Today at STPCon Chris led two interactive sessions, one on Most Effective Ways to Improve Software Quality, and another on the Makings of a Great QA Leader. Both sessions used the Group Wisdom Without Groupthink method to brainstorm and then rank ideas based on the collective experience of the participants.
Chris led three sessions at PCamp the day before we left for the Scrum Gatheirng: Agile 101, the ever-popular Agile Learning Games, and a new session with Ainsley Nies called "PM Principles, Values and Practices," a World Cafe session that delved into ways for PMs to apply the Agile Manifesto to their roles and areas of expertise.( I stayed home with a sore throat, bleh.)
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Yesterday Chris and Elisabeth Hendrickson led a day-long dress rehearsal for a class called Creating Agile Games for Coaches & Consultants. The idea for the course grew out of various experiences: Chris has led sessions on Agile learning games at several conferences, and they've always been hugely successful, and Elisabeth has taught learning games, and held "game days" for coaches at her Quality Tree Software offices in Pleasanton. She's also done a lot of work deconstructing games, and building a set of principles and processes for how to create or adapt them to target specific learning objectives, as well as amassing an amazing array of boards, markers, spinners, dice and the like.
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Craig Brown voiced a common concern project folks have in "A Downside of Agile Development?" on his Better Projects blog, writing about his fears for his company's proposed transition to Agile:
Chris and I are at Disney World for a few days of R&R after hosting the Open Space at the Orlando Scrum Gathering, but the park will have to be pretty supercalifragilistic to compare to the conference, which was wonderful. So much engagement–250 people there, and yet it felt intimate. I left feeling I had got to know more people than I'd normally meet in a year. Check out the wiki to get to know some of them yourself.
Here, just to incite envy among the far flung, is a list of all the sessions posted on the Open Space market wall in Orlando. Disclaimer: These were handwritten, and often hard to decipher, so some titles and names are my best guess at spelling, and some sessions may have been added or changed after I took my notes. Feel free to amend in the comments if you know better!
… because Chris is leading a day-long public workshop on Agile Project Management on March 23rd, at the SD Forum offices in San Jose.
Yesterday I signed on to Jurgen Appelo's Complex Manifesto for Software Development, a document whose first principle is "Every problem has multiple solutions" and whose last principle is "It is impossible to predict the best solution." The Complexity Manifesto posits that the path to agility lies not in the observance of a set of reductive, fundamentalist "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" commandments, but in the cultivation of mastery and discipline in all their complex glory.
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In this week's InfoQ article, Chris covers the debate over high tech vs.low tech toolsets (what Alistair Cockburn refers to as information radiators) for managing agile projects: eg, which is the lesser evil, killing a tree and taping its carcass to the wall one notecard at a time, or clicking through an annoying heirarchical menu every time you want to see your data?
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Last year Chris spent more time on tour than Madonna, logging appearances at no fewer than eleven software conferences. To keep track of all this activity and help us plan for 2009, I've been building out a Google calendar listing all of the upcoming software conferences nationwide (and a few beyond) that are most relevant to agile practitioners. It's up to date through June as of now. We've had a few requests to share this data, so here it is on its own page. Enjoy!