Exploration Through Example

Agile Coach Camp is about creating a network of practitioners who are striving to push the limits in guiding software development teams, while staying true to the values and principles at the core of the Agile movement. We’ve invited practitioners who, like you, are passionate about their work, active in the field and willing to share what they’ve learned.

Do you have a technique or practice worth sharing with your peers? Or an idea you’d like to test out with some leaders in the community? Are you facing challenges and want to get some perspective from other practitioners, or hear how they do things? If you feel you’d benefit from connecting with 80-100 ScrumMasters?, XP Coaches, Trainers, Change Agents and Mentors to talk, draw, argue and explore ideas, then this conference is for you.

You can learn all about AgileCoachCamp on this wiki.

I’m writing my position paper now. I think it will be on avoiding doing whatever things cause the legitimate part of the Post-Agile reaction. (And I do think some parts are definitely legitimate.)

UPDATE: the position paper.

Kevin Rutherford:

Clarke Ching has now published the podcast of last Saturday’s Naked Agilists conference. You can download it by following the links from www.nakedagilists.com, or get it directly from Clarke’s blog. It’s a great 90 minutes of presentations and discussions, and the Naked Agilists website has links to the slides so you can follow the presentations along with the speakers.

We had five 10-minute presentations:

1. Servant Leaders — Nancy van Schooenderwoert
2. wevouchfor.org — Laurent Bossavit
3. Fit4Data — Adrian Mowat
4. Shared data for unit tests — Paul Wilson
5. Let them Eat Cake — Brian Marick

And after each little session we had 5-minutes of discussion and Q&A. Also taking part in these discussions were Clarke, who chaired the whole thing expertly, me, and Willem van den Ende, who helped put the show together (as did Brian Marick).

Join the Naked Agilists mailing list to find out when the next event will be — and help us find an inexpensive technology that will make it live and interactive!

Note: Nancy’s talk (the first) is hard to hear. Too bad.

This sounds like a neat event. I’ve put it on my calendar. (UPDATE: I’m now one of the organizers.)

Do you wish you could attend the Agile conferences and XP days, but can’t get the funding or the travel budget or the time off work? Well there is one agile event that you can even attend from your own bath — the Naked Agilists!

Last year’s event was so successful that we’re running another. And you only need Skype to be able to attend. Save the date now:

Date: Saturday 19-Jan-08
Time: 20:00 GMT - 21:30 GMT
Venue: Your place, or mine

The event format is a Skype conference, supported by chat, and a website hosting slides and stuff. There’s also a mailing list where you can find more details of what happened last time, and loads of feedback on the event itself.

The event will be chaired by Leigh Mullin, who did such a great job last time — particularly to keep out the inevitable “tourists” who were hoping the “naked agilists” all had webcams! Please join the mailing list and propose a session. This time around we’re hoping to run with two different kinds of session:

• Experience Reports, lasting 2, 5 or 10 minutes. Think of these as mini blog posts — your chance to share a quick idea or observation with the rest of us. Last time, most presenters prepared a few slides to support their session, and most were also followed by a few minutes of Q&A, discussion and Skype chat.

• Open Questions. You’ll get 1 minute to ask the group a question, and then there will be 10 minutes of discussion. This is your chance to tap into the experience and expertise of the assembled agile experts.

If you would like to present or table a question, please join the mailing list and post your suggestion there. We’ll put the programme together early in the New Year, so please get your entries in early. Detailed intructions for participating in the call itself will only be posted on the mailing list, so even if you simply want to be in the “audience”, join the list now to avoid disappointment.

Adam Geras and I will be “producers” for this “stage” at Agile2008. Here are some notes.

I’m imagining a single room for the duration of the conference. We won’t have a huge number of sessions. (Problem: This stage has a specialized topic and few sessions. It is not the Testing Stage, though it’s a natural home for many types of testing sessions. Where do all the other worthy testing submissions go?)

Only the first half of the stage will have prescheduled sessions. The second half will be devoted to “repeat and request”.

Repeat: Since there will be many simultaneous events at the conference, some people will hear about a great Example session after it’s too late to go. Within our room, we’ll have flipcharts upon which people can write “Please repeat session X!” and “Yeah, please!” If there’s enough interest and a willing session organizer, the session will be repeated.

Request: We’ll have quite a few people floating around the conference who can show examples of technique X (not necessarily a testing technique). We’ll have more whiteboards where people can request sessions built around examples of techniques. This is somewhat like Open Space, but oriented toward showing rather than telling. For example, I’d be happy to show my graphical workflow tests in action—if people want to see it.

Take that a step further: I had been thinking of two types of submission: one that comes into the submission system while we passively wait, and one where we actively invite specific people to enter something into the system (or, possibly, simply invite them to come and do their thing). But why should our paying audience wait to see what other people want to push at them. I want our audience to pull by proposing sessions they’d like someone else to perform. Then it’s the producers’ job to find people who can satisfy the demand.

For example, suppose some people think a session on improv would be good, and they make that argument <somewhere>. Then it becomes my task to contact the three or four people I know who’ve done improv and get them to work up a proposal. (In fact, I’m going to do this without prompting.)

Another idea is “Reality Theatre.” As I’ve mentioned before, many groups can’t envision what a good standup or planning meeting is like, not just by reading descriptions in books. Similarly, the buzz and activity inside a good Agile team is palpable but hard to describe in print or by waving your hands around as you talk. So I would like the Example room to hold the world premieres of short documentaries of actual teams doing actual things. (Real video, edited, with expert commentary.) We may be able to provide some production assistance. Maybe we can get a company to donate prizes.

So that’s what I’m looking for: nothing that’s a safe bet. Watch this space for more.

Agile 2008 will be arranged around the metaphor of a music festival. There will be a main stage for the big-draw speakers, the larger tutorials for novices, etc.

I was asked to do a stage about testing that wouldn’t help shunt people into silos. (It shouldn’t be “the testing mini-conference”.) I decided the stage would take seriously the usefulness of explicit, concrete examples—executable or no—in the thinking about, construction, and post-construction investigation of software-ish things. Hence the logo:

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The 2007 winners of the Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice are Naresh Jain, for his work establishing user groups in India and for the Simple Design and Testing conference; and Jeff Patton, for his work helping establish what User Centered Design means in Agile (including the agile-usability group) and for being an example of the usefulness of being fluent in two fields (programming and UCD).

We also broke from our charter to create a new award—the Ward Cunningham Gentle Voice of Reason Award—and awarded it to Dale Emery for what he’s done on the XP and other mailing lists, and in person; and also for his work creating environments where change happens (rather than, as J.B. Rainsberger put it, “inflicting change on people”).

Join me in a warm round of applause…

(P.S. The similarity between this award’s graphic and my own four missing values poster is unfortunate. The Pask Award design came first, and I loved the image of ringing out the news. I hope the similarity isn’t interpreted to imply any other connection.)

                        CALL FOR PARTICIPATION (final)

    14th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP 2007)

      September 5-8, 2007 - Monticello, Illinois, USA
                   http://hillside.net/plop/2007/

                *Early Registration till 19th August*
        http://hillside.net/plop/2007/index.php?nav=registration

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The OOPSLA conference, originally about object-oriented programming, was the seedbed for a lot of the early conversations about Agile. It’s fallen on hard times these past several years. Now that object-oriented programming is ubiquitous; the easy patterns have been mined and the next step beyond pattern catalogs faltered; and Agile has gone off into its own conferences, OOPSLA has struggled to avoid just being the place where (1) academics go to present papers on making Java fast and (2) old comrades go for the yearly reunion.

That said, the Onward! track and the workshops remain happening places. You can say pretty edgy things—I still remember fondly the time one person said of my position paper that he’d shown it to his wife (a physician) and her opinion was that if I actually believed that, I was clinically insane. (Sadly, I don’t remember what position paper that was. Maybe I should be alarmed that it doesn’t stand out.) Even better: people will actually talk to you about your edgy ideas, help you refine them, help you make them useful. That happened to me a fair amount, so I’m grateful.

So I’d give OOPSLA a look. For exampe, here is a workshop about Agile methods in new contexts.

The people who run the No Fluff, Just Stuff conferences have a new one called The Agile Experience.

The Pragmatic Studio has a workshop:

The Pragmatic Studio is excited to announce the Agile Developer Studio, designed exclusively to help you and your teams succeed through agility.

In this three day workshop, you’ll learn what being agile is all about, by actually doing it! You’ll also learn how to transition your project or organization from conventional approaches to agile development practices that save time and money.

You’ll be expertly coached by Andy Hunt (of The Pragmatic Programmers) and Venkat Subramaniam, co-authors of “Practices of an Agile Developer”. Drawing from their vast project experience, they’ll help you become a better, more agile, developer.

I don’t have any personal experience with these events, but they’re from reputable people. (Not that any I didn’t mention aren’t!)

Agile2007 is almost sold out.