I was just reading a Blog entry by Nat Pryce and I was struck by how much it looked and felt like a proper article. I then wondered whether people are writing Blogs instead of articles. There is something quite nice about quickly getting your idea or thoughts out into the public domain.
Personally, I am using my Blog more like a notebook to store all my ideas as they pop into my head. I am now marshalling them into proper articles that I hope to get published somewhere.
I have dragged myself out of my pit of despair.
Rather than avoid work which is what you do when you are feeling low, I decided to actively seek out work on the project. People then saw I was motivated and gave me more work which made be feel more valued and hance more motivated.
If you finding yourself demotivated, drag yourself out of your cycle of despair and go get some work. Even unappealling tasks can be fun if approached with the right attitude.
I must stop drinking the caffeine.
The interesting thing is the work is the same. The difference is my attitude toward the work. I'm having more fun now and the work seems more fun as well. I'm avoiding negatives and looking for positives.
The original paper on the waterfall by Royce can be found here
Funnily enough, he says to iterate at least once. Perhaps someone in the consultancies should have read this.... Then again they would have only got half the fees on the project before it was cancelled.
Tim Bacon pointed out a couple of great presentation on ROI.
The first is a classic by Jim Johnson of the Standish Group at XP2002. In the presentation he states that 45% of features are never used and 19% are rarely used. To double your productivity, simply don't build the stuff that people do not need.
The second is Mary Poppendieck's keynote from XP Day 3. Mary's presentation showed a number of ways we could be more effective.
My experience is pretty typical. I think everyone who attended had a similar experience. There are lots of broken links in this Blog entry that I will fix over the weekend.
ADC Experience Report – Short Form
Awesome.
Listen, think, talk with the greatest minds working on software on the planet. Jet lag, hungover or drunk the entire time. It was still an amazing experience.
All the book recommendations I picked up are on Book Shelved.
Things I learnt.
I need to improve my listening skills.
NLP basics from Dan North.
More stuff than fits in my tiny Brain. (See Blogs over following months.)
I need to improve my listening skills.
ADC Experience Report – Long Form.
Day 3 of the conference. I am sat at the ThoughtWorks booth writing next to Joe Walnes. It’s a conference and so I’m both hungover and jet lagged to hell. Its been an awesome conference so far. As good, if not better then last year. I only had 3 hours sleep last night so it will be a wonder if I make it through the day.
I arrived on Tuesday night and immediately met up with old friends from last year and XP 2004. Russ Rufer and Tracey Bialik of the Silicon Valley Patterns Group who are book reviewers for the Agile community. Russ told us that the conference will be merged with XP/Agile Universe next year although they will be keeping a lot of the things that make ADC special. Diana Larson, the organisational change goddess was here as well and threatening to take photos of my dancing again. Angela Martin is continuing her world tour to present her PhD work on the XP customer. Tom and Mary Poppendieck are here again. Tom is the official conference photographer, he gets everywhere with his camera. The XTC and TWUK gangs are here in force. Jeff Patten and I exchanged stories about our children. Hopefully Jeff will be working for TW in the not too distant future. In fact, hopefully everyone at the conference will be working for TW at some point. Deanna Cockburn was nervously watching her son Cameron (The one who planted the weeds) play Halo on the X-Box that ThoughtWorks is going to raffle off at the end of the conference. I spent some time trying to unravel the chaos I created with the hotel room booking. I tried to apply a real options approach to getting the rooms which caused no end of confusion. I end up in the Irish Bar until 2 am with the TW Gang (Joe Walnes, Dan North (Get a Blog Dan), Richard Watts, Greg Luck, Tim MacKinnon, Mike Royle, Murray White and Sid Pinney), Andy Pols and Alistair Cockburn. The conversation had already accellerated to mach 2 and the conference hadn’t started yet.
ADC Wednesday - Keynote
On Wednesday Morning I woke up at 5 o-clock with a horrendous hangover. I explained the Agile Business Coach ideas to Ken Schwaber. He suggested I speak to Mike Cohn who would be interested to include something in the Agile Times. Tim Lister kicked off the conference with a keynote speach about peopleware and risk management. Tim introduced himself as a risk Zealot. We had that in common. Tim talked about the “dead fish”. Something that smells bad on the project that no one will talk about. He told a story about his daughter-in-laws experience with having a pool built. Two builders gave a quote but the third refused. He said that he could not quote until he knew whether there was top soil or solid rock beneath the grass. He would give a quote after he had drilled holes in the grass to find out what was under it. This sounded like an XP spike to me. He said that the waterfall was really analysis, design, code, test, deploy, litigate. He showed a map of the hurricane Isobel path prediction that gave a range of area over which they might hit landfall that covered an area of several thousand miles that gets revised down as the hurricane gets closer to shore. This is acceptable in weather prediction but not IT project estimation. He said that package implementations with some “minor” configuration were like trying to find a statue inside a block of marble. He said that some code is still around from the early seventies. He wished he had a time machine so that he could go back and tell the developers to take more time getting it right. He said that most failed projects had a dead fish that everyone can smell but no one dare talk about. Anyone who points out the dead fish is normally punished. It sounded similiar to my experience last year.
I met Esther Derby, the retrospectives queen. She is delightful. It is so cool meeting someone when you already know something about them from reading their thoughts on their blog. Even cooler when they have read your own blog. J
John Daniels kicked off the open space session. I suggested the use of Real Options in Risk Management. More interest than I expected including Michael Williams,Rebecca Wirf Brock, Eric Evans and href=”www.c2.com”>Ward Cunningham. The most interesting insight to me came from Rebecca who pointed out the damage to morale that an option based approach had had on a team she had worked on. A separate project had been started at another company in case the project failed. This had destroyed the morale on her project.
I then joined Tim Lister and a few others to discuss risk management in the hallway before adjurning to the local deli with Tim and about fifteen others.
I attended the Scrum Session by Ken Schwaber in the afternoon. I lasted about an hour before jet lag kicked in and I bailed. More cool conversations that I barely remember but I was fried.
Dinner that evening was at a Mexican with Sanjiv Augustine, Steve Berzcuk, Andy and others. Then over to Squatters with Andy, Sanjiv, Sid Pinney (TW Biz Dev) and the TW Boys. The TW crew ended the night in port o call. A top night which ended at about 2 oclock. Only to be wide awake at 5 am again. Bloody jet lag. Breakfast with Joe and now I’m writing the Blog.
ADC Day 5
On my way home on the plane now. Just pair programmed with Dan on Jbehave. I played the role of dumb BA perfectly. Plenty of dumb questions which slowed Dan up by more than the usual 15%.
Great analogy from Dan on the Cheetah. A cat that can run at 60 miles an hour when it needs to feed but spends 99% of its time sunning itself and sleeping. Reminds me of Rohit and I during the Dresdner Days.
Thursday morning was the Executive Summit. Pollyanna Pixton and David Spann had included Andy and my article< in the summit pre-read. Way cool. J
Lunch with Esther (with an h) Derby, Angela Martin, Lowell Lindstrum, and Diana Larson.
Thursday afternoon is a blur which ended with the open space follow up on Real Options. I will put the notes from the session on the conference wiki. I missed the Agile PM session being run by Jim Highsmith. They are going to name themselves the “Dead Fish Society”. URL already registered. Everyone wants to join!
Quick chat with Mike Cohn about doing an article for the Agile Times in August before the Agile Alliance AGM. All conference attendees are now member of the AA. Todd announced that ADC will be merged with XP/AU next year. Conference name, date and venue to be decided, although the two contenders are Minneapolis and Danver. Go Denver!
Todd, Andy, Tom, Mary and I retired to Pollyanna’s garden for a barbecue. Top nosh and conversation.
Back to the Irish Bar to meet with Alistair and Jeff. I tell Alistair about my insight on the different Agile methodologies. He gets me to write it down. I tell him the Agile Business Coach principles. He suggests Andy and I write an article on them. Sat in the hotel until 4am drinking with the boys including Dan Gackle, one of the sharpest minds at the conference.
Friday. Awoke at 7am. My plan of staying up late so that I sleep has failed spectacularly.
Executive Track is changed to respond to the comments posted on Thursday. I prefered Thursdays Format. An excellent presentation by Niel Nielson, COO from Deserat Books. I spend lunch with David Spann, Michael and Pollyanna. Friday afternoon is spent on a Death March behind Alistair’s house. Dan x 2 are discussing Semiotics. Is there any subject at that someone at this conference is not an expert in. Alistair shows Olav and I through his book collection. I meet Amazonian Solveig and exchange business cards on several occasions. Solve is the author of Dating Design Patterns. I convince her I am the evil dating anti pattern. ;-).
I get invited to the Organisers Party at Pollyanna’s office. Afterwards I end up in the bar with Russ Rufer. I end the night at 2am. Joe Walnes, my room mate for the conference borrows my bottle of Southern Comfort. Good job I bought one for the mother in law after all. Another late night…. Only to wake at 7am again. Jet lag, jet lag lag log lead…
Last Day.
I skip the keynote by Preston Smith in favour of hall way chats with lots of cool people. Dan Gackle tells me that one of Preston’s slides indicates waterfall is better than Agile for controlling costs. After the keynote ends I dive in with Dan G to challenge Preston on the slide I have not seen. AGILE is better at control than Waterfall.
Luke Hohmann has arrived. We chat and agree that our work is Complimentary. He is working on a new book.
Lunch with Angela Martin and the Retrospectives crew (David Spann, Tim Mackinnon, Ellen Gottesdiener, Diana Larsen, Michael, and Esther Derby)
Steve Freeman cannot find the original Joyce article on Waterfall but Russ Rufer says he has a copy he can send me. Apparently Joyce’s original paper describes the waterfall on page one, then proceeds to say that it doesn’t work and iterative approaches should be used instead. Check the link and read it for yourself.
I attend Luke Hohmann session, “Speed boats and Jacuzzis”, which is about getting feedback from customers. An excellent session and I look forward to the book. I skip out early to attend the second half of Alistair’s tutorial on Crystal.
The conference ends with the Banquet and disco. I finally get to speak to Ellen Gottesdiener about Business Analysis. I also meet Kent McDonald, another Agile Business Analyst. More drinking and talking until the early hours of the morning.
I met Andy Pols, the smart half of the Agile Business Coach, for lunch to discuss our next article on The Business [Coach] Principles.
Andy explained the difference between a Use Case and an XP Story.
An XP Story is a scenario. A Use Case is a collection of scenarios. See, its easy.
You can assign business value to either.
I told you Andy was the smart one.
ADC was an opportunity to view situated learning in action.
People discussed their problems and projects. Others listened and then offered counsel if desired.
Todd Little and Alistair Cockburn had created a four day conversation in which all participants took part. Everyone was a legitimate peripheral participant.
I have decided to upgrade Situated Learning from a "borrow" to a "strong buy". It is an academic book that is difficult to read but worth the efffort, especially when you get to see it in action as I did at ADC. I had to read it twice to get it.
Jim Highsmith held a meeting about Agile Project Management at ADC. The meeting decided to name itself the "Dead Fish Society".
This is a great name and signifies Agile Project Management moving from the innovator's to early adoptors. It is a name that inspires people to join.
So far, the group has decided on a name, and to get together for a day and a half in Chicago on October. If you are an Agile Project Manager who wants more details, let me know and I will put you in touch with the "Dead Fish Society". Oh yeas, and Pollyanna has registered the URL for the Agile Alliance.
The society was named after the keynote speech given by Tim Lister at ADC. Tim refered to a "dead fish" on a project. Something that everyone could smell but no one spoke about until it was too late.
I had an insight / aha moment concerning the different Agile
Methodologies.
XP is the set of developer practices,
SCRUM is a set of project management practices,
Crystal speaks to communication and methodology fitting,
Lean identifies waste and optimises the process, and
Business Value tells us why we are doing a project.
The project manager role requires more definition, in particular how to use the theory of constraints and real options.
I met Clarke Ching last night. We talked about business value and the theory of constraints.
We decided that the best way to set up a project is to run a few very short iterations at the start. The iterations should identify the constraints within the project, whether they be in the analysis or development team. Once the constraints have been identified, it should be possible to manage around them. Clarke thinks that the analysis team is likely to be the constraint because it should be fairly easy to find additional developers to add to the team. Any additional developers could work on alternative designs.
It was a very pleasant evening.
I will write up my experience report for the Agile Development Conference next week. It was an awesome event. So many interesting people.
I was either jet lagged, drunk or hungover for the entire conference.
The executive summit was on business value. Andy and my paper on business value was one of only two papers included in the pre-read.