Here are my notes from the conference. A treasure of ideas that I can come back to uncovering.
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Sue McKinney - IBM (Agile in economic downturn)
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trust
step up without stifling innovation
step back without ---
influence not authority
why collaborative leadership?
stand back and deliver
leaders empowered to change within scope of influence
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There's Only Us Panel (Distilled)
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The purpose of trust is to increase productivity of the whole.
Individual productivity can thrive in an environment without trust,
but doesn't necessarily benefit the whole.
Trust needs conflict in order to grow.
Conflict slows down productivity (it fights against the purpose of trust)
Conflict is resolved by the combination of courage and collaboration.
Resolving conflict builds trust.
Avoiding conflict weakens trust.
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Better Agile Through Stealing (John Rusk)
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Responding to change
Evidence Based Management
Crystal history
Individual & Interactions
Positive Organizational Psychology
(popular practices work because they have these traits)
Deliberate Practice
Authenticity
Managers are being themselves more skillfully
Being yourself is consistent with trust
You can learn it by yourself, but it takes time
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Principled Negotiation
Getting to Yes
Quality Based Selection
Winner's Curse
Economics - 205 years
Earned Value - the long term view
Political Skill + Authenticity + Time = Trust
Make connections outside
Influence inside
www.agilekiwi.com
john@agilekiwi.com
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Agile Infrastructure (Andrew Schafer)
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Planning vs. Engineering
Developers
Product Owners
Testers
Executives
System Administrators
Database Admins
Net Engs
Designers
Usability Experts
Circle of Happiness
Who is working on a web app?
End of shrink wrap
Clouds are rising
Where does that web app run?
Who takes care of those servers
How do you interact with them
Engineering
Version Control
Build From Source
Puppet - Infrastructure is Code
Semantics
Reproducible
Maintainable
Extensible
Shareable
But why?
Backlog of requests
Config of critical services are often not documented and must be
recreated
Work on the biggest fire
Deployments and upgrades are expensive, tedious, and error prone
The chance that dev, test, and prod are configed the same -> 0
Hardware failure can be catastrophic
Heavy weight change control processes seem like a good idea
More and More Systems to Manage
Virtual Machines
More machines to configure
Do not make golden images
Really foil balls
WTD?
Infrastructure is code - automate everything
People spend time making decisions, not doing tedious work over and
over
No longer managing servers, manage services
Take advantage of processes and tools we have for software development
Planning
Communication
Collaboration
Estimation
Prioritization
Non-functional requirements
Requirements are requirements
A web app is the infrastructure
Without infrastructure there is no app
A change in usage patterns can crush the infrastructure
Requires collaboration between dev and ops
Developers vs. Operations
Wall of Confusion
Boundary Objects
Community of interest ???
Brian Marick - Boundary Objects
Plan for infrastructure requirements
But be willing and able to change them
Short feedback loops
Operations' Customer is the App
If the infrastructure isn't working nothing is
Create a culture of collaboration
Most important statement from the manifesto
Often forgotten and most important phrase of the manifesto (it's first
after all)
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and
helping others to do it.
Throwing bodies at work that is taken for granted when it could be
automated -- that is the meatcloud.
imvu -- Automated deployment
Last responsible moment for infrastructure was 6 months ago
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Agile Architecture (Jon House)
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Agile - way of doing things
Arch - means of doing things
Drivers for architecture usually business oriented
Agile
Flexible
Mitigating Risk
Understandable - visible
Scalable - Adjustable
Design
Strategic
High - Level
Scalable
Adoptable
Focused on Application Architecture
Presentation
Domain Logic
External Systems
Identifying common functionality
Customized code
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Brian Marick (Artisanal Retro-futurism Team Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism)
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they don't care as much about cheese as we do
don't complain at the samurai bar
replace it all!
gov't
corp.
trade unions
workers' solidarity - "One team"
workers' self-management - "self-organizing teams"
direct action
in contrast from hoping someone from above will swoop in and help you
where's my jetpack?
where's my emergent design?
infinite in all directions - endless possibility
limited in most directions
"ignore people like me"
"what would make our lives best, now let's change the context to that"
sense of naivety that is key to success - hope
i and i over p and t
"I know you think you are helping, but you're not"
not respectable to talk about process and tools
promiscuous pairing
pair programming ping-pong
how to move bodies in space
Celebrate the Gosh-Wow Brigade
Bringing ruby folks back into the fold
What do we do now, what's needed?
Need reminders
arxta.net
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Israel Gat (Four principles, four cultures, one mirror)
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Timeless principles
Intrinsic Obstacles
agile principles - disruptive - in positive manner
bypass or overcome obstacles
re-crossing the chasm between customer and vendor
the "sausage syndrome"
"codify" agile principles in contracts
75% organizations using Scrum will not succeed
they are supposed to make dysfunctions transparent to fix them, not
adapt and hide them
market development myth
Cultural Duality
how we do things around here in order to succeed
how wo do software in order to succeed
introduce conflict
Taxonomy of Core Cultures
collaboration
control
cultivation
competence
actuality
possibility
personal
impersonal
some cultures look at data in the future
what could be accomplished next year, the year after
some cultures pay attention to what is happening today
how cultures make decisions
"data is the only thing that matters" vs "personal"
recovery of patient depends on collaboration with nurse
each corporation has a psychic center, too, which consists of vision,
etc...
agile rollout strategies
build on strengths of the current culture
assume you are in a control culture
control, very methodical, very rigorous
move toward an adjacent culture
move from control to collaboration, or control to competence
takes years to change your character, and a lot of investment
move toward an opposite culture - unlikely to succeed (personality
transplant)
scaling and culture
expect success to beget success
scale up
likely to be least disruptive up to a point
you will probably stay within the culture in which you already
demonstrated success
scale out
adding local culture(s) into the mix
various variants of distributed agile might not be optimal, but their
use is inevitable
key to success is minimizing implementation variances against
manifesto practices
scale diagonally
take success in agile r&d to drive change in downstream functions is
an effective strategy
as long as you are mindful of the cultural boundaries you are crossing
limit on scaling
beyond the joint infrastructure that serves constituencies affected by Agile
the data the culture pays attention to
the process by which decisions are made
using your mirror to determine your core culture
whatever your current culture might be, it is easier to build on the
strengths
no single culture is right for agile
behavioral changes through tools
good agile tools are likely to induce behavioral changes (in good
time)
data - single source of truth
process - natural and automatic - like the response to an exciting
video game
principles for applying timeless principles
know thyself
be true to thyself (don't assimilate the way salesforce did it)
behavioral changes through tools (joint agile infrastructure over
explicit cultural change pushes)
other cultures are part of your mirror
the essence of organizational health is cultural balance a condition
in which the tendency toward excess that characterizes any 'pure'
organizational culture is mitigated by the opposing tendencies of the
other cultures
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Alex Pukinskis (Facilitating a Product Council)
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Agile is like beer (1 or 2 ok, 6 or 7) - getting drunk on agile
Release-oriented
1. Bring your ideas
2. Details and Voting
3. Final Backlogs
4. Retrospective
Too much work.
Stakeholder Stress
Diner menu
Pet Projects
Bias toward churn
Everyone's got an opinion
They're all wrong
Bias toward stability
Easy to maintain
The clouds lift
Stories: too granular for VPs
Stakeholders relax
Create a visible kanban
Sit with each stakeholder
You'll get stable stakeholder support
Agile is like a dream, again
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Pollyanna Pixton (The leadership tipping point workshop)
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Leadership tools from her experience
When using these tools, Agile will emerge
Stand Back and Deliver (June 29)
'Old school' 80% - manages changes, knows the answers, bureaucratic,
leader decides
Positional power - stops making decisions based on all the information
'New school' - embraces change - fosters new ideas - collaborates -
gives ownership - influential
the answers are in yor organization
none of us are as smart as all of us
collaboration model
open environment - right people - foster innovation - step back - and
let them work
step up without stifling innovation
step back and keep focus
how do you step aside
unleash talent
increase productivity
develop great solutions
how?
give ownership and NOT TAKING IT BACK
by giving solutions we take ownership
use authentic motivation
* foster collaboration
teams collaborate to make their decisions
* let people choose
let people choose how, what, and when
have to trust that they'll find the missing piece, and they do
* provide meaningful work
trust first and...
suspicion is a permanent condition
create a culture of trust as a leader - fosters trust in the organization
you can't make people trust each other
a team that has not built trust yet
remove debilitating fear
step back tips
team figure out how
create a safe place to fail
get the right people on the bus in the right seats
get the wrong people off the bus
how do you know when a team is struggling
Red Flags
When they are always waiting for me before they take the next step
(usually involves just talking to someone else)
Everyone talks about a general problem that they are experiencing (a
theme of symptoms), but
won't speak up about any specific out of fear that I might disagree,
or that they'll cause conflict among themselves.
No updates
Silence
Ashen faces
Non participations
Changes in hours worked
Closed door discussions
Too busy to retrospect
Working on the wrong things
what to do
get the team back on track without sacrificing integrit
don't ask what's wrong
or where stuck
describe work, approach, path they went down, and why they went that
way
help discover a new view
zero gravity thinker
step up tips
reinforce ownership
don't give answers
don't give them the solutions
tell stories, experiences
ask questions
questions that help people discover solutions
how would you like to solve it?
what would you like me to do?
what would you ask?
macro-leadership tool
cube - stand back
remove barriers
help teams grow, make it a bigger cube
when they start coming out of the cube - step up
purpose - considerations - results
tighter boundaries
Your cube?
Results
Customer Satisfaction
Quality
Commitments met
Development team satisfaction
How does your cube align with your team's cube
your tipping point? practice.
If there is a silent resistance to my suggestion - step back - let
them figure it out.
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James Shore (Simultaneous phases)
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Scrumerfall
Testers helping the team understand if the are doing everything they
need to do to create bug free code
Continual, Incremental, Planning and Requirements
Current Iteration - Task, Task
Backlog - Next two iterations - Story, Story
Roadmap - Next three months - MMF, MMF, MMF
Vision: This release and a bit of the future - Vision
Programming Errors
TDD, PP, Energized Work
Design Errors
Slack, Simple Design, Incremental Design, Refactoring, Fix Bugs Promptly
Requirements Errors
On-Site Customers, Customer Tests, Bring Testers Forward, Customer
Review
Process Errors
Root-Cause Analysis, Fix your process, Exploratory Testing
"An example would be helpful about now"