By: Chris Sims

A couple of centuries ago, American independence was a movement. The idea caught on, and people were willing to make real sacrifices, because they believed in the movement. They believed that life would be better if the movement succeeded.

Do you believe that agile practices, such as Scrum, can make life at your company better? You’ll need to start a movement. Here’s a pattern: Attract a ‘first follower’ and treat them as an equal. Now, work together to build support. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about the movement. Good luck!

Thanks to my friend David Chilcott for sending the video link to the BayAPLN email list.

BTW: This will be one of the last posts on this blog, as we have moved to a new address: http://www.agilelearninglabs.com/blog/

Cheers,

Chris

By Hillary Johnson

Chris will be leading off the Agile Manager's Support Group in San Mateo with a presentation on the theme, "Help! Our user stories are too big!" As usual, there will be a raffle and free pizza, and as a special bonus, you'll get to take home a copy of our Agile Dictionary sampler, a booklet containing highlights from the new website.

Meanwhile, Steve Bockman and Rob Myers will be presenting on the theme, "Making Pair Programming and TDD Fun and Effective" at the San Francisco .NET Developers User Group's monthly meetup, which will be held at Microsoft's Market Street offices.

Which one are you going to? Life's all about making tough choices, isn't it?

By Hillary Johnson

Chris will be giving a brief, experiential introduction to Agile on the morning of July 27, sponsored by SD Forum. For anyone who just wonders what the "fuss" is all about, this is a way to get a quick dose--not of lore and theory, but of what it might actually be like to live in an Agile world. One thing is for certain: there is no PowerPoint in this utopia. Also, if you're hesitating over whether or not to take the plunge and get your CSM, this is a good way to test drive Chris' material and teaching methods. This workshop will set you back a mere $35--$25 if you're an SD Forum member, and why wouldn't you be?

By Hillary Johnson

Writing a dictionary turns out to be a fair piece of work. Who knew? We have had a soft launch this week, with Chris Sims handed out a hundred copies of a "sampler edition" at Agile Roots. And The Agile Dictionary now has a live website, with a handful of definitions, and counting. It is ready for your perusal and commentary at www.agiledictionary.com, where you can even sign up to get the Word of the Week delivered to your inbox. Don't think of it as spam, think of it as an entertaining diversion, something fun to read while you avoid answering all those other supposedly urgent emails.

Without further ado, here is an entry from the Dictionary:

An umbrella term for iterative, incremental software development methodologies. Agile methodologies include Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Crystal, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Lean, and Feature-Driven Development (FDD). Agile methodologies arose in opposition to the traditional, phase-driven “Waterfall” development method, which emphasizes top-down project management, “big design up front,” silos for architecture and design, coding, and testing, and extensive documentation. Agile methodologies share an emphasis on small teams delivering small increments of working software with great frequency while working in close collaboration with the customer and adapting to changing requirements.

The term “Agile” was first used by a group of Software pundits who gathered at a ski lodge in Snowbird, Utah for the express purpose of naming and defining the greater movement in which they deemed themselves to all be participants. The original invitation to Snowbird went out to those interested in “lightweight” development frameworks. The attendees agreed that they didn’t like the negative connotations of that term, and agreed to adopt the term “Agile.”

By Hillary Johnson

If you're like us, you've dialed-back your conference-going in the past couple of years, but one event that's not to be missed is the Agile Roots Conference in Salt Lake City. Both Chris and Steve will be presenting, and we'll be handing out the very first "samplers" from our forthcoming Agile Dictionary project. Why do we love Agile Roots? Because it takes place in Salt Lake City, near the birthplace of the Agile Manifesto, and opens with a keynote address by Jeff Patton titled Nobody Wants Your Stupid Process. See, you want to go now, don't you?

Steve will be presenting one of Agile Learning Labs' greatest hits, a workshop he designed called Flying Through Bottlenecks. Chris will be doing The Great Agile Requirements Showdown, which could just as easily be called Showdown at the Agile Corral. Both workshops are participatory, and a lot of fun.

On the way to Agile Roots, Chris will be making a whistle-stop at the Better Software Conference in Las Vegas, where on Thursday, June 10th he'll do a little number he picked up from Steve, Eliminating Process Bottlenecks: The Theory of Constraints. I think I like Steve's workshop title a bit better, even though it's less explanatory; who doesn't want to learn to fly?)

Somewhere between the two conferences, Chris is going to manage to stop by Los Angeles to attend my son's high school graduation. What a whirlwind. Good thing he's so Agile....

This is a sneak preview of an entry from Agile Learning Labs' newest publishing project, The Agile Dictionary.  Our mission: to craft succinct, state-of-practice definitions for common Agile terms, complete with origins and links to the most authoritative primary sources we can find for further information. We plan to beta test the definitions here on our blog, prior to publishing The Agile Dictionary 1.0 in print and online.

Many thanks to volunteers Angeline Tan and Tami Blake for their hard work as contributing editors, and to Jeff McKenna, who has bravely volunteered to serve as our first editorial advisor.

An Agile software development methodology that emphasizes customer involvement, transparency, testing and frequent delivery of working software.

The Extreme Programming canon includes a Customer Bill of Rights and a Developer Bill of Rights, and lists its core values as communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and respect. XP is a developer-centric methodology, and unlike Scrum, it prescribes specific coding practices like Pair Programming, in which two developers work side by side at a single machine, automated unit testing, and frequent integration. Another key practice in XP is refactoring, or the continual improvement of design over many iterations.

The basic advantage of XP is that the whole process is visible and accountable. The developers will make concrete commitments about what they will accomplish, show concrete progress in the form of deployable software, and when a milestone is reached they will describe exactly what they did and how and why that differed from the plan. This allows business-oriented people to make their own business commitments with confidence, to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, and eliminate dead-ends quickly and cheaply. -- KentBeck

In 1996, Chrystler’s visionary CIO, Sue Unger, gave Kent Beck free reign to form a team to tackle the Chrystler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3), a large scale software project, using a handful of cutting edge methodologies around Object Oriented Programming and Pattern Languages that he, Ward Cunningham and others had been experimenting with as part of the nonprofit geek consortium, Hillside Group. Beck decided to seize the opportunity to “turn up the knobs” on the project. He brought in his colleagues Ron Jeffries and Martin Fowler, and the project was developed in SmallTalk, an early object oriented programming (OOP) language.

ExtremeProgramming.org

http://www.extremeprogramming.org

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Explained-Embrace-Change/dp/0201616416

Extreme Programming Installed by Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, and Chet Hendrickson

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201708426/armatiesA

Extreme Programming Pocket Guide

http://oreilly.com/catalog/extprogpg//

C2.com wiki page on Extreme Programming

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExtremeProgramming

C2.com wiki page on XP Roots

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?XpRoots

Have a correction, opinion, or idea? Please do use the comments here to weigh in!

By Hillary Johnson

I'm just starting to play around with a really cool, freshly launched product called Edistorm, an online app that features draggable stickies and dot voting. It's a bit strangely positioned, as a consumer not a business product--the example in the tutorial is about cake baking--but beneath this surface is what looks like an extremely useful tool for distributed Agile teams who find themselves longing for the chaotic simplicity a sticky wall.

Stickies and dot voting are two of of our main tools here at Agile Learning Labs. Every free wall is a colorful mosaic, and I suspect we are putting at least one Post-It Note heir through college. Every retrospective (and we have a lot of 'em) ends in some form of dot voting, to narrow down our action items.

Why online?

Online stickies would in theory allow distributed teams to collaborating using the same format tools we prefer for co-located teams. The question then becomes, what makes real sticky notes so great, and do these benefits actually transfer to an online environment?

Big and visible

One benefit is that a wall of stickies serves as an information radiator. By virtue of being on a wall, they are always visible to the team--always on the fringes of  consciousness, accessible at a glance, without booting up or drilling through a menu. This benefit is lost by putting stickies online.

What's the alternative? Chris, Steve and I hold a remote stand-up every morning, looping Steve in via Skype video. We can just make out Steve's task board in the background, and he can just make out ours. It turns out not to matter too much that we can't read each other's stickies. We watch each other move through the task board, discussing each stickie as we move it from doing to done, or from the backlog to doing. We are happy with this set-up, and wouldn't switch to an online wall, as the benefit of having the information radiator outweighs the issue of legibility by a longshot. 

But that is a taskboard. I can see other situations in which Edistorm could be immensely useful for short-term uses, such as a distributed team retrospective, or brainstorming a small project, where you don't really plan to leave the wall up as a radiator anyway. And you could get creative about sharing, by projecting them on a conference room wall or displaying them on a large monitor in each location.

It's Simple

One of our mantras at Agile Learning Labs is "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" And about 50% of the time, the answer is "sticky notes."

Write a sticky. Slap it on the wall. Move it around. Crumple it up and throw it away. That's pretty much all a sticky note can do. It is not programmable. And it is blissfully immune to feature creep.

Edistorm is simple now, but I'm not yet convinced that's by design. Right out of the gate there is a big red flag: it has already included a totally unnecessary feature, a "bot" that makes new "suggestions" based on your current set of stickies. The bot in the cake baking example in the tutorial creates stickies with words like "wedding" and "food" on them. You can turn the idiotic bot off, but my tender young mind should never have been exposed to the existence of such a thing. How this could ever be anything but distracting and annoying mystifies me, and it tells me the company is in danger of loading its product up with bells and whistles that totally defeat the purpose of using stickies--i.e., to keep it simple.

That said, bot aside, the product really does work like a wall of stickies. It's simple, intuitive, and it just works. It is the dot voting equivalent of my favorite online task board, scrumy.com, which has kept itself ruthlessly simple in design.

If you want to see Edistorm in action, you can watch a nice, to-the-point tutorial, and if you sign up for a free trial, you can create a wall of your own, or visit a stickie wall the company has started where users can add to, or vote on, suggestions for improvements or new features.  Several bumptious lunatics have suggested things like a chat window, ven diagrams and Facebook integration. The only feature I voted for was to make the wall itself draggable, and to create an API--my thinking being that an API would encourage people who want to cruft the product up to do so on their own.

Speaking as someone who uses stickies and dot voting every single day, my advice to Edistorm would be to resist adding any feature that isn't also a feature of a real sticky wall. No chat windows, email, spreadsheet imports, etc. Let people who want that stuff use traditional project management software like Microsoft Project. Give me a virtual version of the real thing, and let me figure out how to use it, and what to use it for.

By: Chris Sims

You could do it the Dilbert way...

...or you could take our Certified Scrum Product Owner Workshop this weekend and learn some better ways!

Cheers,

Chris

By: Chris Sims

Oh, there are still seats available in our Certified Scrum Product Owner workshop. No one under 6 years of age admitted.

Cheers,

Chris

By Chris Sims

My friend, Llewellyn Falco, recently shared this screen-cast of himself doing a code kata.  I like the way he approaches the problem, and I think it's a nice demonstration of test driven development (and/or behavior driven development). 

Cheers,

Chris

BTW: There are still seats available in this weekend's experiential Certified ScrumMaster workshop.

By Chris Sims

I just noticed that XKCD, my favorite geeky web comic, has a cool unix-like shell interface available!

In other news, there are seats available for this month's Agile Learning Labs Weekend Certified ScrumMaster workshop, and Weekend Certified Scrum Product Owner workshop.  Get 'em while they are hot!

Cheers,

Chris