I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
Blogosphere impressions from QCon was collected in this InfoQ article. I was quoted no less than four times, although my name was misspelled twice. 
I also managed to get caught on some images. Here I am (right) with my collegues, looking very ..ehm.. interested.
/Jens
Finally I got around to post my experiences from the last conference day. Actually thanks to Floyd Marinescu, co-organizer of QCon, who just asked if I didn’t attend the last day.
This posting is a slightly edited answer to his comment.
I didn’t have as high expectations for the last day, but I was pleasently surprised about some of the sessions, especially Dave Thomas did an amazing performance and also Joseph Pelrine had some really interesting stuff.
It was also my first Open Space experience. I was mostly observing
this time, but I will definitely contribute more the next time I get
the opportunity.
Unfortunately I missed Diana Larsens session, because I had to catch a
flight, but I look forward to seeing her on the Öresund Agile 2007
conference in Copenhagen 12-14 june, an arrangement by Softhouse. Look
it up!
All in all it was a great arrangement and I returned with loads of
inspiration and motivation that will keep me going for a long time.
Thanks!
The agile track on the second day of QCon was the main reason for my London visit. However I was a little bit disappointed. The speeches were ok, but the content was in many cases too basic and without any new ideas or experiences.
One exception was the on stage “battle” between Kevlin Henney and Jim Coplien on the subject Agile Architecture is not Fragile Architecture. The two had been seen arguing earlier in the conference, and even if the heat didn’t build up to the expected levels the format was interesting and the performance was really great. They both firmly believed that architecture was too important to be put off by a “we’re agile and architecture is not, so we don’t do it”. Again TDD was under Jim’s cross-fire with questions like “How do you know which unit test to write if you didn’t design any architecture?”, “If we don’t have a short design phase upfront, where does the architecture come from?”, “What design artifacts do TDD create?”. Interesting points.
Of course master motivator Jeff Sutherland attracted a large crowd when talking about Lessons learned at Google. His speeches almost resembles revivalist meetings that you cannot avoid being sucked into. His performance is really great and afterwards you get the feeling that Scrum can be used to run countries and solve world poverty. Actually you probably could run a country successfully using Scrum. It require a lot of scrum of scrums though.
I have now been on the first QCon conference in history. The format felt a lot like JAOO, which was good. There were nothing in particular that caught my interest on the first day, I mostly stayed on the architecture track and listened to Kevlin Henney and Martin Fowler, who really are excellent speakers.
However I also listened to Jim Coplien’s From Design Practice to Code, and he provoked quite a few when he challenged some of the agile practices. Especially Test Driven Development (TDD) was under his attack. His point was that if development is test driven you should start by defining acceptance tests, naturally. But his question was how do you go from acceptance tests to unit tests without doing design. I definitely see his point, that you in many cases are forced to do a short design phase upfront before doing TDD. His advice was to skip TDD altogether, but I think TDD can be a great tool, especially for systems with well known architectural patterns and in the hands of experienced programmers.
I also met Henrik Kniberg, the author of the popular Scrum and XP from the Trenches. It was interesting to hear that he wrote all of his great paper during one weekend as a documentation of the experiences from his last project, without the intention of publishing it. When he asked his collegues what to do with it, the said “publish it on the web”, and the rest is history as they say. If he would have known the impact of his writings he would probably not have written it in that way, and then it might not have reached the same popularity.
Mike Griffiths has in his blog, Leading Answers, written the article Introducing Agile Methods: Mistakes to Avoid – Part 1. The first in a series of three articles describing how to introduce agile methods into organizations (and how not to). Well worth reading!
It all comes down to handling changes. It basically takes three things to implement a change, and all three are needed:
It’s like starting a fire, where you also need all three of oxygen, heat and fuel.
Agile methods emphasize realtime communication over written documentation and it is a common agile practice to co-locate development teams as well as business people. In reality however this is not always practically possible.
Sometimes projects are forced to be distributed between multiple locations for different reasons. Sometimes it is the business representatives that cannot be co-located, sometimes individual team members and sometimes whole projects are being distributed between several locations. The question is if we can still be agile?
I believe we can. Although agile methods encourage a strong focus on people, communication and co-location, being agile is a state of mind. Remote teams present a challenge, no doubt. It will take some effort and it will not happen by itself. The obvious challenges are face to face communication, retaining the visibility of the task board, daily stand up meetings, etc. Having teams spread over several time-zones even further complicate things. Worst case half the team is sleeping while the rest is working.
Even though nothing beats face to face communication, I think a lot of the communication issues can be handled with collaboration tools like Skype or NetMeeting which offers VoIP, conference calls, chat and even a common drawing pad. With a webcamera you are even able to see the person you are talking to. Schedule a slot for a daily team meeting. If it is difficult to find a common slot due to divergent timezones, at least try a weekly meeting. Also don’t forget to budget for travels, because like I said nothing beats face to face communication, at least once in a while.
Are agile planning tools an option to a physical task board? The tools I have seen have all been unnecessarily complex, resulting in information hiding. I’d go for a more simple solution having a wiki as the foundation and for a backlog and maybe an Excel-sheet for burndowns, continuously published on the wiki. For larger projects you might want to have some issue tracking system like trac or bugzilla. Actually I would like to try to use an online camera pointing at a physical task board, or publishing daily snapshots of the task board on a wiki. I think that might work for some setups. However stay away from MS Project.
How about agile engineering practices then? Those shouldn’t pose any problem. Most tools work in distributed environments like Subversion for source code management, CruiseControl for continuous integration and JUnit, DBUnit, FITnesse, etc. for different levels of testing. Collective code ownership is supported in source code management systems and IDEs support refactoring. Even pair programming is supported via collaboration tools, remote desktops and a plugins to Eclipse.
If you are serious about getting your distributed teams agile you have to read this:
Transitioning to Agile in Onshore-Offshore Distributed Teams
You should also read Jeff Sutherland’s (et al) paper:
Adaptive Engineering of Large Ssoftware Projects with Distributed/Outsourced Teams
The planning of this year’s conference Øresund Agile 2007 is progressing rapidly. This year it will take place in central Copenhagen, june 12-14. Some of the persons engaged as speakers so far include: Mary Poppendieck, Jeff Sutherland, Diana Larsen and a number of local experts. Stay tuned…
Øresund Agile is an annual agile gathering in the Øresund region, which connects Sweden and Denmark. The event is organized by Softhouse, Öresund IT academy and Scrum Education.
