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!
I worked for a company that deployed their server software every day, sometimes more often than that. Over time, the system got more complicated and more prone to break when changed. The decision was made to only deploy twice a week. The reasoning was that this would give us more time to test the new build. Now we had a new problem: when we found bugs during testing it could be difficult to track down which of the many changes in the new build caused the problem. Worse yet, even when we could quickly find and fix the trouble, we had to do a whole new build and start the testing process over again.
… 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.
Read the full article…
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?
Read the full article…
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!
If you want to hear Chris explain agile in layman's terms, have a listen to this episode of the Cranky Middle Manger Show, where Chris is the featured guest. The show is hosted by our friend, Wayne Turmel, who is jovially cranky in a way that only a stand-up comic-turned-management trainer can be.
Read the full article…
This week Chris wrote his Monday morning InfoQ Article on Scrum Club, which organizes software developers to train in scrum practices (which can be applied to their Certified Scrum Practitioner requirements) by working on projects for charity. Their promo video looks eerily like something written by Chuck Palahniuk and directed by David Fincher. To call it irreverent is a drastic understatement:
I read Jurgen Appelo on The Decline and Fall of Agilists this morning, in which he calls out those who insist on defining agile as a set of static procedures: "According to these agilists, being agile is not about being adaptable and doing whatever it takes to make your project a long-lasting success. These days, agilists simply claim that agile is about following practices X, Y and Z." On the contrary, he says, “Agility is about moving software projects to the area of complexity, right between order and chaos.”
Read the full article…