
I’m speaking at Agile 2009
The presentation by myself and Paul King from Agile 2009 called “Agile Tool Hacking – Taking Your Agile Development Tools To The Next Level” is available on SlideShare.
I’m speaking at Agile 2009
The presentation by myself and Paul King from Agile 2009 called “Agile Tool Hacking – Taking Your Agile Development Tools To The Next Level” is available on SlideShare.
I’m speaking at Agile 2009
The presentation by Paul King and myself from Agile 2009 called “How To Make Your Testing More Groovy” is available on SlideShare.
The last main day of talks at Agile 2009, and once again lost the morning to preparation and presenting a talk with Paul King.
Here is an overview of the sessions I got to:
The session I presented with Paul King, we got close to a full house and the session feedback forms were overwhelmingly positive. The slides are available in a separate post.
A full house to this session run by Tsutomu Yasui gives some validation to the fact that Kanban is gaining traction with the agile community. All the details and materials for the game are available at http://www.yattom.jp/trac/public/wiki/ProjectGames/TheKanbanGameEn. I only sat in on the first half of the session so I could fit in some other last minute talks.
I had an aim to get to at least one talk by Jeff Patton (especially for bragging rights for one of my work colleagues, Teale Shapcott)! I actually got to have a brief conversation with Jeff later in the evening which was awesome.
Homonyms
Then:
The emerging best practices are:
Finally, most usability designers won’t go back after doing agile!
I was keen to go and see Scott Amber speak, you can view the session or view the data. According to Scott, this is what people are doing in practice and this talk is exploring some myths.
Majority of organisations doing agile?
Majority of teams doing agile?
Pretty much all development in agile?
Agile is just for small teams?
Does not apply to regulatory situations?
Agile and CMMI don’t work together?
Agile process empirical?
Agile teams doing greenfield development?
Becoming a Certified Scrum Master is a good idea (2 days)?
Most agile teams are co-located?
Agile teams don’t provide up front estimates?
Agile teams just start coding
Agile follows common development guidelines?
Rights and responsibilites are part of agile culture?
Agile test often and test early?
Agile don’t do up front requirements modelling?
Agile don’t do upfront architecture?
Agile write interim documentation?
Agile produce supporting documentation?
Agile works better than traditional?
Finally:
Jeff Frederick ran his Scrum Is Evil session that I had first seen at CITCON in Brisbane earlier in the year. It was interesting to see that the outcomes were exactly the same half way around the world!
It’s very hard to take notes in a banquet with the lights dimmed, but Jared M. Spool gave a very entertaining keynote on User Interface Engineering, including some iPod vs Zune bashing and an old Apple video on future design.
Here is another post I found from this session: http://www.agilitrix.com/2009/09/user-interface-engineering-agile-2009-banquet/
The night was finished off with a Chicago Blues band and some conversation late into the night at the hotel bar!
One of the problems of presenting a double session at Agile 2009 is that miss out on a bunch of the great talks that are going on at the conference at the same time. Added to that, the (very) last minute preparations that I was doing with Paul King meant that I only got to sit in on one session (apart from our own).
This was a good overview by John Smart of using Maven as a build tool as well as how you might use tools such as Cargo and Liquibase and scripting languages like Groovy to automate your deployment process. I was hoping John would have the silver bullet to linking the Jira release button to a deployment script, however it appears the only way of doing this still is via a plugin for Bamboo.
The session I presented with Paul King, we got a reasonable turnout for a technical double session and the session feedback forms were overwhelmingly positive. The slides are available in a separate post.
I had the pleasure of having dinner with Todd Green from Manning, Greg Smith (co-author of Becoming Agile) and Paul King (co-author of Groovy In Action). As the technical proof-reader for Becoming Agile and knowing Paul King, I also got an invite for traditional deep-dish Chicago pizza.
Afterwards, Paul and I treked up the “Magnificent Mile” and up 95 floors to the Signature Room in the John Hancock Center (Chicago’s fourth tallest building but best observation deck according to the locals). The views were amazing (the pictures don’t do justice to the city lights that carry on into the distance!)
Day 2 of Agile 2009, and Johanna Rothman welcomed everybody to the conference and advised that they had 1,350 participants this year from 38 countries. Furthermore, they had 1,300 submissions that they brought down to 300 presentations.
The sessions I attended on Day 2 were as follows:
Alistair Cockburn kicked off his keynote with live bagpipes, you can view the session or download the slides.
I had been recommended by numerous people to get along to this tutorial being run by Chet Hendrickson and Ron Jeffries (one of the original XP’ers and both authors of the purple Extreme Programming Installed) and I wasn’t disappointed.
The session ran sort of like this:
This was a workshop led by Steven “Doc” List from ThoughtWorks and involved some great playing cards that I am still hoping may get sent my way one day.
UPDATE 13/10/2009: About 12 hours after posting this, a deck of cards arrived in the post at work. Many thanks Steven and ThoughtWorks for keeping your promise and sending the cards through!
Patterns (these are behaviours not identities)
How to deal with these behaviours, do the facilitation four step
For more information:
Finally, from some of the questions at the end:
I also found the following blog post on this session: http://www.selfishprogramming.com/2009/08/31/agile-2009-facilitation-patterns-and-antipatterns/
This session was on ways to deal with distributed project teams and was delivered by Mark Rickmeier.
One problem on distributed projects – communication breakdown
Agile processes can solve these issues – distributed requires more effort but agile team and communication processes mitigate the risks
How to organise teams
Five p’s of communication
Tools
All tools improve communication
Distributed release planning – don’t do it distributed, try and get at least a subset of team together
Iteration planning – planning poker distributed? – planningpoker.com
Sign up for iteration as a team, use online tool like Mingle to update card statues prior to standup
Daily standup – local participant can see reactions of people and can see the card wall
Retrospective
Closing thoughts
More details can be found at offshore.thoughtworks.com
My original plan for Tuesday night was to attend that Chicago Groovy User Group with Paul King (but I mixed up the times and did not catch Paul in the corridors), so I decided to get along to the ThoughtWorks open office instead (at their offices on the 25th floor of the Aon Center, the third tallest skyscraper in Chicago).
Martin Fowler and Jim Highsmith both spoke, and the Agile PMI community was launched. I got to marvel at the original Cruise Control instance that was still running after all of these years and some great conversation was had with the rest of the Australian (and ex-patriot Australian) attendees.
Once again I was extremely lucky to get two talks accepted at Agile 2009 (with Paul King) and the support from Suncorp to send me along to speak. Whilst its a been quite a number of weeks since the conference, I wanted to ensure that I posted my notes and comments. This year, being my second attendance, I found the hallway discussions all the more valuable and had many awesome conversations with friends made last year as well as new friends just met. Added to this, Chicago exceeded my expectations as the host city.
Once again, the number of simultaneous sessions made the decisions extremely difficult on what to attend.
The sessions I attended on day 1 were as follows:
This session on the testing stage was delivered by Janet Gregory, one of the authors of Agile Testing. The slides are available on the Agile 2009 site.
Testers should be part of release planning and think about:
Iteration planning:
Need to acceptance test the feature, not just the story.
We then did a collaboration tools exercise, and some of the tools used by the audience were:
Waterfall test pyramid, upside down, very unstable – Functional Tests –> API Tests –> Unit Tests (heavy functional tests based on GUI, very few unit tests).
Automated test pyramid (Mike Cohn) – unit tests / component tests are the base layer, require testable code that we can hook into below the GUI at API layer, GUI tests are most brittle because UI changes so do as few of these as possible, right at the top you might need a handful of manual tests.
Agile testing quadrants change the way you think about testing – use to classify tests, what the purpose of the test is (why are we ariting these tests), tests will cross boundaries.
Agile testing quadrant – can be used as a collaboration tool (developers will understand how they can help), emphasizes the whole team approach (no “pass this to the QA team”, whole team is responsible for testing), use to defne doneness (use for planning, what needs to be done, has estimate allowed for the amount of testing we wish to complete).
Quadrant 1 – technology facing tests that support the team, TDD supports the design of the team, tester has feeling of comfort
Quadrant 2 – where the acceptances tests live, supporting the team in natural language, helping the team deliver better software, use paper prototypes to talk to customers rather than big GUI, acceptance test upfront helps define the story, use examples to elicit requirements (easiest way to get clarification from the customer, always ask “not sure what you mean” or “give me an example”, pair testing (ask for feedback as soon as possible)
Quadrant 3 – user acceptance testing, critiquing the product, getting the customer to look at the system
Quadrant 4 – non functional tests (should be part of every story (eg. is there a security or performance aspect), ility testing, security testing, recovery, data migration, infrastructure testing, do as much as possible upfront although sometimes you will need environments that will not be available to the end
Test plan matrix – big picture of testing against functions for release, usually on a big whiteboard, use colours (stickies) to show progress, benefit is in the planning in what we need to do testing wise but also appeases management because they like to see progress, gives idea of where you are going
Can use a lightweight plan, put risks on a white page, 35 of the 37 pages of the IEEE test plan are static, so put that information somewhere else
Test coverage – think about it so the team knows when the testing is done, burn down chart will be enough if you test story by story, when thinking risk ensure you include the customer (they may have different opinion of risk
Summary:
Janet also mentioned the following throughout the session:
I also stumbled across a related blog post on this session at: http://agile2009.blogspot.com/2009/08/agile-testing-quadrants.html
This session was delivered by Liz Sedley & Rachel Davies, authors of the new book Agile Coaching. The slides are available on the Agile 2009 site.
This was a hands-on workshop and involved some good discussions on how to deal with different coaching scnarios.
This session was delivered by the legendary Jim Highsmith. The slides are available on the Agile 2009 site.
The Fresher’s Fair at the Ice Breaker had a number of great groups including Kanban, Usability and CITCON. I stumbled across the following poster that was a long way from home…
I had the great pleasure to attend the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools (AAFTT) workshop on the Sunday before the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago, and share discussion with some of the best minds in the testing community from around the world.
The location was right across the road from the Willis Tower (better known by its previous name, the Sears Tower). Some of the notable attendees amongst many others included:
There were at least 4 tracks to choose from, these are the notes from the ones I participated in.
Small group discussion led by Jason Huggins about a different way of thinking about test artefacts (basically producing an iPhone commercial)
I came in mid-way through this session, but caught some of the tools being discussed at the end
UltiFit
Jason Huggins led this conversation which was more a roundtable debate than anything else. The group discussed how we can get tests running quicker and reduce feedback times considerably.
This discussion led to a couple of the quotes of the workshop from Jason Huggins:
This started as a discussion on testing led by Brandon Carlson…
…but ended up as a great discussion on agile approaches and rollout, discussing a number of war stories led by Dana Wells and Jason Montague from Wells Fargo
Some other miscellaenous observations from the workshop:
A number of posts about the workshop have been posted since including:
And you can view the photos that I took from the event at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33840476@N06/sets/72157622521200928/