The Agile community recently lost its friend and one of its most inspirational members in David Hussman. Craig and Tony were privileged to speak to him in one of his last interviews at YOW! Conference in Brisbane.
Tony, Craig and Renee are at Agile Australia and catch up with Steve Krug and talk usability and along the way try to figure out whether Tony is lean, agile or just old…
Typically most organisations have separated development and design teams which results in a very linear process
Need simple design documentation as a “single source of truth” because you shouldn’t need to specify styles more than once and it helps reduce effort and obtain a consistent design
Use tools such as PaintCode to create a colour palette which serves as documentation as well as a static analysis test
Need leadership to ensure there is an agreed approach, set the standards and create discipline
When building features need to decide when to leave work that is consistent across features, in relation to design, this should be…
The second keynote was supposed to be Mark “Bomber” Thompson from the Essendon Football Club but he was an unexplained no show. After an impromptu thankyou speech from me and breaking the conference for an early break, James Hird arrived to substitute and did an impromptu talk. As a result of the scheduling changes, I unfortunately did not get to see much of either session.
failed, needed twice as many people after implementation
ran net promoter scores internally, -40!
attempted Agile customer management – planning meetings took 3 hours, attendance dropped, SAP team became prioritisers
NPS dropped to about -35
changed team structure and in-sourced, positive NPS
got agile working – 4 week sprint, 40 minunte presentation, stakeholders turn up because if you are not there you don’t get prioritised
developed a prioritisation matrix – business value versus effort, colour coded cards for skillset, sets order for prioritisation
pre work is required for the meeting – know how many points of effort for every available person
prioritisation board – built the backlog as part of the session
no spreadsheets!
The Trouble With Time Machine
I was MC for this session delivered by Matthew Hodgson from Zen Ex Machina. He gets extra marks for working Doctor Who and bow tie references into the talk. His slides are available here.
time machine pattern – work an iteration or more ahead of the development team
UX is primarily about design, we are in two different worlds
embed the time machine pattern within Scrum
personas – focus on the pragmatic face of our users (David Hussman) – synthesise what we understand at the moment
added to GWT… Given I am a role AND I VALUE, When… Then…
grooming is the forgotten ceremony
involved the users in planning poker – got clear perspective in the context of their environment]
demo became a cognitive walk through
Emerging Paradigms in Software Testing
I was MC for this session for Kristan Vingrys from ThoughtWorks. I have known Kristan for a number of years, and I resonate very closely with his views on testing and testers. His slides are available here.
ATDD is a good way to break down the barriers between developers and testers
need to change focus to preventing defects rather than finding defects – measure yourself that more defects is bad
fast feedback – embrace continuous integration, automation and the test pyramid
involve everyone – crowd source your problems, tests are an asset, version control your test cases
change focus from how I prevent this going into production onto how I get this into production
build pipeline- stage build to run different tests in different stages in the pipeline
tester needs to inform the team of quality, not be responsible for quality
target testing to things that are changing, not just scatter gun
it’s about the principles, not the practices
test code is code – treat it like any other code
it’s important to know what you are not covering, more than what we are covering (Model Based Testing)
Design Eye For A Dev Guy
I was MC for this session delivered by Julian Boot from Majitek. This was one of the highlight sessions that I attended at the conference and as I remarked when thanking Julian, it reaffirmed how much I don’t know about good design. His slides are available here.
you gotta love it, you gotta be able to do it and it needs to deliver a bag load of cash
people now expect a fit and finish, design is now expected
people over process, not everyone is a good designer so let people play to their strengths as weaknesses get in the way of excellence – need to understand it though
design is related to visual processing – what we see is what we design, design can be taught
highlight individual items – contrast, colour, shape, white space, underlining
focus on data over labels – make the data bigger, keep your headings close to your data so you don’t get lost
hierarchy of actions, but use them properly
colour – use a designer, but if not use 3 colours in one shade and two others (using three grey is the best pro tip and two others)
let design be your brand, don’t overuse the brand
Agile Executive: The Naked Truth!
I was MC for this session led by Kelly Waters from ThoughtWorks and author of the All About Agile blog. I unfortunately did not get to see much of this presentation, the slides for which are available here.
I was MC for this session delivered by Tony Young from Integrated Research. This session was designated as “Expert” but there is nothing in this that I could see that made it that level. His slides are available here.
teams find it hard to focus at 7-8 people and they saw parallel development, sweet spot was 5+/- 1
changed because competitors moving faster and customers questioned our quality
used agile guidelines, not rules – had must dos and bendys
product team deliver using Scrum and give to a QA team that uses Kanban !
the peer pressure to try is key
use Lego board for backlog to see resource impacts
Other Stuff
One of my colleagues who presented a talk on day 2 was Colin McCririck (who is the Executive Manager of a team I coached for some time) and he spoke on Leadership Secrets for Agile Adoption).
The Agile community recently lost its friend and one of its most inspirational members in David Hussman. Craig and Tony were privileged to speak to him in one of his last interviews at YOW! Conference in Brisbane.
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