I like Christmas. A lot. I’ve come to appreciate Christmas like I do weddings. I feel the same way towards Agile. All three operate on a manifesto of sorts that people can choose to either respect and adhere to or flout and play-pretend.

Everyone just wants to have a good time. And why not? In my experience, practicing Agile is a bit like driving. When you tell people you use Agile to deliver projects, you’re signalling intent, one of collaboration instead of conflict. After signalling comes fulfilment, made real through behaviour and action.

It’s like driving to the shops and indicating you want to turn left and then actually turning left. Unfortunately, many of the Agile drivers I meet signal left and then turn right. These are the same people who wonder why their passenger-team doesn’t believe or trust them to drive safely. Unskilled drivers are a menace to themselves and everyone else on the road.

Agile, like Christmas, creates a culture of shared reality. By having a common and worthwhile goal, one that produces genuine value for instance, people will figure out difficult (impossible) problems like they’ve always done: through co-ordination, cooperation and convergence.

Agile is the ultimate endurance test because it demands openness, stamina, consistency and constancy. What would your project be like if everyone tried their best to get along with one another, do the right thing and do things right? It would be like Christmas. Everyday. For Everyman. How civilised.

Make 2008 matter. Instead of letting others make mincemeat out of you. Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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!

Question: What do Tom Peters and Steven Levitt have in common?
Answer: They make a living out of having and using a rare and precious thing that has made them kings. Their magic is no secret: it’s common sense.

Tom Peters Says

Tom Peters is a classic great speaker. He’s charming, inspirational and a brilliant performer. It was interesting to hear him speak about excellence in the enterprise 25 years on from when ‘In Search of Excellence’ was first published. According to the title of his talk, he’s ‘Still in Search of Excellence’ – an observation that’s at once disconcerting as well as hopeful. Disconcerting because, from experience, we haven’t solved the problem yet (in spite of the number of man years spent in this pursuit); hopeful because it gives us something to do. Problems are good. It’s often the solutions that make things go from bad to worse. I’m constantly reminded that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

Tom began by assuring the audience that we were all leaders – weren’t we? He then went on to say: ‘We all know we’re phonies and because we’re afraid to expose our weaknesses we don’t ask the interesting questions. It’s our job as leaders to ask interesting questions.’

Tom described the essence of enterprise as:

• Cause – worthy of commitment
• Space – for encouragement and initiative
• Decency – respect and humane
• Service
• Excellence
• Servant Leadership

He then hollered a typical management mantra to the crowd like some punk rock star: ‘Park your brain at the door dude and row the slave ship!’ then lowering his voice, he continued: ‘But we have computers to row the slave ship.’

According to Tom, our only chance to succeed in globalisation is to leverage the creative and intellectual skills of our teams. Starbucks is a good example of a human function being replaced by a machine. Since coffee making is done by a machine, what Starbucks buys is individuality in their staff. When asked why Starbucks staff are constantly smiling, one manager said as a matter-of-fact: ‘We hire people who smile.’

Tom, like Levitt, fully acknowledges that he has nothing profound to say. Instead, what he does has been described as ‘blinding flashes of the obvious’. So here’s the latest newsflash: ‘Put your people before your customers,’ says Tom Peters. What will you do?

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

‘Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.’

– The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

Dawkins’s examination of the biology of selfishness and altruism has led him to assert that “we are born selfish”. The manifestations and consequences of his assertion in terms of people and software development are what I have coined (the art of) Selfish Programming.

Together we can thwart it and may be even turn it into ‘environmentally-friendly’ energy. Welcome.