Developing Code, Connecting Industry

Day four at Agile 2009 was the last day for regular sessions. My morning started off with Coaching Self-Organizing Teams by Joseph Pelrine. This workshop was very interactive, and was littered with activities that Joseph was hoping would get us self-organizing ourselves. He proposed a number of hypotheses and defined five different states of a team’s flow using a cooking metaphor.

• Burning
• Cooking
• Cooling
• Gelling
• Solidifying

In order to move teams to the ideal “cooking” state, you need to control the amount of “heat” that you apply. Apply too much and your team will “burn” out. Don’t apply enough and they team will “cool”, and maybe start to turn into a “gel” where they become very constrained. Using his ABIDE principle he identified things you can do to control the heat, thus initiating change.

I went into Min-Gu Lee’s session on Executive Leadership Challenges for Agile Adoption with fairly high expectations. Unfortunately it geared itself towards the government sector or huge organizations riddled with bureaucratic overhead. Many of the things he mentioned could be applied or at least thought about in smaller companies, but I think most of it could be considered common sense.

I wanted to get as much information as I could on making feature teams function properly so I took in Andre Frank’s session Feature Teams – Collaboratively Building Products from Ready to Done. He gave an experience talk on how his company LiquidNet moved their Scrum teams down the feature team path. I think the title was a little bit misleading since the focus was more on the Scrum process they put together with little discussion around how they overcame challenges associated with feature teams.

Declan Whelan from my old stomping grounds of Guelph, Ontario gave an interesting talk, Learning is the Key to Agile Success: Building a Learning Culture on Your Agile Team. I was eager to see how Point2’s approach to creating this environment correlated with his findings. A lot of what he presented could be considered “touchy-feely”, or as Declan put it “all “rainbows and flowers”, but everything he said made sense.

Not getting into the details of the “rainbows and flowers”, he did speak of changes we made to facilitate this at Point2. Such things included changing the work environment, setting up workshops or study groups, implementing an e-forum, and making it a recurring process. He also recommended a number of books with one catching my attention called The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge.

The day was wrapped up with a banquet where they revealed an iPhone application that was built during the LiveAid sessions over the week (in which Ryan had a hand in). The application provides a way to make donations to Mano a Mano International, a charity for “creating partnerships with impoverished Bolivian communities that improve health and increase economic well-being.”

The keynote by Jared M. Spool titled The Dawning of the Age of Experience was awesome. The industry examples he used around Netflix, Apple, and Southwest Airlines made everything he said so clear. By the end of his talk it was obvious that all companies need an experience design to, “not build crap.”

That wrapped up Agile 2009 in Chicago, Illinois and I think I can speak for all of the Point2 crew that the experience was incredible. It was great to be around so many great minds in the software development industry and participate in the discussions they ignited. I came here with a goal of learning as much as I could from other attendees while passing on my experiences to others. I think I can leave Chicago feeling I did that.

By Hemant J. Naidu

Day three at Agile 2009 started off with the great experience report Shock Therapy: How to Bootstrap a Hyperproductive Team. This session was ran by Scott Downey an agile coach for 68 teams at MySpace, Bjorn Granvik, and Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland.

The three of them spoke about crucial criteria for achieving a hyperproductive state in a Scrum team. A few examples included implementing one week iterations, introducing a few non-negotiable rules (can only be changed if the team can provide a business reason for it), and a definitive meaning for done. They presented real world data of teams they had worked with that managed to reach this – a 240% minimum velocity increase. My only complaint about this session was that it was limited to 45 minutes.

My next stop was down the HR track hearing Esther Derby speak on the topic, Performance Without Appraisal-What to do about Performance Reviews. She had strong feelings that yearly performance reviews that rank or put people at certain levels are not effective. Research has shown that people are unable to gauge ways that they can improve with infrequent reviews that rank them.

Esther was certain that we could do better, arguing that constant feedback is the way to ensure people are growing and learning – feedback should be business as usual. It was great to see her making suggesting that Point2 has already adopted. She did a decent job of relating the subject matter to the software industry, and more specifically agile shops since they introduce different challenges. She also spoke about an interesting law.

The Law of Crappy Systems: a crappy system will inhibit the ability of the most talented person to perform brilliantly

Scaling Scrum with Feature Teams by Bas Voddewas a look at how to get multiple Scrum teams working on the highest priority items in the backlog. To get to this state Bas proposed that you need to change your component teams into feature teams that are able to work on any item in the backlog. Sound familiar? It should because this is exactly what we are trying to do at Point2. Bas says he has managed to scale this up to over 2000 people projects, so our instance is small in comparison, but the techniques are the same.

The only problem I had with his discussion was that he identified some of the major challenges (ones that we are currently facing at Point2) of making the transition, but no real concrete way of working through them. For example his solution to having multiple teams working on the same codebase could be remedied by using something like SVN merge. Another problem of reaching a level of collective code ownership over a large product was mentioned, but no real-world, take-away ideas were presented.

My afternoon was filled with a three hour workshop Getting People to Take Responsibility and Demonstrate Ownership led by Christopher Avery and Ashley Johnson The two of them explained the states of mind that all people experience when they are presented with a problem or crisis. The workshop provided techniques on how to identify when people (including yourself) enter these states of mind in hopes of moving past them.

The theory is that while you are in these states of mind you are completely unable to make responsible decisions – in essence, we are not very smart during these times. The point is to get to the responsible level as quickly as possible, and then solve the problem at hand. This workshop was excellent and I would recommend it to everyone. It applies to all aspects of life.

Following the daily sessions the Point2 crew went out for some Chicago Style pizza at Giordano’s. Ryan convinced us that we needed two fourteen inch pizzas between the five of us. Some of us disagreed with this estimate, but in the end we went with his plan. Needless to say none of us felt very good after eating the pizza. We nearly polished off the two pizza in their entirety, but at what price?

By Hemant J. Naidu