Day 4 at Agile 2011 brought a full day sessions full day of sessions followed by the conference dinner. For the first session I used the law of two feet and landed in three different sessions.

Stages of Practice: the Agile Tech Tree

Arlo Belshee and James Shore led this hands on session to build a technical tree of agile practices. I didn’t stay for long, but I was interested in the output, which I found hanging on the walls later in the day.

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

Creating Customer Delight

Steve Denning (author of a large number of leadership books) delivered this presentation based around a blog post of a similar name that I sat in for about 30 minutes. His presentation is available here.

From Agile 2011

• move from output to outcome
• customer must be surprised and delighted
• move from implicit goal to explicit goal
• custom delight is the new dimension of done
• product owner adds contingent valu
• bottom line is whole organization, not just the team
• customer delight is measured eg. net promoter score
• delight is happiness, joy, customer success – everybody has a story or understands this concept
• identify your project that you wish to delight – who is your customer?
• what do customers say they want? – warning! they don’t always know eg. New Coke
• what is it that core customers might not like about your product? eg .why they made the Nespresso machine because people did not like cleaning up, need to get inside their head to understand what you need to change

Agile From the Top Down: Executives Practicing Agile

Jon Stahl delivered this session, and I wish I had been there for this one all the way through as his presentations are always entertaining and informative. His slides are available here.

From Agile 2011

• visualise your work  in progress (WIP) by putting every project in progress up on the wall, also visualise your demand

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

• model your application assets – you will be surprised what you will find – link them, then order them by business value

From Agile 2011

• create a radiator wall for each one of your assets – understand technical debt, print out each of your defects, be ambarrased!

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

• visualise your org chart – particularly where your skills are, then rank them by apprentice, journeyman, master – then you can score your aptitude

From Agile 2011

• get HR to create their own room to map the organisation and look for patterns – finding the truth isn’t simple but putting stuff on walls creates conversation
• create a tool wall – who cares what tool you use, as long as you are adding value
• get the practice vocabulary up on the wall – matched with a booklet with more detail
• when tracking practices move away from traffic lights and use smiley faces to track how people are feeling – don’t care about if they are doing stand ups but how are they working for them – good way to figure out where to send coaches, where the frowns are

From Agile 2011

• transparent leadership – post and show your people what roadblocks you are working on
• everybody wakes up everyday thinking they are doing the best thing they can – as a business the executives need to check each other to make sure they are working on the most important thing and allow each other to question

From Agile 2011

• make roadblocks visible – you will get more respect from you people – put one up for every person who has the title manager in your organization
• leadership team to do retrospectives every two weeks – take people out of their element, makes them more likely to talk
• continuous improvement – force it by shutting down email, block out meeting rooms
• you would save money on coaches if you got people to read books, free ice cream by reading a chapter in a room and talking about it in an hour
• pair management – pair on everything to get better, pair in public which will show developers pairing is ok
• change name of PMO to MSO (manifesto support office), make them in charge of ensuring the visual radiators are up to date
• dashboards are costly and evil – they are not the truth, data is mostly inaccurate
• speak in story cards – create a wall to get answers to things you want to know

Acceptance testing in the land of the startup

Joseph Wilk presented this session, his slides are available here.

From Agile 2011

• Relish – the only way the customer will read Cucumber tests
• two way mirrors – ensure the users are integrated into development and they can use the software, outside the building
• good coders find stuff hard – easy to Cucumber test the full stack but the build time blows, unit tests are hard but are fast, so limit the amount of cucumber tests and isolate them
• features rot if the Customer does not read them or not exposed via tools like Relish
• manual testers duplicate automated tests – expose features, pair, give Cucumber ownership to QA
• how to test lots of permutations – pairwise testing is OK, or just automate the happy path and one scenario and manual test the rest
• Crazy Egg – monitor what users are actually using
• use WIP to keep testing under control
• metrics – JUnit Max to predict probability of failure
• Limited Red – calculates the probability of Cucumber failure to improve the way we work – found features that never fail – just keep them in nightly build – means a long build usually fails very quickly
• use JMeter to check everything is up like a tracer bullet – eg. a row has appeared in a table
• got 8 hour build down to 20 minutes by distributing over 24 EC2 nodes – but think we were solving the wrong problem
• slice up the architecture and have thin tests to test them
• Spork – helps to speed up the start up time of an application – hard to know whether to reload and it adds a lot of overload at the protocol layer, so almost as efficient to run the tests
• people have core responsibilities but we all meld in our roles to be one team and deliver

I enjoyed this session, particularly as I read about Joseph’s company in Specification By Example. I am excited about the prospect of a tool such as Limited Red as well.

Telling Better Stories with User Story Mapping

Jeff Patton led this session to a packed room that included a live appearance from his children! His slides are available here.

From Agile 2011

• user stories are the simplest idea in the world, but like any simple idea they all get screwed up
• it’s easy to lose the plot when you have a lot of stories
• story mapping – tells the whole story of your product and still gets down to the iteration level
• you already know this stuff!
• “sharpie markers smell like ideas!”

• dump ideas onto stickies, on your own – they should almost always start with verbs – we need verbs to do things
• verbs are a user task – they are a small task

From Agile 2011

• now we want a flow of what we do from left to right – stack the duplicates and group the similarities – create a user workflow

From Agile 2011

• mark where the natural breaks are – this is called a user activity – a grouping of things that a user does
• next, identify where the pain points are
• because it is a map you can find stuff in it

From Agile 2011

• how to change the world – start with an idea which is product > feature > specification > requirement
• learnt that requirement means “shutup just build it”
• outcomes result in impact – agile is to maximize outcome and impact we get
• stories are a conversation about the future
• stories are 5c’s – card –> conversation –> confirmation –> construction –> consequences (when we realise our ability to predict the future sucked!)
• Kent Beck called them stories because they were meant to be heard
• need to figure out the who, what, why – this is the richness behind the story
• add a short title, add a description (story template), add notes, specifications and sketches and write acceptance criteria before writing software
• stories shrink in size and grow in detail as they travel through a pipeline
• start with capabilities or features (understand value) –> break to release size stories– > upcoming iteration stories (priority, UI design, business rules) –> break to iteration size stories (details user acceptance tests, small enough to fit in iteration) –> completed bits of software
• user story mapping – based on story mapping in films
• ultimately we have big things that break down to little things

Build story maps by:

1. talking to real users
2. brainstorm user tasks to help them organize
3. research and build from a narrative

• discussions with users in front of a map drive out conversations
• plan incremental releases as a team event – developers will actually read the plan
• start talking about adding stickies and notes, finally get a fist of five for confidence
• don’t prioritise user stories by ROI – target a user segment
• like ripping a $5 note, the small stories are not valuable (Jeff actually ripped a $5 note to illustrate the point)
• map at MVP (minimal valuable product) and MMF

From Agile 2011

From Agile 2011

Finally, Jeff has a User Story Mapping book in the pipeline which looks really interesting. I have had the pleasure of meeting Jeff a few times and always enjoy his presentation and learnings, and I am keen to give these learnings a go in my next storycard workshop.

Flirting With Your Customers

Jenni Jepsen delivered this presentation, the slides are available here.

From Agile 2011

We started with an exercise – 3 things that make a great project – trust, hard work, common goals, transparency, clear direction, grown ups, togetherness, support, communication, budget, right skills, creativity, quality, teamwork, fun, support

We then discussed 3 things that make a great romantic relationship – trust, communication, clear expectations, respect, common goals, honesty, integrity, similar values, enjoy spending time together, depth, support, compromise, patience, back rubs, teamwork, equality, chemistry, humour, passion, sacrifice

• there is a lot of commonality between projects and a relationship
• flirting is about making people feel valued
• need human touch to thrive, keeps immune systems strong
• people who are happy and feel valued at work results in increased profit
• introverts need to take care of themselves, take energy from within – they can flirt but it takes energy
• extroverts thrive in social situations – if your customer is an introvert they may not share your energy

The 8 steps are:

1. radar – makes you aware of the people around you, takes confidence
2. target – figuring out who you want to connect with in an organization, who has the real power
3. move in – show interest, practice your opening line – make eye contact, making the person feel like they have knowledge, makes them feel valuable, interactions become richer because of this
4. back off a little – the other person may not be ready for the interaction, give the other person space
5. open up – being honest and laying it out, you have now created a comfort zone, you are also making yourself vulnerable, there might be some back and forward bargaining here
6. dance – have a little fun, create conversation – lunch, cook together, virtual coffee over Skype, celebration to mark a milestone, dinner club
7. get real – go through a crisis together, if you have flirted and built a relationship
8. enjoy – enjoy the relationship

• have a list of questions to get over the anxiety
• all good steps for people you manage
• body language is 93% of communication

Conference Party

The conference party was entertaining as always. Here is me hanging out with Alan Bustamante (who I worked with on the reviews) and the gang from Seapine Software

From Agile 2011

The acrobatic team doing their trampoling indoors was certainly a highlight:

From Agile 2011

Podcast

Finally, I recorded a short audio podcast for The Agile Revolution wrapping up Day 4 of the conference.