August 10
Talk on Large Scale & Distributed Agile with Robin Dymond
Agile 2010 Conference, Orlando, FL

Cooking the Product Stew

What is a stew? A stew is made from various ingredients you have around, left overs, new ingredients that go together well, and others that are filling but need lots of sauce. The enterprise software market is made up of products that are a stew of software on many legacy platforms that have evolved over a long period by many hands. Taking an enterprise software product to Agile methods is a challenge. In a uniquely European context, this presentation will draw from the ongoing agile adoption in a multi-location multi-team enterprise product with 460 staff in 4 countries and 5 locations.

I’m happy to announce I’ll be presenting a main stage session at Agile Eastern Europe this year! This together with Robin Dymond from Innovel.net who’s been a great help all the way. The presentation is depending on our work in progress and will be adjusted throughout the year representing product owner and backlog scaling related results, patterns, anti-patterns… in a mixed Agile/Scrum & waterfall organization.

Product Stew we are working with:

• 1 very large customer with many needs and a strong tendency to waterfall
• 1 sales team that is not held accountable in any way for the promises made
• +/-10 analysts trying to figure out what is needed and each is telling the teams what to do.
• 26 product teams in 5 locations/countries
• about 430 developers
• confused priorities
• large requirements documentation expectations
• tight budget and process

By the time of the conference lots of things will be changed compared to todays workings, things are already changing by using some of the Lean principles, Agile work methods & scrum practices. We can assure you to bring some very nice insights into the subject in September.

If you’re not there you’ll be missing out on quit some nice topics and this is not only about our session but all others that are scheduled, go and subscribe: http://www.agileee.org/

See you there

/J

Innovel.net and iLean are happy to announce their cooperation on a Scrum Certification Course Track for 2009!

Currently we have the following dates and locations set, even though locations & trainers might change during the year:

• 8th & 9th of June – Certified Scrum Product Owner in Antwerp by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 11th & 12th of June – Certified Scrum Master in Antwerp by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 10th & 11th of September – Certified Scrum Master in Ghent by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 14th & 15th of September – Certified Scrum Master in Leuven by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 5th & 6th of October – Certified Scrum Master in Antwerp by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 8th & 8th of October – Certified Scrum Product Owner in Antwerp by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 3rd & 4th of November – Certified Scrum Master in Ghent by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 5th & 6th of November – Certified Scrum Master in Mechelen by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 30th of November & 1st of December – Certified Scrum Master in Antwerp by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet
• 3rd & 4th of December – Certified Scrum Product Owner in Antwerp by Robin Dymond & Jürgen De Smet

To register go to http://www.scrumtraining.com/upcoming-events/

What is a Certified Scrum Master course?

What is a Certified Scrum Product Owner course?

Greetings & see you there

---

Certified Scrum Master Training

---

Certified Scrum Product Owner Training

The 4th of June we had an interesting Agile Belgium session, a hands-on session of Fitnesse by

• Michel Grootjans, iLean, http://www.linkedin.com/in/michelgrootjans
• Pascal Mestdach, Ihc Group, http://www.linkedin.com/in/pascalmestdach

See http://agilefun.com/?p=244 for more details on the content.

I liked the session because of…

• the fun way the use case was presented (see pic)
• the well thought scenario used in the exercise
• the way developers were encouraged to make sure you saw who was who (hats, see pic)
• the possibility to get the latest version from the presenters laptop to make sure people are right on top of the session and not left behind
• the given information sheet on where to get the workshop materials and contact the presenters

To make the session perfect I would…

• include the audience in the presentation by means of pair-programming at the presenters desktops
• ask the audience what is in for the different roles within a team instead of presenting them
• think about a way to scale it for a bigger group as preparation for XP Days

[singlepic id="184" w="250" h="" mode="" float="right" ]

Yet another “Agile Belgium” session organized within the offices of IHC Infohos, Legeweg 157/E,  8020 Oostkamp.

When?

4th of June
Welcome @ 18.30h
Start @ 19.00h

Subscribe by mail to jurgen@agilefun.com with subjec: “Agile Belgium 4th of June – Agile Acceptance Testing”

Presenters:

Michel Grootjans, iLean, http://www.linkedin.com/in/michelgrootjans
Pascal Mestdach, Ihc Group, http://www.linkedin.com/in/pascalmestdach

Objective(s) of the session:

Participants will experience how to set up a Fitnesse environment from scratch. They will also have hands on experience in specifying acceptance tests and writing ‘glue’ code (.Net) with the 4 basic Fit fixture types. Not in a simple hello world or calculator example, but in a more real life application.

Content:

An introduction to the concept of Agile Acceptance testing. In a Specification Workshop, participants (in groups of 3) will think about how to specify acceptance criteria, followed by a little debriefing. Then participants will set up Fitnesse from scratch. In 2 small iterations we will deliver a Snack-ordering application. In those iterations the participants implement prepared acceptance tests in Fitnesse, write glue code in .Net and run the tests against the prepared Snack ordering application. By implementing the acceptance tests, the 4 basic fixtures get illustrated. We also integrate Fitnesse in an automated build and cover a possible way to structure tests in Fitnesse. Participants who do not code along with us, can pair with those who do, or just watch us doing it on the projection screen.

Format and length:

An interactive mostly technical workshop.

Length: 1 hour 30 minutes, max 30 participants.

Process and timetable:

* 00:00 – 00:10 – Introduction & illustration of the snack ordering application we are going to specify.
* 00:10 – 00:20 – Specification workshop: nail down the scope of a given user story with real world examples
* 00:20 – 00:25 – Debriefing: what did you experience?
* 00:25 – 00:40 – Participants setup Fitnesse on their PCs following the detailed instructions (a backup plan allows simple copying of files to achieve the same result)
* 00:40 – 00:60 – Iteration 1: Implement a bare bones ordering service & automate the build to include acceptance tests
* 00:60 – 00:80 – Iteration 2: Credit management & structuring Fitnesse.
* 00:80 – 00:85 – What’s in it for you?
* 00:85 – 00:90 – Closing

Intended audience and prerequisites:

* Who will benefit from this session?
o Product owners, Agile Coaches,… will see a way how the communication gap between customers and developers can be narrowed down.
o Java developers, testers will have hands-on experience in writing executable specifications in Fitnesse
o .Net developers will also have a first experience in writing the Fit glue code

* Do you expect them to have certain knowledge or experience?
o We expect that the audience knows why acceptance tests are important.
o For the .Net developers who will code along with us, we expect them to have Visual Studio 2008 on their machines.
o We expect everyone to open their pc and participate actively.

BRING YOUR LAPTOP WITH YOU!!!

Hi,

May I point out to you that we have some interesting Certified Scrum courses coming to Belgium! Subscribed now to improve your Agile skills, find out how things can work out differently, enable effective software development and much more.

---

Certified Scrum Product Owner 2 day class @ 11 & 12 May in Ghent

Location: Sirris, Extensa Building, Kolonel Bourgstraat 153, 1140 Evere
Sponsored by Sirris

When? 7th of May
Welcome @ 18.30h
Starting @ 19.00h

Subscribe by mail jurgen@agilefun.com

---

Sessions hosted by Vladimir Blagojević and Tom Tourwé

---

1. Beyond Agile: Development Goes Social

How far can you stretch agile? Can you apply it to build other products than software products? Can you assess up front if agile will work in your context? We showed you a simple thinking tool to do just that in our earlier session “Beyond the Comfort Zone of Scrum”. You learned about four agile application models: homogeneous model, coordination model, co-opetition model and dependency model. This is based on a study of 9 different teams that tried to apply agile outside “pure” SW development. The models are equally applicable to software development teams too.

We saw that in some cases, especially for the dependency model, agile may not have all the answers. It’s time to move forward. If agile isn’t the answer – what is? Can Web 2.0 help? We spent the last 2 years developing new solutions for this that we’d like to share with you.

First results were accepted for publication by ICSE 2009.

---

2. Business Value by Crowds

Everyone agrees the product backlog should be prioritized according to business value, yet everyone has a different understanding of the meaning of value. And everyone estimates the business value of a particular feature differently.

Instead of trying to define the ultimate business value formula or relying solely on an enlightened product owner, we study how to exploit wisdom of crowds. Can a company grow its definition of business value organically, much like a folksonomy? Can the crowd provide more reliable value estimates? We want to share opinions, ideas and insights!

We will introduce you to the “wisdom of crowds”, and explore how to exploit this to define and estimate business value and select the right set of features for the next product release. While doing so, we will show you methods, techniques and tools that you can try out and apply in their context.

This session is based on results of the Flexi project that studies this topic. Flexi is the largest industry-oriented European project on agile software development.

Lean and Agile: an integrated approach to improving software development and knowledge work

As usual I’ll try to provide some feedback about a course given for the first time… CSPO still to come after this one

Adopting Scrum and Agile has led to many improvements in the delivery of software products and the efficiency of teams. However, as Scrum and Agile are implemented, other issues are discovered that are beyond the team and a development team based approach. Integrating Lean with Agile/Scrum provides a powerful and expanded set of tools that allow an organization to achieve higher levels of improvement faster and throughout the entire organization.

The 2 day course teaches how to use Lean principles and techniques to improve at an organizational, environmental, and systemic level. As usual we started by gathering information on what our attendees wanted to get out of the course, getting post-its organized (grouped) on a flip chart… this way we can still adjust the content of the second day (as we did) according the input given.

The first day focussed on “what is lean?” by providing some thoughts about “speed” and what it can do to an organization, how it can influence the competition… this to identify that speed is a good thing to look at. This type of speed is what one has to think of the time it takes from concept/idea to cash and not only about how fast one can type on a computer.

Next to speed as a basic concept, it covered batches or queues and the issues it can bring into an organization. Of course, as any other good course, this has been practiced and explained with games followed with a retrospective. Once speed, batches, queues were known to all attendees we moved on to the benefit of a Lean organization embracing an Agile development center, mainly by pointing out the common ground they all have with each other. Where the main point (in my opinion) is the time, ideas, framework… for continuous improvements!

The second day started out with the techniques used within “mental modelling, systems thinking, causal diagrams” to identify root causes and/or validate assumptions taken. To my opinion this is one of the best techniques to analyse complex systems, identify root cause of recurring problems, validate what you think is good sense… and much more of course. One of the things used as examples in the course was the “faster is slower” principle where the attendees used the technique to validate certain commonly used decision taking within software companies, showing them another point of view on the subject taking into account the underlying effect a decision can have.

Once all the basics were explained we came to the main thing of Lean: VSM (Value Stream Mapping) where the theory was combined with a real life exercise using the attendees’ experiences in their current environment by presenting their VSM, discuss it, identifying possible quick wins and at last use the A3 technique to improve a certain item in the VSM. A3 provides a quick way to identify the PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) cycle which is coming back in a lot of the Lean/Agile/Scrum environments, in different ways and with different levels of administration but the concept is there.

Similar to Agile/Scrum most of the techniques showed are based on collaboration, team work and respect for everybody in the group and I hope people experienced it this way. This was the first time I was involved in a Lean course and it was a tough job to get everything done in time but overall we were pleased with the results and will of course use the attendees’ feedback to improve the course for a next run! For this, muchas gracias.

If you think this course might be something for you, do not hesitate to contact Robin @ http://innovel.net/ to get an extra one organized in Belgium or elsewhere, I’m pretty sure he would be pleased to help you out.

Also see how Robin Dymond (main teacher during the course) has been interviewed concerning the subject (30min): http://www.infoq.com/interviews/lean-orgs-for-agile-teams# even though I have to add a remark to his speech: I think the announcement of organizing around teams might be misinterpreted, what if your organization is still based on component teams? Then you better not organize around the teams for sure! Maybe it would be better if Robin had mentioned around feature teams, which is to me rather building your organization around the flow of delivering customer value. Something to take up with my friend and come back to in a later post

Also as usual… do not hesitate to post some comments or contact me directly with remarks, questions…

Till next post, cya

Ok… the post is a bit late but better late than never

During a business trip visiting our offshoring project in Bucharest, I had the opportunity to join in on a fun Agile Romania user group meeting and wanted to share this with the world! People out there… also in Romania Agile is FUN.

But let me first give you some impressions of what we were really doing in Bucharest. In order to improve our environment we engaged ourselves with Azoth for them to build us some extensions for our Hudson environment which would allow us automated OS validation, CPU consumption reporting/measuring, memory reporting/measuring… Since we wanted them to work iteratively using Scrum principles inside an Agile setting we helped them on the way with a simple story writing workshop, identifying release points (MMF) but most of all discuss and agree on what is expected as well as the follow up on the project. This while providing immediate support to what ever they needed us. You can see the team at work on the right, in the mean time they are bussy with their 3rd 2-week iteration and everything seems to go pretty well and people are learning… also we are learning on how to be a good Agile customer for a change. This provides us with a different insight which might help us understand our own customers better when trying to get them on board… but more about that in another post when the time is right.

During the initiation of the team I got in contact with Maria Diaconu who is trying to get the Romanian Agile community together as well as organizing an Agile conference in Bucharest as part of the eLiberatica. If you didn’t know about this, then I invite you to follow the links behind eLiberatica & Agile conference in Bucharest You can see Maria at the left, actively participating during the UG event.

Beforehand Maria asked me to do something around estimations and I prepared a few slides that could guide us through the topic, but at the start of the event it seemed the only things available were a flipchart, post-its and something to write with. So we forgot about the preparation and the single topic and started out facilitating a very familiar way on gathering information, questions, doubts… from the people in the room on… yes… post-its. Everybody had some topics they would like to see discussed which was great! Guess what… apparently Maria knows her group because one of the main topics coming from this initial information round was related to ‘estimations’.

Other topics on the board were self organizing teams, pull vs push mechanisms, how to start with scrum, TDD, how to handle urgent issues, pair programming, distributed teams… in other words way too much for a single evening! But interesting list and each topic would have been interesting to share thoughts on. So… what is the Agile way to bring some focus to the discussion? Yes, you’re right: dot voting!

Once the dots were given it was again clear that estimations are one of the most difficult things to implement within Agile teams. So we discussed why this is the case, how one should think about estimations, ways to estimate with story points or ideal days, how to improve on estimating stories, what to do with the values, measuring velocities, extending this to release planning…  the whole Agile planning came around during this very extensive and interesting part of the session. Once everybody was satisfied or had enough food for thought on the subject the group decided to move on…

So we looked at the clock and were surprised to see we only had 20 minutes left, time flies when you’re having fun! So now we know our timebox, the subject: self organizing teams. Since my blog is called AgileFUN and I do like to play games, I asked if people were familiar with “strangled mess” which seemed to me a perfect suit for the time left, tackling self organization as well as some things concerning pull vs push which was also a topic on the board. I was lucky, nobody knew about the game so there we go… create a circle, make a mess, identify a manager & let the manager tell us what to do!

Part 1 of the strangled mess was something around 7-8 minutes if I remember correctly (don’t shoot if I’m wrong)… so team… what did you feel as a worker? It was easy since we just had to listen, difficult not to actively support the manager since we knew he didn’t saw the problem… And, you, manager, how did you feel? I really didn’t know where to start, couldn’t see where people were strangled, had no overview…

Great, now let’s make it even a worse mess than it was before and make it even more difficult for the next one we identify as manager! It is amazing what people really do to make the mess even more messier, almost like in real life traditional projects This time we actually do not assign a manager and you are all workers, go ahead and unstrangle…

Part 2 of the strangled mess was done in about 2-3 minutes! Again… how did it feel this time? What was different? We knew what was wrong and how to get it fixed, we had to take initiatives ourselves, there were multiple activities at once, it was more fun…

How does this all resemble to real life? Very similar isn’t it? Agile will not make it easier for the team, the team will take more initiatives since they see more and know more… but at the end it is more FUN to work in such an environment!!!

Almost perfect timing as well, just went about 5 minutes over the scheduled timing of the event. It was a great experience meeting the Romanian UG and I hope people got some inspiration for their daily doings. Keep it going! Keep sharing your experiences in your UG! You are a great bunch

Greetings

Jürgen.

Oooh, being disruptive brings a bad smell to the topic isn’t it? Well don’t worry and continue reading, you might be surprised on how disruptive can be good

When you start with Scrum/XP it is most probably going to be a bottom-up approach since it are indeed the specialists that know how things should work, so the people on the floor. The main reason is probably being able to adapt to all management shifts teams have to endure, especially during economic regressions within a company. Or maybe it is the code quality you have to live with due to pressure, pressure to deliver, pressure to meet deadlines… Anyway, why you start and how you start with your bottom-up approach doesn’t matter within this post.

At a certain moment in time you’ll find yourself and other teams that adapted Scrum/XP in your organization in a state of Agility and pretty well optimized. And there it starts to get difficult, you bump up to the ‘other’ side of the organization, the waterfall structure, component teams… in other words dependencies! What do you do with those dependencies? Ignore, keep being stuburn? No of course not because we believe in ‘Kaizen’! So there are several options to choose from and much depends on the top-down support you gathered in the mean time.

Let us examine option 1 first: remove all dependencies at once!

This means that top-down a complete new organization will be established, new teams will be created, cross-functional teams, teams that will have no dependencies to deliver a feature: “Feature teams”. Having no code ownership and based on generalizing specialists. But as you see, this will require a lot of management support and will most probably bring yourself into a lot of political, emotional discussions, even though it is the best solution to become more productive and deliver fast. I will not continue on “feature teams” this time and can only recommend “Scaling Lean & Agile Development – Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum” by Bass Vodde and Craig Larman on the subject, the book is great!

So we’ll jump to option 2: handle the dependencies.

This means you do not have all support needed for the above and have to handle dependencies as a temporary solution (still go towards feature teams if you really want to be successful). In a large organization multiple teams will do Scrum/XP somehow and it is best for all of you to form an alliance and bring more visibility to your management as well as handle dependencies in a more appropriate manner. A good way to do this is by being disruptive to some teams by convincing them to synchronize iterations, let’s say their 2-week iterations. At first people will not see how this is being disruptive but here it comes… While synchronizing iterations one would like the rest of the organization (dependencies remember) to benefit from this as well so one should make sure those other teams/persons/managers can attend the scrum ceremonies (demo, planning) for all teams involved! And here is where we start being disruptive to teams that could handle their demo, retrospective, planning in a single day or less since now we have to organize a full one day demo meetings (if necessary with swim lanes build in), followed by a full one day planning meetings. Resulting in 2 days for all teams = being disruptive isn’t it?!

So how can this be good? Well, let me give you some examples of benefits of this temporary disruptive action:

• Scrum teams will get more people to join in the demo and planning meetings, even those managers that never had time. Reason: all teams are doing it the same days, meaning that those managers will have more benefit as well in freeing up their agenda those days.
• People out of Scrum teams will be able to join in each other’s ceremonies more easily since it will not disturb their ongoing work. So people will get more familiar with those other domains, modules in the organization and as most of us know already: skills, knowledge = speed & quality.
• Old fashioned project managers handling a big project in the organization can setup a swim lane for those 2 days where teams busy in their project are presenting their progress; as where are other teams will be organized in one or multiple other swim lanes. This way the so called project management group will have a complete overview and will be able feel/see trends within their environment. Enabling them to act as well, what the hell, maybe even be convinced of this new approach and start supporting Lean, Agile, Scrum, XP.
• Since more people are benefiting your Scrum/XP work, it will be seen more and thus promoted better. This might lead to the support you were/are missing for some of those organizational impediments you need management to fix.

As you can see, even a disruptive action to some teams can bring good things to all! But keep in mind this second option should be a temporary one, do never give up on “feature teams” once you have all support that is needed!