Suffering from the winter blues? Fed up with never-ending requirements discovered during UAT? Then come along for a spot of festive cheer and peer coaching at next week’s Extreme Tuesday Club in London. Hope to see you there! Where? There.

I’ve been surrounded by a lot of grey for the past couple of months. It may be the dreary autumnal London weather. Or perhaps it’s the sea of sombre suits reflected in glassy buildings in Canary Wharf. Fortunately, going to JAOO for the first time back in September helped cheer me up. Going to XPDay London last week gave me hope.

What worked well: The Highlights

It’s the attendees who make the conference: I met some very cool, contemplative and collaborative people. By cool, I mean friendly, modest and fun. When combined with cool, contemplative and collaborative best describe what people who really get Agile mean to me. Instead of meeting resistance, things just flow.

In an opposing context, the 3 Cs can mean: colluding, corroborative and complicit. Apparently that’s how some people behave when things get tough. Unfortunately, it’s also when how you behave matters most in determining the outcome. Over time, I’ve come to recognise Agile as a mindset and it’s really easy to spot the bona fide ‘Agilistas’ (practitioners of Agile) from those who play pretend. It’s a bit like watching bullies prance about in tutus. They’re usually those who don’t quite ‘fit’.

Creative sessions such as the Conversation Café by Simon Baker and Gus Power asking the difficult question – ‘Have you compromised your agility?’: I especially liked the scene setting with paper table cloths, funky electric tea lights and piles of lollipops. It seemed to me a well-crafted social experiment in which participants were lulled into a comfortable state of mind before being electric-jolted into discussions that challenged their fundamental beliefs in what being Agile means. The combination of this polemic session with Steve Freeman’s panel discussion on ‘Have we lost our mojo?’ helped reunite a crowd that had become fractured by difficult conversations (I described it as invoking a tribal reaction much like football does – understandably, of course).

For me, the best sessions were those that encouraged us to fight against organisational inertia and question conventional wisdom. Simon and Gus did an excellent job of reminding us to challenge mediocrity. It may be the norm in your organisation, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

My three wishes for XPDay London 2008

1. For an inspiring and erudite speaker like David Stoughton to do the opening keynote
2. For an exceptional closing speech that challenges us to take action (because ‘Goodbyes’ are important).
3. To co-present a session with Pascal Van Cauwenberghe, co-creator of The XP Game.

Thank Yous for ‘The Yellow Brick Road’

Special thanks to Tamas Jano and Tom Geary for test-driving the Wizard of Oz game cards. Many thanks to Duncan Pierce for mucking in with what he described as ‘the most unusual session’ he’s ever worked on. And a big T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U to Jim for making shadowy figments of imagination real. If you want to know how the session went, you can read Pascal’s account of it here. Thanks for the coverage, Pascal!

Here’s a chance to swap your bit part for a major role in the Agile re-telling of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for your organisation.

Starring:

• You as Dorothy
• Agile as the Emerald City
• Agile adoption path as the Yellow Brick Road
• Session presenters (Duncan Pierce and me) as the Wizard of Oz

See you at XPDay London 2008

I’ll be co-presenting ‘The Yellow Brick Road’ at XPDay London in November. The session will be a self-contained workshop as well as a potential kick-off session for a year-long programme where you will learn about and practice peer-coaching to transform your way of working from suboptimal to agile. You will get the chance to work with peers in similar organisations and draw on a wealth of experiences, from learning how to deal with real problems to brainstorming and selecting effective solutions. We hope to create a setting where you will be able to give and receive support as you apply solutions through an iterative and collaborative process of plan-do-inspect-adapt.

To find out more about XPDay London, go to: http://www.xpday.org/

Why JAOO?

I left Aarhus last Friday tooled up with numerous good ideas, a dozen or so new Agile friends (you can never have enough of those) and a reading list the length of my arm thanks to acting on Eberhard Wolff‘s conference recommendation. Thanks Eberhard!

What worked well: Conference sessions – The Highlights

Jim Coplien on Scrum Architecture: Jim started by highlighting that use cases describe what a system does and architecture represents what that system is. A common problem on Agile projects is that a lot of teams become unstuck during the third sprint because there is no architecture. After all, architecture is what enables developers to work together. Jim therefore recommended we assert what we know on an architecture in order to provide a high level design, taking no more than three days, made up of abstract base classes and domain dictionaries (two sides of A4 per domain). Jim went on to say that TDD (Test-Driven Development) does not produce (good) architectures. That architectures cannot be derived from unit tests. That we should adopt architecture-driven design instead of unit-test-case-driven design. The session hit the sweet spot as a technical Agile session: suitably thought-provoking or controversial depending on how you interpreted his presentation.

Kevlin Henney on developer professionalism in terms of economy and elegance: Kevlin was eloquent, erudite and entertaining. He said that ‘in searching for identity, we need to look beyond caricatures and preconceptions’ and urged developers to consider the differences between engineering and craft. Kevlin described software engineering as a specialisation of information engineering. Because software engineering is an emerging discipline, it therefore follows that what we are experiencing is ’emerging professionalism’. That is all the more reason we should be cautious of the motivations behind our designs.

Eric Gamma on developers playing Jazz: Eric demo’ed Jazz, the new development management productivity tool integrated with Eclipse. It looks ideal for projects that can be developed using Eclipse and Agile. Eric described the Eclipse way as ‘team first’ and emphasised that there shouldn’t be a need on teams for people to act solely as architects. After all, everyone on a technical team should be involved in architecture because they care about it.

Justin Gehtland on Ruby: Justin’s enthusiastic delivery reminded me to take a second look at Ruby.

What worked well: Tutorials – Top Picks

Pollyanna Pixton on collaborative leadership: An unusual tutorial at JAOO focussed entirely on leadership with practical advice on how to hire the right people and deal with troublesome ones. Pollyanna’s hearty humour and stories reminded me that Good Leaders exist out there.

Henrik Kniberg on Scrum and XP from the trenches: Henrik began by entertaining us with his piano-playing and went on to demonstrate by example how he implemented Scrum in thorny environments. He struck a chord when he said, ‘Death marches are not allowed in Scrum’ because I had said something along those lines just the week before the conference. Henrik was very creative in his delivery of the session and is the epitome of Scrum pragmatically and successfully applied.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on the art of telling design stories: Rebecca was a sympathetic and knowledgeable presenter who used technical examples and analogies to show us how to convey technical designs and present difficult technical situations to challenging audiences.

What could have been better: In Summary

• More Agile tech sessions like Jim’s
• More stylish and literary speakers like Kevlin
• Make conference sessions more useful like tutorials
• More networking opportunities like Diana Larsen’s Open Space sessions which were excellent at bringing likeminded and contradictory individuals together with many leaving happy and invigorated