Victoria University of Wellington: Going All XP On Your Business
My lecture for students in SWEN302 Agile Methods at Victoria University of Wellington called “Going All XP On Your Business” is available on Slideshare.
Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
Brisbane Agile & Lean Meetup: Agile Lightning Talks + OpenMRS
Recently the Agile Academy decided to get out of running community meetups and hand them back to the community. At the same time, Adrian Smith and I had been talking about the lack of meetup groups in Brisbane. As a result, we took over the established group that existed and created the Brisbane Agile and Lean User Group.
We held our first meeting last week at the Villager Hotel who kindly sponsored the venue and some nibbles. We had about 30 attendees turn up to listen to a discussion about OpenMRS as well as having some group discussions on distributed Agile and selling Agile.
For our first meetup (under our new identity), we are going to run some lightning talks in an open space format. With a number of members having just attended Agile Australia and a long time since our last meetup, we are looking for members to share their stories.
For those that attended Agile Australia, there was a calll to action to support the OpenMRS project (http://openmrs.org/). With groups already kicked off in Melbourne and Sydney it would be great to canvas interest for a similar group in Brisbane.
If you are interested in giving a Lightning Talk please contact us and propose a topic. Alternatively, feel free to speak with us on the night as we setup the agenda.
We are also looking for suggestions on where and where to best host our meetup as well as looking for upcoming topics that the group is interested in hearing or speaking about.
After an overview of the new group and some discussion on potential upcoming topics, Michael Harrison led a discussion with Cathie Hagen on OpenMRS:
We then broke into two groups to talk about Distributed Agile:
Here is the output:
The other group talked about Selling Agile:
Here is the output:
AWS Lean Startup Event 2012
The planets aligned this week which meant that I was in Sydney for the Amazon Web Services Regional Premier Lean Startup Event, with the highlight being able to hear from Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup. A huge thanks to my friends at Slattery IT who got me registered for this event. Here are my notes from the event.
Eric Ries – The Lean Startup
I am a huge fan of the Lean Startup movement, so it was a thrill to hear directly from Eric Ries. His talk mirrored others of his that can be found all over the web and the content followed much of what is available in the book, but it was inspiring and awesome nonetheless.
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| From Miscellaneous |
This is a copy of a similar presentation from another conference.
Here are some of my notes from the talk.
- you can now rent the means of production and compete with big players
- join the global conversation at #leanstartup
- this is the boring part of entrepreneurship
- Ghostbusters is the original movie on entrepreneurship
- startup = experiment
- we live in a time where we can build anything we can imagine – need to ask not can it be built but should it be built…
- entrepreneurship is management
- most products Eric has built have failed!
- Frederick Winslow Taylor stated things that are obvious now yet had to be invented then – work needs to be done as efficiently as possible and breaking work into tasks
- all of the tools of general management are based on planning and forecasting – but making an accurate forecast relies on a long operating history – need a new entrepreneurial toolkit because the world is filled with uncertainty
- the pivot – successful entrepreneurs did not have a better idea, they take the leanings and change the direction without changing the vision
- runway should not be amount of money remaining but amount of pivots remaining
- achieving failure is successfully executing a bad plan – this is like getting good fuel mileage when driving a car off a cliff
- the lean revolution was led by W. Edwards Deming and Taiichi Ohno
- Agile only works well if you know who the customer is
- failure is the great equaliser of quality
- “we learned something important” is an excuse, need to learn early
- ask what experiment am I trying to run, and what learning can I take from that
- build > measure > learn loop – minimise time through the loop
- measurement will slow you down but optimise the part to optimise the whole
- drive down the batch size to one day – continuous deployment – many features take longer to prioritise than to build
- The Toyota Way says foundation is long term thinking, the startup way says foundation is accountability
- brink of success is indistinguishable from goofing off – need innovation accounting
- business plans are rarely achieved – achieving failure – leap of faith assumptions need to called out
- build a minimum viable product, iterate experiments and look for upward trends, pivot when returns are diminishing
- better to have bad news that’s true than good news that’s made up
- pivot meeting should be a milestone in its own right, need good information to make a good decision – micro scale experiments that help make future decisions
- lean startup is still early adopter stage
Dr Werner Vogels – The Lean Cloud
Dr. Werner Vogels is the CTO of Amazon.com and opened the startup event. Here are some notes from his session.
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- Animoto – upload images and music, analyses the music and creates a movie around the mood – went from 15 to 5000 servers in a number of days
- web services is now called cloud…
- Australia is not yet an Amazon Web Servixes (AWS) region – soon? – Asia Pacific region is based in Singapore
- the number of objects in S3 has increased by 250% per annum consistently over the last 5 years, currently 762 billion
- cloud is defined by its benefits not its technology
- scaling is as much about using the Cloud to scale down as it is to scaling up
- lowers cost – eliminate CAPEX, reduce OPEX
- increase agility – not constrained by resources(eg. waiting for or buying servers), reduce time to market
- remove heavy lifting – like scalability, security, reliability
- foundation for next generation architecture, infrastructure cost should grow with your income
- resource models changing due to competition, limited capital, power of customers, faster time to market
- lean manufacturing – the machine that changed the world, lean startup
- remove waste that does lead to direct value for the customer
- an elastic and pay-per-use infrastructure – follow their demands to eliminate waste for peaks in traffic
- AWS makes deployment, testing and staging trivial – tools for red-green deployment for example
- need to build security in from the ground up when building a cloud application – lots of tools available
- advantage of AWS is you are on a continuous innovation curve
- DynamoDB – uses low latency SSD, predictable performance, zero administration NoSQL – database is no longer the bottleneck
- no need to have your own transcoding anymore, it all sits on the cloud
8 Securities / Q&A Panel
8 Securities gave an overview of their use of AWS ahead of a short lean cloud panel.
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- are all the lessons US lessons? No, early on some cultures said this would not work, particularly admitting failure, the grass is not greener in Silicon Valley, understand the underlying principles, figure out how to translate strengths and build on the Lean startup principles
- there is a new book by Jeffrey Liker who wrote The Toyota Way (The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership) – Toyota has translated the approach to as many plants in the USA
- need to communicate and connect with your employees – we are still solving simple problems
- good thing about having a small amount of customers is that when you screw up you can apologise… personally
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Agile Australia 2012 Product Afternoon Review
As a precursor to the Agile Australia 2012 conference to be held in Melbourne, a product afternoon was held at the Hilton on the Park in Melbourne in November and had a good variety of Australian speakers. The success of the event means a similar event is being schedule for Sydney in February 2012. Here are my notes from the event:
Look What Happened When We Let Customers into the Product Development Loop at Lonely Planet!
Nigel Dalton from Luna Tractor led this session, his slides are available here.
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- you can’t say product you need to start saying customer
- publishing life cycles are enormous – publishers have to wait up to 5 years to change a font
- The New New Product Development Game – the last paragraph sums it up
- need to avoid the next bench design problem – only ask the person on the next bench about quality, do not go to the wider world
- for Lonely Planet, realisation was a competitor in the market who produced a colour guide, no sales the month they launched
- went to customers 4 times in the process, took publishing from 2 years to 9 months, visualise the project
- Rob Adams talks about getting the developers to do some of the initial marketing calls
Marketing is from Venus, IT is from Mars – and the Customer Doesn’t Care
Daniel Oertli from REA Group led this discussion that he hastily renamed to “5 Kick Ass Principles for Customer-led Development”, his slides are available here.
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- be customer focussed not customer driven
- effect of marketing has changed over the last 5-10 years, we no longer control the marketing channel, need customer admiration
- be a peeping Tom. Regularly – there is only one customer, the people who pay for products, none of this internal customer bull####, hard to put your business on the road regularly to talk to customers
- 5 on Friday – Silverback on Mac, 5 internal employees for 15 minutes and ask them to do specific tasks with your product (eg. show me how to change the default colour scheme), continue to do this every Friday as parts of the product are developed
- don’t ask for the solution – to get creative you need to figure it out internally, great people create great things
- day and half every quarter – hack day – off tools, schedule around it, put ideas on intranet and vote, teams form around the idea self-forming, winning team gets a cash prize and gets sponsored product into production
- 2 week inception process – use business canvas mapping to lay out the business drivers
- democratize design – hard to get excited about something if you have not been part of the design, get everybody to draw
- ready, fire, aim – Agile gives us opportunity to change things in motion but most organisations still execute iteratively what is planned up front, Agile gives you a bullet frequently, be very clear about your minimal marketable features, be ruthless about what you send to your Agile teams, you have a lot of go’s at this
- teams win – good people outperform any processes, keep teams very small (6-8 people), have a mix of business fundamental understanding, lead designer and lead technologist and there for skills not core decision making, trust is essential
- dealing with resistance – hardest change of all was getting business on the journey, need to get culture sorted and get teams focussed
- more of what people do is outside of their hierarchy, biggest impact is dynamic thinking by thinking of type of things we will do rather than what we will do
- public companies need a plan to show to shareholders, challenge is to make it more dynamic after that
- engage people in their career progression – still report to a lead, but 90% of the time they live with their cross functional team – more about stretching their knowledge in their domain so have practice meetings
SEEK’s Approach to Product Innovation
Doug Blue from SEEK presented this session, his slides are available here.
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- put customers before profits – no display advertising on the front pages, founder would prefer to have a dollar tomorrow rather than a dollar today
- build for the long term – customer core needs, competitive advantage, long term trends and shareholder value, in GFC let customers negotiate out of long term contracts
- strive for a rock solid core and out innovate the competition – focussed on number of ads and size of audience, now need to focus on the product
- focus – do a few things very well, carried this over to the iPhone app as well, but run business on the things that are do-able
- people engagement – never compromise on engagement
- data driven decisions – if we build or change something, we measure it
- test and learn – put it out in market and do course correction
- balancing customer needs – 3 different customers with different needs (job seeker, employer, recruiters) – came up with an invisible salary to balance the needs
- on bigger initiatives, need to do your homework
A Start-up Approach to Product Delivery in a Corporate Environment
John Sullivan from Jetstar delivered this session, his slides are available here.
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- XP Explained lacked an explanation on how to communicate effectively with customers to understand what they wanted to achieve
- base costs on optimum team sizes that can manage constant delivery of a number of system concerns
- have no process, when problems occur, take those problems away
- don’t use iterations, they constrain the customer, need to be able pick up any card and get it into Production
- ideas wall – backlog for where the business is going, anyone can post ideas on it
- don’t talk about what the product we are delivering should do, talk about what the business should do
- challenge everything – stand ups are almost useless in large organisations – only say things what people in the circle need to know about, because they work together, so they should know
- most people in large organisations are disempowered – how do I know I am doing the right thing? Just do it, everyone is the business
- need to help everyone understand the market – understand what the impact of features are
- whole of company showcases every Friday
- need multi disciplined teams that understand the market they are striving for
Panel: Why is Customer-led Product Development so Hard?
Keith Dodds from ThoughtWorks led this panel with all of the above speakers. Some of the key learnings were:
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- it’s hard to ask hard questions
- if you have leaders that are customer focussed, everything else will follow
- most organisations try to make the workforce effective and efficient by putting structures around them, need to retain a functionalised structure and stay away from specialisation
- companies are introverted because traditionally they have not had access to customers
- it’s hard to keep up with all of the tools out there – there is lots technology to seek out what the customers are viewing
- most products are designed to be obsolete within 1-2 years, especially those that are consumer focussed
- companies are not set up to evolve things, they are setup to build, the world has changed where everything is outdated the minute you deploy
- grass roots movements are usually the most enduring
- most companies lack the balls to shut things down when they need to
- frugal innovation – constraints help you channel great ideas, would be interesting to apply some artificial constraints to hack days
- what doesn’t work are artificial constraints and the team know it
- next C level job will be the chief designer – targeting the customer
- Agile helps to get a customer led product out, because the person who wants the product can talk to the person who builds the product
- report on value delivered to the business rather than velocity
- the pool of talent is not that big, how do you keep people motivated - sense of purpose, sense of meaning (problems that have currency in the real world), ability to react and shape, ability to be heard, about making a difference
- where do great Product Managers come from, how do we develop and train these people
Agile Academy Meetup: Agile & Lean Games
Last week, the Agile Academy had a games night for its November 2011 meetup, to cap off the year, hosted by Adrian Smith from Ennova.
The three games we played were the XP Game, Lean Paper Plane Game and Kanban Soduko. We ended the night with the Marshmallow Challenge.
You can also view the pictures from the night.
YOW! Nights: Extracting Gold from Legacy Code
Last month, Dave Thomas came to Brisbane for YOW! Nights to deliver his always insightful and entertaining presentation entitled “Mature Legacy Seeking Sexy New Technology for Fun and Profit: Extracting Gold from Legacy Code”. It’s been a pleasure to work with Dave on the last couple of Agile Australia conferences and I always try to make sure I catch his presentations when he is in town.
The following are my notes from the session:
- a common complaint is that my boss does not let me do anything neat – legacy is a challenge
- go where there is a big need rather than wherever everybody is – solve a problem that is important to them in a clever way
- legacy code is code that has no tests
- only if you have a product that matters you will have legacy – you can make bloatware even in new systems
- legacy – the big ball of mud – OO is one of the biggest creators of technical debt
- developers are the source of legacy debt – the developer solution is we can always rewrite it in my language – most rewrites fail
- outsourcing often works short term – but you lose your business knowledge and you realise your requirements stink
- vendor solution – start with a technology you don’t need
- agile solution – just refactor it, there are no tools or practices that can fix millions of lines of code, it will take forever
- need to figure out what the legacy is about – get the metaphor and a picture – write stories and put them on a wall, invest in getting the legacy programmers to sit down and talk about it
- most companies are living on their legacy – new products are not paying the way
- pair legacy and non-legacy developers to tackle the problem
- use modern IDE, use modern SCM, new continuous build infrastructure is cheap, need fewer developers if your whole world is in memory
- when everybody is using agile, how can it be the best practice – it is the only practice
- prove your way through the old systems – there are very few greenfield projects
- do TDD using live transaction roll back
- automate from the data definition not screen scrape
- people only do innovation when they are screwed – agile is predictability and quality not productivity
- rewrite the contracts so that vendors can only install if they have automated acceptance tests – acceptance tests are the only way of putting two distinct processes together
- big resource contracts should be split because the quality of resources are usually spilt in half – give it to local resources who have the talent
- an agile coach is “an unemployed Smalltalk programmer”
- think outside of the box – use spreadsheets to load data to the cloud
- simple innovation in a difficult problem gets you a lot of respect – don’t ask your boss if you should write some Prolog to solve a problem
- look where the customers are spending money – it is usually in legacy
- lots of great opportunities to make a difference to hold your nose with the legacy smell – find where the biggest bang for buck is quickly – need to do it in months
- KLOCs kill – more code to maintain
- prove new ideas and do a little bit at a time
Agile Academy Meetup: The journey of becoming Agile or even more Agile
A few weeks ago, the Agile Academy held its February 2011 meetup, with three speakers and a panel discussion on agile adoption in different organisations. There was a good turnout to hear the 3 speakers:
Here are my notes from the short sessions.
Adrian Smith (Ennova)
Ennova is a startup in the engineering space:
- start with an idea or a better way of doing something as well as good people and customers
- get an idea, develop it as quickly as possible, give it to your customers and learn
- use low-fi tools: story wall, Pivotal Tracker, user personas and scenarios, build prototypes but enforce rules such as “can’t give this to the customer” or “no tests”, offshore remote pairing with Skype and iChat, version control using GitHub, continuous integration using Hudson, testing using Cucumber and RSpec, one-click deployment in Hudson and EC2 test grid, communications with Campfire and Yammer for chat and retrospectives using Listhings
- started with the culture in mind, set principles and hire the right people
- whole business needs to be agile, focus on technical quality important
Nigel Waddington
Nigel relayed his experiences from setting up Agile at a large software organisation:
- don’t believe case studies, every customer is different
- it’s all about yoghurt! – cultural change is hard – need leadership involved plus bottom up engagement
- leaders care about money – “show me the proof that waterfall works!”, they want predictability and reporting and to make money
- ran pilots to show success – choose good duration, start small and grow and make sure it has executive buy-in, don’t choose pieces of work that are too easy
- pilots are good to engage people – train, educate, seed teams – get them to push and make it happen
- balance between fast and evaluation
- eat your own dog food, “iterating towards agility” (Mike Cohn), use a virtual scrum team for transition
- don’t mess with the Scrum basics in the beginning
- remember you go to work to deliver software, not to do Scrum
Elio Patane (WorkCover Queensland)
WorkCover Queensland is a workers compensation insurance company:
- weren’t delivering quickly enough resulted in reduced confidence from the business
- wanted to be agile, but not capital “A” Agile – did not want to lose sight of goals
- started with customers breaking down projects to deliver value
- solution delivery framework – Idea -> Discussion -> Plan -> Build -> Implement
- needed to improve communication around intent of project – created a “project picture” to give context
- found out that they did not know enough about stories – started too early – more in planning phase
- standups – walk the wall, back to front rather than the 3 questions as they missed the picture of progress
- ATDD using Cucumber and Watir – testers break the build, just like developers
- one floor, open plan environment
- big release walls – give management a view
- can now to deliver to Production every 3 weeks and high quality
Panel Discussions
The panel discussions covered some awesome questions from the audience. As I was lucky enough to be asked to moderate the panel, I did not get the opportunity to record any notes from this session.
Sydney Go Inaugural Meetup January 2011
I got along to the “Googleplex” when I was in Sydney the other week, and with Steve Dalton checked out the inaugural Go Meetup. I have spent very little time looking at Go, so was interested to get some background into what it is all about.
Andrew Gerrand gave (part) of a talk on Practical Go Programming (I say part because it turned out to be a discussion with the slides rather than the talk). The slides are available here, but the talk is available as a recording from OSDC 2010.
Steve Dalton also interviewed Andrew Gerrand on the Coding By Numbers podcast earlier in the day, which is well worth a listen.
Agile Academy Meetup: A is for Agile, the start of something good!
It’s that time of year where you start to clear the decks for the next year, and, in amongst a bunch of files on my hard disk, I found my notes from the Agile Academy Meetup from April 2010 in Brisbane, which I thought had been long lost to binary heaven.
At this meetup, Phil Abernathy presented an introductory agile session entitled “A is for Agile, the start of something good!” He had some good some refreshing points, and some of my notes from the session are here:
- why change – better, faster, cheaper – key driver, but customers have always wanted this even before the Global Financial Crisis
- RAD – “the good old days”
- agile is evolutionary – developed over time from RAD, XP, Scrum, etc…
- pendulum swing from waterfall to agile is a bad approach
- agile is made up of values and principles plus technology, social and management practices
- values and principles are not enough, so the only way to implement these are practices – social, technology and management
- being accountable is a key value, but gets harder as agile teams work closely together, so you also need courage, respect & honesty as well
- wisdom of the crowd is always better than the best person in the group
- simplicity is the most difficult principle to implement – humans always want more detail
- self organization does not mean no leadership – it means even more leadership
- if you get kickoff of your project wrong, it will always go wrong (regardless of waterfall or agile)
- agile successful in non-software development projects – biggest demand in Suncorp is from the business
- benefits linked to outcomes which are linked to features which are then linked to stories
- agile is different to RAD because we don’t prototype, we build… iteratively
- in agile we don’t write documentation until we have shared understanding, but there is a discipline to the amount and the need to refactor
- issues with agile adoption are usually on the IT side of the fence, once the business have seen it they will be the biggest supporters
Phil then answered some questions from the audience:
- PRINCE2 now has a large agile component to it – is no different because agile sits on top of it – agile has rigour and will work with any project management method
- governance – heartbeat of the steering commitee must be the same heartbeat as that of the project
- selling agile – you need troaching – training and coaching together, it’s a change management journey
- don’t expect a successful agile project to sell agile in the organisation, you will get resistance – need to manage transition from pilot to scaling, need buy-in to the pilot to avoid this
- where do you put agile artefacts when you don’t have walls – mobile whiteboards, walls, a company in San Francisco just got seed funding for agile walls
- do not recommend using a tool over tangible materials
Agile Academy Meetup: A Business Value Focused Model for Story Identification
Shane Hastie presented at the September 2010 Agile Academy Meetup in Brisbane on the topic of user stories. Here are my notes:
- use models to break complex problems down to manageable chunks
- Standish Group – number of canceled projects has increased with agile and number of wasted money projects have decreased – trend seems to be that agile is driving the cancellation of bad projects
- business value is not delivered until it is in production and being used by the users
- nobody ever does a business realisation review – 9 months after the project ask did we deliver what we said we would deliver
- turn the story card around to emphasise value – so that… I want…
- users is a bad term – implies they are addicted to something – they are customers of our service, victims of our software
- think about who is your customer, what are their real needs – pin a picture up of them up on the wall to remind you to ask what they would think
- events happen – business events (random but we need to be able to respond them when they arise), temporal events (happen due to the passage of time such as end of month, annual backup, daily backup, quarterly review) and conditional events (happen because something else happened)
- suggest adding when to epics to track events as a… when… I want… when… so that
- elementary business process – done by one person (or small team) in one place at one time – this is the level we should usually look for our epics
- look for CRUD – a business process that is supposed to happen
- latch onto nouns in customer conversations – a trigger that something is done
- look at the management levels – we are good at the immediate needs of the workforce, but what about the needs of supervisory management, middle management and top management
- think about the impact of data from external sources – what if the GST percentage changed tomorrow (it is in New Zealand!)
- the model for epics – As a.. When… I Want… Using… So That
- add the CRUD to the using statements to confirm the process
- next level down look into Jeff Patton’s story mapping process
- the smell of stories – PERFUM (Performance, Efficiency, Functionality, Usability, Maintainability) – in some cases if you don’t look after these, a refactor will mean rewrite the system
- value is in the delivery of a complete epic
- epic model helps you figure out how big the project is without going to a low level of detail
- epic model is based on early work by Ed Yourdon and works on any project, including waterfall
Craig Smith
