Kane Mar

Last night, as part of our regular Seattle Scrum meeting, I presented a half hour introduction to Agile Engineering practices. I talked about the four big practices: Continuous Integration, Test Driven Development, Refactoring and Pair programming. It’s just a gentle overview that’s intended to introduce some of the ideas and concepts, and to provide a starting point from which to learn more.

I’ve posted the presentation on the Seattle Scrum website, and you can also download it here.

Update: Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of two other descriptions of Affinity Estimating. Jukka Lindström posted his experiences on ScrumDevelopment, and Chris Sterling has written a great Step-by-step description.

Update: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

The last session that I’d like to report on is Lowell’s “Affinity Estimating.” Affinity Estimating is a technique many teams use to quickly and easily estimate (in Story Points) a large number of user stories. This is a great technique if you’re just starting a project and have a backlog that hasn’t been estimated yet.
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Update: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

This is a continuation of my report from the Trainers gathering. In part 1 I gave an overview of some of the topics discussed and in part 2 I presented Boris’ Ball Point game. In this post I’d like to discuss anther exercise that was presented by Jens Østergaard . His exercise is designed to demonstrate the difficulties encountered when trying to interpret a written specification.

In this team-based exercise, each team is divided into “Developers” and “Spec-writers.” The “Developers” are separated from the “Spec-writers” and only allowed to communicate using written specifications. “Spec-writers” are then presented with a diagram that they need to communicate to the “Developers,” who, in turn, must interpret the written specifications and reproduce the diagram. The exercise is run twice with two different diagrams and a retrospective is held at the end of each run.
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Update: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

In part 1 of my report on the Trainers Gathering I gave an gave a summary of the events that occurred. In this post I’d like to discuss one of the exercises that was discussed. Boris‘ Ball Point game is a fun and exciting way to explore process flow. The rules are quite simple and the more people you have, the more exiting it can be. We played with about 25 people, but it would be an excellent game for large groups up to approximately 50 people.
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Update: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

About two weeks ago, a Scrum Trainers’ Gathering was held in Boston. About 25 Certified Scrum Trainers (CSTs) from all over the world gathered for a great two-day event, discussing training exercises, different approaches to training, and other related issues. There were a number of sessions that I found to be of particular interest and in the next few weeks I will write about three of these sessions including Boris’ Ball Point Game (part 2), Jens’ Written Specification exercise (part 3), and Lowell’s Affinity Estimating (part 4).
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Team self-organization is one of the key principles [1] of Scrum and its introduction to an organization raises a number of interesting questions around decisions and decision making. Specifically, the introduction of Scrum leads to consensus-based decisions by the team. I believe that the consensus model of decision is superior the an authoritarian model and results in superior decisions and better information.
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Is your team having difficulty forecasting when a project will be completed? Do you have a large number of un-estimated Stories in your product backlog? Are your planning meetings several days long and full of confrontation? If so, it could be that you’re forgetting to “groom” your product backlog.
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Back in July, 2007 Pete Behrens announced the first draft of a Certified Scrum Coaching (CSC) program. In the words of the original post:

This program is designed to complement the current Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) education-based programs, the Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP) direct experience-based program and the Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) Program.

To be honest, the draft proposal had some ideas that would have been very difficult to implement, and although I was skeptical at first, the more I read the draft proposal the more convinced I became of the benefits of a CSC programme. So, I thought about it some more and provided some feedback on the draft proposal.
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I’m pleased to announce the formation of the Seattle area Scrum users group. I’ve been working on this for a while now, and it’s finally coming together. All the details are at the groups website: http://SeattleScrum.org

I’m especially excited to announce that our first speaker will be Damian Evans, VP for Product Development at Qpass, who will be talking about “Scrum challenges from a departmental/organizational perspective“. It’s not often that someone in Damian’s position talks about their organizations Scrum adoption and this is a unique opportunity to hear about his experiences.

If you’re reading this and you’re in the Seattle area, we’d love to see you at our very first meeting on 9th August, 2007 at Qpass’ Seattle headquarters.

Munich proved to be one of the friendliest places I’ve been to. On two separate occasions someone went out of their way to help to provide directions; there was a kindly old gentleman that traveled several train stops to ensure we were getting on the right train; and the Grandmother that continued with the conversation for 10 minutes even though the only reply she got were a few smiles and laughs.

While I was there I learnt a lot about not only Munich but also Istanbul:

• Munich is the capital city of Bavaria which considers itself quite distinct from the rest of Germany. Bavarians are proud of their unique and distinct heritage.
• TÜV is a independent technical laboratory that certifies technical standards in and around Germany.
• Istanbul is divided lies between both Europe and Asia and the two sides of the city are connected by a bridge. One side of the bridge is in Asia, and the other is in Europe.
• The city is also growing very rapidly. There has been an influx of workers from Eastern Turkey and as a result the population has been growing quickly.
• As a consequence it’s not uncommon to spent 2-3 hours commuting to work … hmm, sounds even worse than commuting in Seattle!
• “Es kommt darauft en” means “It depends” in German.

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I’ve always thought of it as a small central European country … which it is, but this has not always been the case. It was once the heart of one of the most powerful (if not the most powerful) empires in Europe and today Vienna contains many of the majestic artifacts and buildings from that time. Here are a few things that I didn’t know about Austria:

• Maria Antonette who, when told that the French people couldn’t afford bread replied “Let them eat cake”, was an Austrian princess
• Her sister, Marie Louise was Napoleons second wife
• The Hapsburg empire included Austria, Hungary and the Czech lands, and
• “To zalezi” means “It depends” in Czech.

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Copenhagen is a nice small city with a great deal of history, many beautify buildings and friendly, funny, crazy people! I’d been to Copenhagen many, many years ago, but I’m always looking for new and interesting facts. Here are some things I never knew about Denmark:

• There is a bridge that links Copenhagen to Sweden, and it’s not uncommon to live in Sweden but work in Copenhagen. Even the train network is integrated with daily commuter trains going between Sweden and Denmark.
• House prices and cars are cheaper in Sweden than in Copenhagen.
• There are few big companies in Denmark. Most Danish companies are small (less than 50 people) to medium (less than 500 people) … a great environment in which to introduce Agile software development!
• “Det kommer an pa” means “It depends” in Danish.

One of the participants of the CSM course, Harald Walker, is a keen contributor to Flickr.com. He took some really, really great photo’s of the event and posted them here. I don’t know what he did to his photos, but they look far, far superior to the phone-cam shots that I took!!
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Stockholm is a truly beautify city with graceful old buildings looking out over the water and an picturesque old city center. The Swedish are open, friendly and incredibly polite! While I was training there they gave me an overview of their culture and language. Here are a few things I never knew about Sweden:

• Santa Claus comes from Sweden!
• “Det beror på” means “It Depends” in Swedish!
• The Swedish have a concept of moderation and they have a special word for it … “Lagom”. It comes from old Viking when a team of Vikings would share a jar of beer. Each Viking would take a drink from the jar but had to show moderation … not too much and not too little. I can only image what would happen if there wasn’t enough for the last Viking!!

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The CSM training course in Helsinki went exceptionally well. Everyone made me very welcome and there were some great conversations about what happens when you don’t focus on delivering high quality software.

We also had some good conversations over lunch about Finland and Finnish culture. Here are a few things that I never knew:

• Finnish workers are the most productive in the world
• Santa Claus comes from Finland
• There is an order to eating at a smörgåsbord, and
• It is polite Finnish etiquette to SMS someone before calling them … even if it’s just to say “Can I call you?”

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Personal Comment: I started this article about 5 months ago and it’s just been sitting in my queue. I’ve been undecided about publishing because I’m not especially fond of it. But rather than let the bits rot, I thought I’d share it in the hope that someone will get some benefit out of it. If you find this interesting or helpful please leave a comment. Thanks.

The concept of “dog fooding” your own products has been around for a long time, and has been made famous my Microsoft who are rumoured to practice “dog fooding” their products as a regular part of their culture. What is dog-fooding?
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When I started adding links to great Agile videos ([1], [2] and [3]) I thought that it would just be a single occurrence, but I keep finding videos that are informative, educational and inspiring. So, while the videos keep coming I’ll keep referring to them. The last few that I posted were very educational. They’re insightful and very interesting, but not the most passionate.
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The Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course that I run involves a simulation of a Scrum team. It has changed over time so where I originally played the XP game [1], I’m now doing a fully Scrum immersion that involves every part of the Scrum process. During the immersion I ask the team to create a product. Typically, this is one of several different types of brochure, but if the team wants a more difficult exercise they may choose to create a board game.

Apart from advice on the Scrum process, the team need to determine all other aspects of the game. They need to determine the the goal of the game, rules, flow, layout, game pieces and even how to win … and they need to do this in about 1 hour 30 minutes. That’s a lot of work in a very short period of time! The results are often unpolished but contain all the elements necessary for a complete game.

My intention is to share some of the creative, funny and ingenious ideas that teams come up with. To start this off, here’s a board game from my last public training in Bellevue.
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This article is about my further understanding about Agile software development. As I my understanding of Agile software development has increased, so has the conflict between my established ideas and what I now see happening in the real world. The latest casualty was my belief that having repeated code or components is bad.

I was greatly influenced by Bertrand Meyer’s [1] book Object-Oriented Software Construction [2] where he presented the case of reusable software components. It could be argued that reusable components are with us now in the form of large frameworks, but my understanding of his vision (reuse of fine grain components) never fully came to pass.

The original impetus for this article was a conversation that I had with Ken Everett. He described the logging scenario that I use as the example for this story. His argument was that for a large team using more than one logging framework was not a bad thing provided that the code quality was good and that it met the business functionality. I absolutely agree. I also wondered, when was the latest responsible date at which point a decision needed to be made?
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It’s been a busy few months with clients, training and the occasional blog posting. To add to all this activity, I’ve agree to do a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) training tour of Europe. This is going to be exciting because I haven’t been to Europe for over 10 years. It’ll be an interesting contrast after having spent the last 7 years in the US.

I hope to have an opportunity to blog-on-the-road, and will (hopefully) include photos of some of the training courses. Here’s my training schedule:

New York - 7th & 8th March, 2007
Helsinki - 14th & 15th March, 2007
Stockholm - 21st & 22nd March, 2007
Oslo - 28th & 29th March, 2007
Copenhagen - 4th & 5th April, 2007
Vienna - 11th & 12th April, 2007
Munich - 18th & 19th April, 2007
Paris - 2nd & 3rd May, 2007
London - 9th & 10th May, 2007
Edinburgh - 17th & 18th May, 2007

Details on these courses can be found here. Alternatively, if you’re reading this and would like to meet up at any of these locations, I’d love to hear from you. If you leave a comment [to this post], I’ll reply as soon as I can.

Wishing you a Happy New Year!
Kane.

Here’s another excellent Google TechTalk. This one is given by Mary Poppendieck, author of “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers” and “Implementing Lean Software Development“.

The talk is called “Competing on the basis of speed” and discuss how speed can create a huge competitive advantage. The talk is very Lean focused (as you would expect) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Here’s the link:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5105910452864283694