AgileHolland Nieuws

WebServices are hot. Some more so than others. SOAP based WebServices are frequently seen as not very lean and agile. Robust - perhaps. Widely supported - no doubt about it. Key element of almost any SOA infrastructure - sure. Easy, lightweight to deploy or to program a client against - no, not really. Inituitive? Bookmarkable? [...]

This is the eight of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able [...]

Most of the time I hear people talking about trust, they are talking about trust between team members. It's equally important to have trust between managers and team members. In fact, the relationship between an employee and his/her manager consistently shows up as a key factor in retention.

One of the ways that managers in the middle of agile transitions break trust is by giving a decision to the team and then taking it away, as in Tale of a Yo-Yo Manager.

Agile experts James Shore and Diana Larsen will benefit from federal funding to teach two courses in Oregon this month, from Employer Workforce Training Funds and the Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development. By Mike Bria

My Stickyminds column, Transitioning to Agile in the Middle of a Project, is up. Enjoy!

Updated October 6, 2008

Choosing the right features can make the difference between the success and failure of a software product. Mike Cohn presented 'Prioritizing your Project Backlog' at Agile 2008 on how a project backlog should be organized and prioritized and non-financial techniques for prioritization such as kano analysis, theme screening/scoring, relative weighting and analytic hierarchy process. By Geoffrey Wiseman

Agile Holland Conference

The Agile Holland group organizes their first one day conference on October 24th in Amsterdam.

Vera and I will present the Business Value Game v1.1, which incorporates the feedback we got from participants at tryouts at Agile 2008, the XP user group meeting, Brain Train and Agile Business Conference.

Scandinavian Agile Conference

Agile Finland organizes the Scandinavian Agile Conference on October 29th in Helsinki.

I will present the Business Value Game with some Finnish coaches at the conference.

XP Days Benelux

The XP Days Benelux conference on November 20th and 21st in Eindhoven also features the Business Value Game, this time presented with Vera and Portia.

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Do you want to learn about “Business Value”, prioritising your backlog, portfolio management and all the challenges that salespeople and account managers face daily? Do you want to experience the benefits of working with short iterations and releasing early? Do you want have fun while you learn? Download the Business Value Game, print the cards and organise your own game.

The XP Game by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

In over two years of working with Scrum I've found it to be a great focus point for people who want to do projects better, faster and have more fun. The clients I've worked with, introducing Scrum, have all seen a surge in employee satisfaction, customer collaboration and focus on team effort. Xebia is entrenched in Scrum and we host certification, events and training. Together with some gurus like Jeff Sutherland and our colleagues we've trained hundreds of people in the Netherlands in using Scrum. After all this positive responses and experience, here at Xebia we thought there should be more ways of sharing Scrum experiences. So we think it's time for a "Scrum User Group" in The Netherlands.

We've set up the Dutch Scrum group and named it nlscrum. We have already hosted our first meetup last month and it was a great success! We hope our next event will even draw a bigger crowd and more inspiring ideas!

The nlscrum community is now three months old and has over 50 members. Our first event was a few weeks ago, on the 3rd of September. About 25 nlscrum members attended our Open Space meetup. The event got a great rating of 4,5 out of 5! Most of the people were Scrum Masters or people starting with Scrum. The Open Space format needed some getting used to as it was new to most people, but after a while it turned out great. There were lots of discussion, sharing of experiences and new insights generated. I was glad to hear people thought is was a great gathering.

Discussing Scrum I noticed a few things. Some people were talking about doing multiple projects with one team. Apparently most Scrum customers aren't used to feeding their teams with a single task. Serge has done some great work with multiple team setups, so he could help out there. Another thing that came up is the unique way we at Xebia combine project management with Scrum. We should talk about that more often as it will help people get a more mature Scrum process faster. Listening to the attendees I noticed the Product Owner role is still a bit of a mystery. I expect that role will get some extra attention next year.

That's why our next meetup on November 4th will have a Product Ownership theme! Check the nlscrum.org website to apply and sign up for our next meeting. There are also pictures of the last meeting and a mailing list for burning Scrum questions. I'm curious what your experiences with Scrum are and I know we'll be able to learn from sharing.

This is the eight of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able [...]

Where do participants to XP Days Benelux come from?

Places are filling up nicely for the upcoming XP Days Benelux on 20-21 November. It looks like we’ll have another sold out conference.

The XP Days started as a local conference, to enable participants to get a taste of Agile without having to travel too far. We always attracted a good mix of local and foreign presenters. Local presenters bring stories that are recognisable to the audience. Foreign presenters bring in new ideas and techniques.

As you can see from the table, three quarters of the presenters are Belgian or Dutch. The other presenters come from 7 countries.

Belgium 24 The Netherlands 19 France 6 Finland 3 Great Britain 2 United States 1 Germany 1 Italy 1 Switzerland 1

The geographical distribution of participants is even more marked: 85% of all participants come from Belgium (45%) or The Netherlands (40%). The other participants come from the seven countries mentioned before, plus Sweden.

But where are the Luxemburgers?

It's conference season again. If you'd like to meet up and have a chat and/or a beer, you can find me at:

CITCON Europe, 3-4 October in Amsterdam; QWAN is sponsoring this event

The Agile Holland Conference, 24 October in Amsterdam; I'm one of the organizers.

The Scandinavian Agile Conference, 28 October in Helsinki (Finland); Willem and I will run our Rightsizing Your Unit Tests workshop.

XP Days Benelux, 20 & 21 November in Veldhoven (The Netherlands); Rob and I will do our Responsibility Driven Design with Mocking presentation.

See you there!

Kevin Coleman told his story working with an offshore team that claimed to be 'Agile' and the woes and worries that came with that experience in last month's issue of the Agile Journal. Several readers validated his experience with their own. In practice, can Agile methods be used successfully with offshore teams given today's business reality? By Amr Elssamadisy

In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Scott Dillman talks about transforming developers into software craftsmen, people responsible for their work, continuously learning, taking pride in doing qualitative work, sharing knowledge and respecting professional standards. By Abel Avram

Flexibele ontwikkelmethodieken betrekken de gebruiker meer bij het programmeerwerk. De programmeur moet daardoor vaker opleveren en meer luisteren. Web 2.0 en agile helpen allebei de kloof tussen ontwikkeling en gebruik dichten.

Sustainable pace is known to help teams with improved velocity. Jeff Sutherland and Clinton Keith quote studies to prove that it works. However, there is an underlying word of caution which suggests that teams should take their sprint goals seriously and a couple of crunch sprints might not hurt after all. By Vikas Hazrati

A widely accepted agile practice is the daily standup meeting, in which each team member shares: what they have done since the previous standup, what they expect to achieve by the next, and anything that is getting in their way. Mike Cohn recently examined variations that shed additional light on the progress being made toward completing each user story. By Chris Sims

Playing with business value

This week, Portia and I hosted two runs in London of the “Business Value Game” that Vera and I developed. As usual, we had a lot of fun hosting the session and got good feedback from the participants.

Brain Train

Portia started the Brain Train sessions as a way for friends and colleagues to get together to experiment with new sessions and games. Earlier this year, we presented the “Real Options Space Game” at a Brain Train session in the Royal Festival Hall.

Last Monday we were back in the friendly lobby of Royal Festival Hall. As players started trickling in we grabbed a few tables and chairs to set up the game. Portia and I each coached one team through the six iterations of the game.

Each team used different strategies. For example, one team lost an unhappy customer because they concentrated on the other more lucrative customers, while the other team ensured that each customer stayed happy. In the end, Portia’s team won, even though they lost a customer.

After the game, we held a retrospective to see the good, the bad and the puzzling. The participants learned (or confirmed) some lessons about customer interaction, iteration planning, release planning, communication and teamwork. We’ll publish the results of the retrospective.

Thank you Eamon, Roshni, Jenni, Mark, Ioana, Al, Mohan, Daniel, Dot, Tamas, Eben and Maria for playing and giving feedback.

Agile Business Conference day 1

The next day, I attended the first day of the Agile Business Conference. The highlight of the program was a funny and energetic keynote talk by Rob Thomsett on Agile Project Management.

One of his learnings is that when we borrowed engineering and construction project management models we also inherited their prevailing culture. The relationship between “IT experts” and “Users” (a denigrating term) has always been adversarial.

Agile Project Management is about true collaboration and is based on a set of values:

• Open: full participation and ownership by stakeholders.
• Trust: team members and stakeholders are professionals who can be trusted to be committed to the project and the organisation.
• Honesty: all people impacted or involved have a right to be told the truth; asking for help is a sign of strength.
• Courage: Undertaking projects requires courage in many areas like telling the truth and asking for help.
• Money: projects consume money. This requires a fiscal and ethical responsibility to be shared by all team members and stakeholders.

Rob concluded with some of concerns (silver bullet syndrome, lack of whole-of-life view, focus only on technical issues, lack of cultural awareness) and drivers (faster delivery, change friendly, more enjoyable, real teams, great values) of further Agile distribution.

In between sessions I talked to some acquaintances and met some new people. Together with Exoftware (thanks Andy!), we invited people to come to the next day’s Business Value Game. By then, we had already updated the game with the feedback from the Brain Train tryout.

Agile Business Conference day 2

After the opening keynote we played another Business Value Game with 13 participants. This time my team won! Again, the players had fun and learned lessons about planning, teamwork and prioritisation. It’s interesting to see how players react to the time pressure of the game:

• one of the teams used some extra time to come up with elaborate strategies and tried to make decisions before they had all the information.
• one team discarded information because they felt they didn’t have enough time to examine the information.

All teams could have done better and worked faster if they had shared more information in the team and if they had only taken decisions when they needed to. But that’s the subject of another game, the “Real Options Space Game“.

Agile Business Conference - closing

One of the highlights was seeing Ole and Jenni from GoAgile in Denmark again. Thank you for the gift and the great conversations about sessions, presentation techniques and Agile project management. We still owe you an explanation of Real Options. Most of all, thank you for your enthusiasm.

The conference closed with a presentation on the “Responsibility Model” by Christopher Avery. Chris explained the difference between being given accountability and taking responsibility. His model explains how we typically react in the face of problems. Portia has a good writeup of the material. On the way back Portia and I had a lot of fun going through each of the steps in the model in an exaggerated way, because one of the “Keys to Responsibility” is Awareness of how we (re)act.

Come and play!

We got good feedback on the game. Portia, Vera and I are busy working on v2.0 of the Business Value Game.

If you want to play our games, come and see us at the following fine events:

29/10/2008 - Scandinavian Agile Conference - Helsinki - The Business Value Game

20-21/11/2008 - XP Days Benelux - Eindhoven - The Business Value Game and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

11-12/12/2008 - XP Days London - London - The Real Options Space Game and a new game by Vera. Exciting!

Or you can download our games and play them at home.

Watch this space for the release announcement or come and play with us at one of the upcoming conferences and seminars.

Some teams use a Sprint 0 to prepare their product backlog, the infrastructure (development environment, CI server), ... .Is this part of Scrum? Is it useful? By Mark Levison