamics and behavior.
Learning and Education- effective classroom and experiential learning techniques that manifest a real embrace of Agile’s core and essential concepts. Experience reports are of particular interest here. We are looking for sessions on best practices in Agile education and learning.
Applying Agile to non-IT Domains- Agile, empirical techniques are effective in many non-IT situations. We are actively seeking experience reports and sessions on how and where real Agile techniques are being applied effectively OUTSIDE of IT. We are looking for hard-hitting material on the use of Agile techniques in the domains of business, academia, non-profit organizations, and other places outside of IT where people organize to do work.

Among the sessions proposed so far: Learning: the best approaches for your brain (my own with Linda Rising), Scrum in Church: Saving the World One Team at a Time, Journeyman Tours: How Apprentices Hit the Road, … (N.B. you need to create an account on the conference website to see and comment on the proposals).

So beat the rush, submit before Feb 13th (the hard deadline) and give the stage reviewers (like me) the time to comment on your proposal. The sooner it arrives the more feedback you will get.

See you in Chicago.

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Snippets

in Software Development by Mark Levison

Moving Stuck Projects Forward: The Clinic Method …The Clinic Method. What’s this? It’s a nurses’ station for projects that are sick. If a project manager or product owner or scrum master or anyone feels that a project is in trouble, it’s a place to go for help. Get five or six of your best people and have them meet for half a day, once a week. … What does this team do when someone brings a problem? They don’t solve the problem. They help that person come up with a positive step to move forward…

The Magic Chemistry of Teams – examines some of the characteristics required to build and renew great teams.

Multi Tasking Myth – we’re often trained to believe that multi-tasking is good either in the small: doing email and answering the phone. Or in the the large working on two or more projects. This item from Jeff Atwood demonstrates the falsehood of both. This picture illustrates the problem:

Handling Large Stories in Agile – a short item on approaches to splitting large stories/features so that they can be completed in a single iteration.

Track Velocity, Not Time Spent on Tasks – reminds us that we ship features/stories to customers not task. While tasks are useful in helping the team plan, estimate and organizing itself – it really doesn’t matter how much time is spent on any one task. Instead what matters is whether the stories are getting completed.

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Time to Go

January 28, 2009 in Software Development by Mark Levison

Friday will be my last day at IBM, and on Monday I will become an Agile Coach/Trainer for hire, via my open little company: Agile Pain Relief Consulting.

I’ve had a nearly an eight year run with a great bunch of people. First at Databeacon and our .NET Rich Client (tip of the hat to Robi, Dave, Marc, Tony, Patrick, Suzanne, Ralph, and briefly Hans) – little did you know how far I would take those crazy ideas around unit testing, milestones, and reflection. Then Cognos for the death of Corinth and rebirth of PMRC (add to the list Sasa , Viktor, Daniel, and Johnathan), PMMT (Brenda, Brian and Steve – aka Chad). Finally IBM and Agile Coaching with too many people to name.

I realized long ago that I was no longer passionate about coding, and that my interests lie in coaching and mentoring Agile Software Development, TDD, etc. Along the way, many of you have given me the chance to do coaching/mentoring work and for that I’m grateful. I’m also grateful to everyone who put up with my all too frequent harangues about why Agile/TDD, etc., was better than what we do today. One of the things I have learned since then is to ask questions, listen, and then harangue. Thanks to everyone who helped me evolve.

Special thanks to:

Robi for teaching me a lot about quality and for helping me to get better at writing good code.
A big thanks to Sasa, who took a chance on Scrum and put up with a someone who was telling him how to organize his team.
Ralph for giving me a chance to coach and for keeping me through three rounds of layoffs.
Guillaume (and the whole BUDDI team) for letting me use BUDDI as an occasional test bed for my coaching and facilitation skills.

An interesting side story on the number of people at each company: Databeacon was ~60 people when I joined and ~30 when we were acquired. Cognos was about 3,500 and IBM is about 400,000. So each time I’ve been acquired I’ve joined a company that was 100 times larger than its predecessor.

It’s been great working with everyone and I look forward to crossing paths again.

My permanent email address is mark@mlevison.com. I would be delighted to connect with anyone on LinkedIn (yes, I know I’ve dissed LinkedIn before).

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TDD Adoption Strategies Article

January 8, 2009 in Software Development, TDD by Mark Levison

Eons ago I promised a blog posting on TDD Adoptions strategy. Well, the posting grew and grew and grew (can you tell I read a lot of kids books?) and along the way morphed into something bigger. In the end, I decided this article needed a wider audience, so I published it on InfoQ. Here’s the blurb:

Making TDD Stick: Problems and Solutions for Adopters

Teams in large organizations still struggle to adopt TDD. In this article Mark Levison shares problems he uncovered when he surveyed teams, and his own strategy to introduce TDD into an organization.

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Do You Suspect You Have a Less than Productive Person on Your Team?

January 7, 2009 in Software Development by Mark Levison

In the past couple of days on the Scrum Development mailing list an interesting thread has developed around what to do with a poor-performing team member.

Too my mind there have been a number of key takeaways:

Be very careful about the language you use: Strong language implies prejudice and assumptions.
Reset use a Beginner’s Mind.
Does the team perceive this to be a problem?
Possible causes of this perception.
Measuring Individuals doesn’t work (nor does measuring teams, but that’s a different topic).

If it is a real problem how to handle it.

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