Wednesday At Agile2010

I believe today was as full and as awesome a conference day as it possible to be. To cover it in as a much detail as I’d like would take too long, so I’m going to have to sum up.

I started the day with an Open Jam organized by Joshua Kerievsky, inspired by feedback he’d gotten from his blog post about Redefining Done. His position is that the product community is always bigger than you think it is, and that product success depends on the team always looking for those people outside themselves. It’s necessary for stories to get finished, and that’s the first step. It’s not sufficient, so as we mature we need to grow the definition of done to make sure we’re doing what’s required to make the product successful. It was a thought-provoking discussion, but before we could dig too deeply I had to run off to my 9 AM session.1

Next up was “Elephant Carpaccio: Nano-Incremental Development” with Andrew Clay Shafer and Alistair Cockburn. I had planned on being the product owner in this hands-on exercise, but I switched over to the developer role when I saw how imbalanced our numbers were.2 It turned out to be a very rich experience; rather than try to explain it, I recommend that you take a look at the materials on Alistair’s website and try it yourself. Despite a rough start, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

My other morning session was “Using Silent Work Techniques” by Lyssa Adkins, one of the sessions I was looking forward to the most. Like the development exercise I’d just come from, it was very experiential. Lyssa’s thesis is that many Agile practices get us to do good work quickly by using discussion and cooperation. To do exceptional work, we have to move to the next level through dialog and collaboration. She stepped us through a series of exercises that eliminated talking in order to get us to more effectively collaborate with each other. I could see a lot of connections with both my experiences in improv and the activities we’ve been using in our retrospectives at work. This session was a game-changer for me, as shifted it the way I see group interactions working.

After lunch I headed to the session with probably the best title at the conference, “What I learned from burning my parents’ house down” by Yves Hanoulle and Robin Dymond. My table included a bunch of people from the Silent Work session, and we incorporated what we had learned to good effect. The material drew heavily from John Kotter’s A Sense of Urgency and focused on how to drive change efforts. The quote of the conference so far game from Gil Broza: “Complacency is forgetting the concept of greatness.”

My last session of the day was “Death by Scrum Meeting” by Pete Behrens. It was, by his own admission, not actually about meetings. Long, unproductive meetings are a symptom; the cause is failure to create strategy. When decisions aren’t made upstream, the necessity to make them flows downhill, but ability doesn’t necessarily. The rest of his material was very brain-focused, drawing on Patrick Lencioni’s Death By Meeting and David Rock’s Your Brain At Work. It was interesting stuff, even if it wasn’t quite what I’d signed up for.3

There’s one full day of the conference left, and I’m starting to feel my brain fill up. It’s full of useful things, though, so I’ll power through tomorrow.

1 There’s a funny story here about Johanna Rothman stalking me, but it will have to wait.

2 Having someone you’ve never met watch you write code is always a fun experience. It gave me new respect for the programmers in the Extreme Fishbowl.

3 I did strongly disagree with his contention that you can do effective retrospectives for a two-week iteration in fifteen to thirty minutes, but that’s a different issue.