Quick Agile Links

November 16, 2009 in Books, Links, Tools by Mark Levison

An idea shamelessly stolen from O’Reilly Radar. Every week I will publish a short article with 4-6 relevant Agile links. I’m open to feedback on the frequency etc.

Given last weeks announcement from Jerry Weinberg, it seemed appropriate to kick of with a couple of items related to him:

The Scrum Alliance twittered about a new list: Scrum Alliance community discussion group: “All healthy discussion is welcome. Differences in opinion and thought are encouraged. Spam, abusive language and direct advertisements/attacks aimed at splintering the community’s energy are prohibited and violators will be warned/banned. Heated debate, differences of opinion, methods other than Scrum or desire for a different SA community group are all open topics. Please be respectful of each other and be mindful that email is often toneless and can therefore be easily taken wrong.” My take – this is a good place to discuss issues that would get you kicked off ScrumDev.

Given/When/Then And Example Tables Using the Robot Framework – Shows how to BDD/ATDD style grammar’s in RobotFramework.

The Airplane Factory game: “The Airplane Factory Game is a simple game to introduce people to Agile and SCRUM. And also, it could be easily adapted to Lean, XP, etc. This article will explain briefly the game, showing the rules, some tips and results. Also, you will be able to download it” I’ve not had a chance to try this game yet – but the premise does seem interesting.

Caveat Emptor – if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Learning Best Approaches for your Brain Slide Deck

November 2, 2009 in Books, Science by Mark Levison

go2.wordpress[1] As regular readers of this blog will know I’ve given a talk based on reading’s in Neuroscience, called “Learning Best Approaches for Your Brain” – several times this year (Agile 2009 and Agile Ottawa). After several requests I’m posting the slide deck (pdf) here – but I’m afraid that it will really only be useful to the people who attended the talk. Here’s the promo I’ve been using:

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights into what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.

Top 5 Reasons that traditional approaches to learning and mentoring fail:

  • Lead with the Abstract
  • Not Grounded in the Listeners experience
  • Passive students – i.e. Those just listening and taking notes, aren’t using all of the brain. They retain knowledge but don’t really understand it.
  • Rewards don’t work
  • High Fructose Corn Syrup

Benefits:

  • Students and Mentees will remember
  • Learn how to correct mistakes
  • Workshop Attendees will stay awake

References:

I promise that sometime in the next month or so I will publish the paper that Linda and I originally promised (threatened), that will include all of the details missing from slide deck. The only caveat no paper will every be as good or help you learn as much as an interactive, example driven presentation.

Download: Slide Deck (pdf)

Caveat Emptor – if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Coaching Workshop

August 25, 2009 in Agile, Books by Mark Levison

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Yesterday (Monday), Liz Sedley and Rachel Davies ran a coaching workshop “What Does an Agile Coach Do?” that helped me spot several things I just never think to pay attention to. From Richard Hackman’s book Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances (which they highly recommend), they provided a number of observations. First, we should recognize that there is distinction between a Leader and a Coach. A Leader is part of the team whereas a Coach shouldn’t be part of the team and must set the stage for the day they leave.

Hackman identifies three types of coaching intervention and three opportunities to use those interventions effectively.

Types:

  • Educational – improve the teams understanding/knowledge
  • Consultative – improve the teams process/actions
  • Motivational – improve the teams effort

And then three opportunities to use these interventions most effectively:

  • Beginning – Motivational
  • Middle – Consultative
  • End – Educational

Like Paul King, I found this counterintuitive at first until they suggested that we think of this as the iteration and not the release level. At the start of the iteration, we provide the team with the motivational push to help them get the most done. In the middle of the iteration, we can provide guidance and offer suggestions to improve the flow and progress. At the end of the iteration, we reflect and find ways of learning from what happened. Each table was given a number of problem scenarios, and we were asked what would we do. After describing what we would do, we were asked to classify each intervention as Educational, Consultative, Motivational, or some other label. Again, like Paul, it quickly became obvious that I do very little in the way of motivational intervention. In addition, I spend a lot of my Educational efforts at moments when the team is less receptive, resulting in their being less effective.

In addition, I discovered a few other interesting things:

  • Breathe, Pause, Wait—don’t act in the heat of the moment. Instead, relax and assess what tool will suit your needs best.
  • Ask questions and understand not just the what but also the why as to how the situation ended up the way it did in the first place. Intervene only when you understand the whole situation, especially the history.

Finally, Liz Sedley told me to not ask why many people will take “why” as an attack and go on the defensive. Instead ask “how” and “what” questions. The exception, of course, is doing root cause analysis (i.e., 5 why’s), and in that case you should explain what you’re doing.

Along with Richard’s book, I’ve also received several recommendations for books on Systems Thinking: Bas Vodde and Craig Larman’s book Scaling Lean & Agile Development, which apparently contains a good chapter on Systems Thinking, and Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. I’ve often heard of this book but never knew that the Fifth Discipline was Systems Thinking (thanks Declan).

Other blog posts I’ve spotted from Monday include: Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback (my writing on InfoQ), Paul King’s Counter-intuitive Agile Coaching Tips (also from this workshop), Masti, Co-Creator, Pair vs. Review, Agile Games – Agile 2009, Day 1 , FitNesse vs. Robot Framework – Agile Testing Tools , and A conversation with Neal Ford.

Caveat Emptor: If you buy any of the books after clicking on my link, I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood, that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Discovery De-Mystified

December 11, 2008 in Books, Software Development by Mark Levison

In "The Myth of Discovery" Ted Neward complains that the software industry is unwilling to look beyond its bounds for new ideas and innovation. What surprises me is how little evidence he offers. In column against the software industry he cites only: Jeff Palermo's essay on "The Myth of Self-Organizing Teams" (an item I mostly agree with).

Oddly Ted offers evidence from the Agile community suggesting we do borrow ideas – citing Mary and Tom Poppendieck and their refinement of Lean ideas for software development. In this case his problem is that development managers/project leads aren't yet given the opportunity to say a product won't ship because the quality isn't there. Well I understand where he's coming from, but it seems like a mis-understanding of Lean/Agile principals which focus on building the quality in – not refusing to ship because the quality isn't there.

In any case I think that more people than Ted acknowledges, do their research outside of the software industry. Some examples:

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Best Agile Books 2007 Development/Code Related

November 30, 2007 in Books, Software Development by Mark Levison

The third and final my Best Agile Books the 2007 Edition series. (Part II was Background Material). There will be even fewer notes than there were in yesterday's. It really has been a long week.

Development/Code Related 

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers – Do you have legacy code? Does your code include areas that are untested and tightly coupled? Yes? Then you have legacy code. Michael focuses on the problem of teasing apart legacy

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler et al – One of the original Agile related books. It defines the concept of refactoring (personal bugbear – refactorings are small changes that don't affect the behavior of the code), explains how to practice it and catalogs over 70 refactorings. 

Test Driven Development by Kent Beck – The original TDD book. Clean, bug free, simple code. That is the promise of TDD. Its that simple nothing more to say. BTW the examples are in C# so some of the details won't apply to Java/Ruby/Python coders.

Late Breaking news: J.B. Rainsberger introduced me to: Test Driven: TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers by Lasse Koskela. I'm only about 120 pages in, but so far am very impressed. Its even caused me to change a few of my habits – specifically which test I choose to write first.

Another Late Breaking item – Robin Dymond gave this one a very strong recommendation: xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros. I've not read this yet – but Gerard covers Test Smells and Refactoring. In other words how to spot trouble your test code and repair the damage.

Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky. Have mess, want to bring some order to it.

Head First Design Patterns by Elisabeth Freeman (et al). I struggled through the Original GOF Design Patterns book twelve years ago now. Thankfully Elisabeth and co. wrote a funny, irreverent and so you don't have to.

What are your favorite Agile Books? 

Caveat Emptor – if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

Coming up posts on: Iteration Length (another lesson learned that I didn't think of in my original post) and Pair Programming vs. Code Reviews a rebuttal.

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Best Agile Books 2007 the Background Material

November 29, 2007 in Books, Software Development by Mark Levison

This is the second part of my Best Agile Books in 2007 Edition. This post will considerably lighter on notes than its predecessor because I’m tired and under the weather.

Background Books

Corporate Culture Survival Guide by Edgar H. Schein – an insightful book that looks at the corporate culture and how it forms. In the second half it examines how to coax change out of an organization. Think of it as Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas for corporations. Added bonus its short and to the point.

Peopleware (2nd Ed) by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister  – A pre Agile classic on how development (and other) succeed and fail. They start by demonstrating most project failures are people and not technology related. They go on to help you organize and build better teams. Sadly this book has been in print for twenty years and we’re still making the same mistakes. 

"The Wisdom of Teams" by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith – Another pre Agile book Katzenbach and Smith study real teams in many industries providing some real analysis and rigour to the question of what made these teams successful. By the end of the book you will discover that "Nothing can guarantee the creation of high performance teams. The best you can do is put in place the conditions that will help them form." This book was at the core of my series Why Scrum Works. 

Influence, Science and Practice by Robert Cildani – You probably read this in an undergraduate psych course. Consider going back to read it again. This classic work covers how and why people are influenced. This is at play as our teams organize themselves and also as we try to influence others to try our new ideas. Its only one of the few books in recent years that I’ve read a second time and taken notes from. (The other being Jean’s Collaboration Explained).

Do It Tomorrow by Mark Forester – Personal productivity guide. He explains why closed lists (effectively a Sprint Backlog) work so well. He’s helped me become far more productive just by forcing me to map out what I will achieve after the daily scrum and then taking on nothing more during the day (except for issues raised by the team). Crises from outside the team will often resolve themselves without your intervention. There is alot of other good ideas to be mined here.

Getting Things Done by David Allen – the other great personal productivity. David’s focus is on emptying your brain so that you can focus on what’s important and not on the milk you promised you would pick up on the way home from work.

Half Truths and Dangerous Lies by Robert Sutton and Jeffery Pfeffer – A simple read on evidence based management. Many common rules of management are no more than myths passed down from generation to generation. They debunk pay for performance, forced ranking (employees are sorted in three buckets: top 20%, middle 70% and low 10%) and many other best practices. It’s great if somewhat depressing read – after all most of us work for employers who subscribe to one or more these myths.

The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton – Are you an Asshole in the workplace? Do you know one? Bob will help you discover whether you are one (and self correct), survive them and document the damage they cause. My asshole test score can be found in this post from earlier in the year.

As I look back on this batch of books I can say that these were easily the most fun of the batch to read. I’ve got one more post on Code coming in and then I will return to The Year of Scrum: Lessons Learned. 

What are your favorite Agile Books?

Caveat Emptor – if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Best Agile Books the 2007 Edition

November 26, 2007 in Books, Software Development by Mark Levison

Last year in response to some questions at a CSM course I wrote a post: "Top 8 Agile Books: Beyond the Basics". This past week I was help out at a CSM course when the topic came up again. This time I’ve a much longer list of books.

Top Three – I wouldn’t start an Agile project without these

Agile Software Development: A Cooperative Game (2nd Ed) by Alistair Cockburn – Possibly the most interesting book I’ve ever read about agile software development. It’s not about any one methodology, instead Alistair analyzes game play, individual communication, team cooperation: the elements that are the core of all software development. The book also includes sections on Agile outside of Software, a survey of the various methodologies and much more.

Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka – A through explanation of what our role as ScrumMasters, Coaches and Facilitators is. It helps agilists understand (and perhaps manage) team dynamics. It’s also the source for my Planning and Retrospective agendas. See: Good Agenda’s make Great Meetings. My comments are in no way biased by the whiskey Jean bought on the first day of the Agile conference this year.

Agile Estimation and Planning by Mike Cohn – Sprint Planning to Release Planning. Estimating in Story Points vs. Ideal Days. One stop reading for planning. Added bonus the book is very easy to read – only five hours and I’d read most of it.

Other Important Agile Books

"Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great" by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen – some great ideas for taking your Agile Retrospectives to the next level.

"Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas" by Mary Lynn Manns, Linda Rising. Trying to introduce change into your organization (if you’re reading this post that’s a safe bet)? Finding it hard? Look to Fearless Change for some great ideas – there are no silver bullets but this will at least give a fresh source of ideas and a starting point. Remember organizational change won’t happen overnight.

"User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development" by Mike Cohn. Think that "An invitation to a conversation" doesn’t quite describe User Stories in enough detail. Need to move on from the traditional requirements to an Agile approach and don’t know how. This book was written for you.

Other Agile Methodologies

"Lean Software Development" by Mary and Tom Poppendieck – do you want to know how the Toyota Production System can be applied to Software development? Are you fascinated with a process that developed nearly forty years ago continues to help Toyota adapt to change? Need to uncover waste? Start Reading. 

"Crystal Clear" by Alistair Cockburn – it seems everybody and their brother has written a methodology book. So why does Alistair’s stand out? Because Alistair is the Agile community’s ethnographer/anthropologist. He studies real live development teams to see what succeeded and perhaps more importantly what failed. Crystal Clear is his distillation of those studies. In addition the Crystal family of methodologies is interesting because Alistair designed them to be adaptable on several axes: project size/budget, criticalness (ie plain old website -> life critical system). 

"Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change" by Kent Beck – you heard alot about XP – both good and bad, you’ve heard alot of hyperbole – with people claiming that XP is a license to hack or that it will solve all problems for all projects. Kent actually explains the stuff that matters. 

I’ve got posts on Background and Code coming up and then I will return year of Scrum: Lessons Learned. Sorry for the recent silence life has been rather busy.

Caveat Emptor – if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Congrats to Alistair Cockburn on winning a Jolt Award

March 23, 2007 in Books, Software Development by Mark Levison

I’ve longed enjoyed Alistair Cockburn’s books and now he’s won a Jolt award for Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game. If you’ve not already read – stop reading this blog and buy a copy.

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Arseholes aren’t Agile, they’re an impediment. Are you an ARSE?

February 6, 2007 in Books, Software Development by Mark Levison

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Bob Sutton author of several excellent books “The No Asshole Rule” and “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense” (my current reading). I took the Asshole Rating Self Exam today and scored 4, which makes me seem pretty normal. More telling what would my score be if my wife and co-workers filled it out, perhaps my score would be a bit higher.

From Guy Kawaski’s posting I also like the story about SuccessFactors and their Rules of Engagement (apparently every employee has to sign these).

These rules sound like very agile/lean in nature. Specifically the rules:

  • I will demonstrate respect for the individual; I will be nice and listen to others, and respect myself. I will act with integrity and professionalism.
  • I will help my colleagues and recognize the team when we win. I will never leave them behind when we lose.
  • I will constantly improve Kaizen! I will approach every day as an opportunity to do a better job, admitting to and learning from my mistakes.
  • I will selflessly pursue customer success.
  • I will support the culture of meritocracy and pay for performance.
  • I will be transparent. I will communicate clearly and be brutally honest, even when it’s difficult, because I trust my colleagues.

Bob’s book and test make a great reminder. Arseholes are not agile, they’re impediment and road block to getting the job done.

Update this post was picked up in the March 1 Carnival of Agilists – Thanks to Kevin for deciding that a Brit living in Canada is a Brit.

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Blogging Retrsopective (or four months in the review)

January 8, 2007 in Books, Film, Food and Drink, Photography, Software Development, Tools by Mark Levison

Getting Things Done, Nightmare with Sears Canada, Scrum and Photography are just some of the subjects that I’ve written about in my first four months of blogging. If you’ve read every post I’ve ever written (Hello to Ben and David), stop now, this one will add nothing new. Here are my top posts as chosen by me (far more interesting than letting a computer do all the work).

Tools

Getting Things Done!!! Can’t Keep Track of all the tasks you have to do? Need a better Tool to Implement GTD? Always chasing little scraps of paper around the office? Then consider "My Life Organized" (MLO) as a task manager…

Trying to recover files from a corrupt NTFS drive? A friend just asked me what tool I use to recover files from a corrupt NTFS filesystem…

Can Agile methods be applied outside software development? Join the discussion
I’ve always been intrigued by the application of Agile methods outside of Software Development. Beyond Toyota what other systems use or can benefit from an Agile approach to problem solving.

Nightmare with Sears Canada or when to purchase an extended warranty?
Adrian on Hardware 2.0 quoting a study from consumer reports says that you probably don’t need that extended warranty. However there are just sometimes when you really do need one.

Key Tricks in writing for the Web or more lessons learned at BarCamp2 in Ottawa
Make your keypoints in the first paragraph, include your keywords in the title and url. 150 words is all you have to capture your readers attention.Software Development

Tired of Notepad? Want a better text editor?
I’ve spend alot of time playing with little bits of text – sometimes from files, sometimes copy and pasted from some other app. I quickly grew tired of the built-in Notepad and all its limitations.

Want to get the best Life from your Lithium-Ion battery?
A lithium-ion battery provides 300-500 discharge/charge cycles. Do you know how to get the best life out of your batteries?

Photography

Is the Canon 400D/Rebel XTi – worth the price?
Unlike the D80, the 400D has only been around for a couple of months, so many of my favorite reviewers only have Initial tests up. However there are enough reviews out to give an excellent idea of the strengths and weaknesses of EOS400D.

Nikon D80 – hot or not
Want to to find the best reviews of the D80 and skip rest? This post is place to start. By now I’ve found over twenty reviews of the D80 and mostly they just repeat themselves. This post is your guide to the reviews.

Software Development

Scrum in a Nutshell or 5 minutes to learn scrum
Heard the buzz about Scrum want to learn more? Want to get a sense of what it is and why many teams choose to use it?

Too many bugs making it to production? The role of QA in Agile/Scrum
Do your team members spend a lot of time interpreting bug reports? The traditional waterfall QA model is broken.

Online Code Reviews suck – even Guido van Rossum can’t fix that
Guido van Rossum has created a new tool project called Mondrian for online code reviews. But even Guido can’t solve the fundamental problems of an online code review. Nothing beats face to face communication.

Nasty catch with: Royalty free licensing of the Office User Interface?
MS just announced the royalty free licensing of the Office User Interface. At first glance this seems like a very generous offer since it includes much detail on how to what behaviors you must implement (Ribbon resizing anybody?).

Top 8 Agile Books: Beyond the Basics
Now you’ve read the basic introductory books to Agile Software development and you want to learn more, here’s my recent reading list…

Too much abstraction?? Bah Humbug
Ted Neward laments the habit of building: "building abstraction layers on top of abstraction layers on top of abstraction layers…

Best Introductions to SCRUM
Looking for a good online introduction to Scrum? Here are my favorites

Retrospective Agility
"Retrospective Agility" by Tim MacKinnon (part of a long pdf – too bad you can’t easily link inside these beasts) is a great starting point for running a retrospective.

Influence Science Practice

Influence – How and why does it work?
I’ve never read a book twice and not since undergrad have I taken notes on a book. Yet Robert Cialdini’s "Influence Science and Practice” is so engaging that I’m enjoying a second read.

Influence: Science and Practice – other sources
After my introductory notes, I’ve received a few inquires about more notes on Cialdini’s Influence Science and Practice. So I dug around on the web and offer up my discoveries.

Why are we so easily influenced? Weapons of Influence
Do you ever walk into a clothing store just to buy a suit and walk out having bought the suit, tie, belt and several shirts? This chapter will explain what just happened.

Food

Cafe Chez Victor
I’ve never lined up to pay my restaurant bill but last Tuesday night at Chez Victor it was so busy that I had to.

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