Notes from a Tool User

TDD Randori Session

2008-10-08T16:58:58-04:00

We're ran out first TDD Randori session at lunch today (approx 15 attendees). I was inspired by Dave Nicolette's session at Agile 2008 and used the Danilo Santo's paper on their Brazilian Coding Dojo as a guide.

In a Randori we work as a group trying to solve a small problem using TDD:

There is one computer with the video output projected on a screen so all participants can see it.
Coding is done at the single computer by a pair of developers.
One half of the pair switches out every 5 or 10 minutes.
The pair on the keyboard should continuously explain what they are doing.
The pair on the keyboard should stop when someone from the audience falls off the sled — and only continue when that someone is back on track again.
The audience should give comments on design only when there is green bar. (During red bar audience can only ask questions)
The pair should not continue on writing new code if other participants are not happy with the current design (The code should be always well refactored before starting to write new code)
The pair will use TDD (Test-Driven Development).

I picked the problem based on a complaint I've heard from people after many of the TDD classes: "the examples are too trivial and don't speak to real world problems. I also hear that we don't enough chance to practice TDD"

For our initial example to trying working through we tried: Brian Marick's "A workbook for practicing test-driven design". The problem and sample code come from the world of Hierarchical Data Format (HDF), a library for storing large amounts of scientific data. Brian provides an initial simple implementation and then invites the reader to make some changes:

...
Add the ability to read and write unsigned 4-byte integers, something like:
```
dataset.defineMember(Like.unsignedInteger(4));
```
Add the ability to write arrays of Strings...
Surprise the PO changed their mind.

So far so good. In the 60 minutes of coding time we had we were able to make solve #2 with an elegant solution, but got hung up in #3. To introduce Strings we had to take a big step, much bigger than TDD would encourage. Net result we got caught in a bit of tangled mess and ran out of time before could tidy it up.

After the session we conducted a very short retrospective using happy and sad post it notes and dot voting (both from Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great).

In the Happy category we had:

Live Exercises are fun.
Talk about the advantages of TDD were good.
Good to go through an example with everyone and the discussion that was raised.
Excellent discussion of choices around refactoring
The example was good. Oddly enough this will be contradicted later on.
Initial Tests went well
Good Practical Introduction to TDD.

In the Sad category we had:

Just use a simple Java class and grow it using TDD.
The problem domain for the example was too abstract for most people and was hard to make sense of. Solution try a problem domain that people are familiar with i.e. Ron Jeffries Bowling game etc.
The Example required too much assistance and special knowledge from the moderator.
Start with no tests on an existing project.
Too much discussion from the audience.
The moderator (me) was too involved in the exercise. Solution maybe I shouldn't be moderator for these sessions.
Topics not directly related to the exercises should be parked. Oooppss. I've was so focused on the content I forgot to put up a parking lot.
Let people make mistakes.
The pilot and co-pilot were often too quiet
A separate high level introduction to TDD and its advantages was requested.
We ran out of PIZZA. 2 extra large pizzas will not feed 15 people.

Going Forward

A single session will not hone anyone's TDD (nor my moderation) skills. I suggest that we continue to meet in the future (every two weeks). For the next session I will find a smaller problem - perhaps a few classes of untested code. We can set the goal testing it, simplifying it and making changes as requested by a mythical product owner.

Beyond this it would be useful to have sessions that focus on: Mocks, Test Doubles, GUI's (Presenter First?), Web Apps, Databases?, other real world problems that teams are encountering as part of TDD. Test Driven: Lasse Koskela is an excellent source book for ideas in this area.

BTW Brian's HDF workbook is an interesting problem I just wouldn't expect to tackle it 60 minutes of coding time.

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Agile 2008 Post Roundup

2008-10-06T15:07:04-04:00

I keep on stumbling across posts about Agile 2008 and thought it might be worth sharing.

Karl Scotland: Agile Business Conference 2008 Review, Agile 2008 - Wednesday, Agile 2008 - Thursday, Agile 2008 - Friday

Lyssa Adkins: Deep Learning at Agile 2008

Eugene Nizker: 7 Agile Leadership Lessons for the Suits

Jeff Sutherland: Agile 2008 - Money For Nothing and Secret Sauce for Distributed Scrum

Gerry Kirk: Money For Nothing: Deliver More Value For Your Client (And You); We do Agile, but Where is the Quality?; Effective Pairing: Good, Bad and the Ugly and Challenges Distributed Agile Teams Face, and Ways to Overcome Them

Luke Hohmann: Agile-08 Repeat Performance and Slides

David Anderson: Future Directions for Agile (from Agile 2008)

Machiel Groeneveld: Agile 2008 - ideas and inspiration

Ryan Shriver: Thoughts on Agile 2008

Richard Durnall: Reflections on Agile 2008

Artem Marchenko: Trends in the world of Agile: Notes after Agile 2008

Kent McDonald: Agile 2008 – Starting out With The Best of Intentions; Agile 2008 - Solving problems requires asking the right questions.; Agile 2008 – Define Roles as Who Decides What, Not Who Does What; Agile 2008 – What simulations can teach us about our decision making process and Agile 2008 – Clearing the bridge on the move to agile – how to apply focus to removing obstacles.

Jason Mawdsley: Agile 2008 - Part II, Agile 2008 - Part III, Agile 2008 - Part IV and Agile 2008 - Part V

Agile Tools (no name?): Agile 2008 - Day 2, Agile 2008 - Day 3, Agile 2008 - Day 4 and surprisingly: Agile 2008 - Day 5

Lisa Crispin: Back from Agile 2008 - what did I learn?

Clinton Keith: Agile 2008 Conference

Gojko Adzic: James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds, Henrik Kniberg: 10 ways to screw up despite Scrum and XP, Aslak Hellesøy: Executable User Stories with RSpec and BDD, Marry Poppendieck: The elephant in the room, Robert C. Martin: Quintessence, Marcus Evans: the FrAgile organisation and Agile 2008: the end

Mishkin Berteig: First Day of Agile 2008 Conference

Ade Miller: Agile 2008 - Distributed Agile, Agile 2008 - Conway’s Law and Distributed Teams, Agile 2008 - Industrial Logic’s Agile eLearning, Agile 2008 - Something is wrong but why?, Agile 2008 - Scrum and Kanban, Agile 2008 - One Hundred Days of Continuous Integration

Pascal Van Cauwenberghe: Agile2008 - Opening, Agile 2008 - Tuesday sessions, Agile 2008 - Wednesday morning, Agile 2008 - Wednesday afternoon pt. 1, Agile 2008 - Wednesday afternoon pt. 2, Agile 2008 - Thursday, Agile 2008 - Friday pt. 1, Agile 2008 - Alan Cooper keynote, Agile 2008 - Final sessions, leaving Toronto, The Business Value Game: v1.0 released

Dave Hoover: Uncle Bob On Craftsmanship At Agile 2008, Craftsmanship over Heroics

Damon Poole: Deep Agile 2008 - Not as Easy as You Thought!

Josh Sherwood: Agile 2008 - Agile Skeptic?

Johannes Link: Sleepless in Toronto

Eric Lefevre: The Pomodoro Technique: can you focus - really focus - for 25 minutes?, Craftsmanship over Execution

Valtech French Blog

Danilo Sato: Learning Kaizen from Toyota, New Product Development @ Toyota, Starting a Kanban System for Software Engineering with Value Stream Maps and Theory of Constraints, Come and Take it! Lean Pull Applied, Expanding Agile: the Five Dimensions of Systems, Coding Dojo @ Agile 2008, My Agile 2008

David Starr: My Life in a Bush of Legacy Code – Michael Feathers and Value Stream Mapping.

MSDNRSS (clearly wants to remain anonymous): A summary of an Agile 2008 summary

Gatorxero (why can't people use their real names?): Questioning Agile with Scott Barber

Eric Babinet and Rajani Ramanathan: Dependency Management in a Large Agile Organization

James Shiell: Agile 2008, The Wisdom of Crowds, Agile Game Development, Hiring for an Agile team, XP - J. B. Rainsberger's Greatest Misses and Embrace Uncertainty.

Michael Tardiff: Feeling Agile

Raghav Ramesh: Agile2008

Allan Shalloway: Time for Agility to Truly Come of Age – Reflections on Agile 2008

My own efforts:

Agile 2008 a Personal Retrospective and on InfoQ: Agile Alliance Functional Test Workshop

Coaching Self Organizing Teams and Part Two (Joseph Pelrine)

Touchy Feely Impediments to Agile Adoption (Amr Elssamadisy)

Beginner's Mind - An Approach to Listening (Jean Tabaka and David Hussman)

Overcoming Resistance to Change (Dave Nicolette and Lasse Koskela)

I'm sure there's lots I've missed - but after crawling through the top 200 results on google et al, I've had enough.

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Miscellany - nuggets

2008-09-19T13:29:48-04:00

Shmula does a great job of putting the Theory of Constraintsto good use examining fast food production. Its a fun to hone our understanding Goldratt's work - while thinking outside our normal problem domain.

In Do Not Run From Your Customers Shmula writes again on Semco, the Brazilian company documented in the book: Maverick. "...amazing job at Participative Management and in eliminating fear and mediocrity in the workplace"

James Shore: Watch Out For These Common Problems - quick list of problems he sees in implementing Agile. Sounds like I need to update my Scrum Smells to cover these.

Finally there is Dan North's Let your examples flow - which questions whether its more important for you remove all duplication in your test code or let it flow.

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So many shiny smart phones - which one to pick?

2008-09-15T14:48:42-04:00

For a whole bunch of reasons I've decided to buy a smart phone and pay the usurious rates for mobile use that the big carriers charge. I've discovered that there doesn't seem to be any good forum to discuss what options are open to Canadian's at the moment.

My needs are:

Email (currently my domain is hosted google apps - in a pinch I could become an exchange user).
Good (at least better than adequate) web browsing.
Battery life - needs to last the day
Good phone
Calendaring support
Keyboard - I expect write some emails but not it won't be my bread and butter
Wifi support - where possible I want to save money and get better performance
GPS is cute - but I usually have a very good idea of where I'm.

At least until the end of the month the choice of carrier becomes very easy. Roger's is offering 6/GB of data for $30 a mth. That's on top of an already expensive voice package - but at least you don't risk being billed by the megabyte for checking something out on a website.

Phone	IPhone	Blackberry Bold	Nokia N95-4	HTC TyTN	Motorola Q9h	Palm Treo 750	Palm Centro Smartphone	HP iPAQ hw6955
Screen Size	320x480 pixels - 3.5 inch	480x320 pixels. 2.6 inch.	240x320 pixels 2.8 inch		320x240 pixels 2.5 inches		320x320 pixels 2.25 inches

Wifi Support	Yes	Yes	Yes		???
Links to reviews	Mobile Tech, CNet	APC Mag "Definitive Review", Boy Genius,CTV	Mobile Tech,	Positively ancient	CNET	Too old to be worthwhile	Mobile Tech	Too old to be worthwhile

Notes

I didn't include price since its largely irrelevant over the life of the contract.
Why doesn't Roger's have the most recent phones from Palm, HP and HTC? They would all make serious contenders.

After talking to a few friends everything but the IPhone and Blackberry Bold were eliminated - too little screen real estate to be useful web browsers. Boy Genius has a comparison of both phones and concludes by saying: "The honest truth is that if we had to use only one of the two devices, we’d be happy enough with whichever one you gave us. We could deal with the email shortcomings on the iPhone, and we could deal with the improved but not incredible browser on the Bold. It really comes down to what you need more in a phone."

At this stage I think it will be the IPhone because of the incredible number of add-on apps that are available already. That said I was pleasantly surprised by how well the Palm Centro did in the reviews.

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Sony Compact Flash Card What a Mess

2008-09-09T08:46:21-04:00

About a month and half ago I thought I would treat my new D300 to 4GB compact flash card so I could go more than a couple of days without having to download photos from my existing card. I just happened to be wandering through Best Buy (which is located on one of Ottawa’s busiest and slowest roads) and where I stumbled across a Sony 4GB x133 (yes you can get faster cards – but it suits my needs) for a great price.

Returning home I swapped out my trusty Kingston 2GB x50 card and dropped in the Sony. Over the next few days I went burning through images at my usual rate. About a week later I went to download the images from the card and was shocked to discover Windows warning me that there were problems with the file system. It appears 16 of the 100+ images were missing or corrupt. Nutsss. I booted up Photo Rescue (thanks to Michael Reichmann for the recommendation) and was able to recover a few.

A few weeks later I again ventured down Merivale (its only 5km from our house, but it almost always takes 20 min and a dollar of gas) to Best Buy to replace the card. Again I was given a new Sony 4GB card. Right after I got home I headed off to Agile 2008 and so didn’t a have a chance to test the card. Yesterday, just before the start of our vacation I decided to test the new card to make sure that I didn’t lose any more images courtesy of Sony. Funnily enough it takes more than a few minutes to fill 4GB even with a D300. Sure enough when I went to download the images Windows reported that the file system was corrupt. Again the card appeared to have lost 15% of the images. Luckily this time they were just pictures of the kitchen and living room. Thinking maybe a low-level windows format of the card might help I gave that a try. Yet again I went through the process of filling the card with images. Yet again Windows reported problems with the file system.

I know its not the camera – it works brilliantly with my trusty Kingston card. So it has to be Sony. Arrrrgggghhhhhh. Now I face a two week vacation with only a 2 GB CF card and another painful slog down Merivale to replace it.

At this stage I can only assume that Best Buy on Merivale got a dud batch of CF cards from Sony (unless these cards are phony). If you’re from Sony and you want to help solve this problem all I want is 4GB x133 CF card that works without having the hassle of driving down Merivale. If you’re from Best Buy you could offer me a refund.

This rant brought to you by poor Quality Control.

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Agile 2008 a Personal Retrospective

2008-09-03T14:04:07-04:00

This was my second Agile conference and I was pleasantly surprised at just how well it went. For a gathering of 1600 people I was pleasantly surprised at how intimate it can be, I kept on running into many of the same people again and again.

I already wrote about my top sessions for InfoQ so I will just link to them instead of repeating myself here:

Agile Alliance Functional Test Workshop

Coaching Self Organizing Teams and Part Two (Joseph Pelrine)

Touchy Feely Impediments to Agile Adoption (Amr Elssamadisy)

Beginner's Mind - An Approach to Listening (Jean Tabaka and David Hussman)

Overcoming Resistance to Change (Dave Nicolette and Lasse Koskela)

Following JB's lead, I will do a short, short retrospective:

Worked Well

Open Space - I didn't use it as intended - for me it was a great place to check email and as a result bump into people. Please keep it big and central.
Great Quality Sessions - the submissions system idea really worked well, you know maybe this whole Wisdom of Crowds thing has legs. Seriously this worked really well.
Pre planning my sessions in the week before I was able to avoid caring the conference program book around.
Posting the day's conference Agenda once in every area meant that I was never confused about finding my next session.

Needs Improvement

Wireless access was slow.
Internet access from hotel rooms should be part of the negotiated deal.
Hotel was insanely expensive - my pre-conference breakfast of eggs, coffee and orange juice was $30. Nuts.
Hotel food for meals and snacks was very heavy on carbs and light on the protein.
Coffee - I've got insanely high expectations here
Overlap between three hour and ninety minute sessions - many long sessions lost half their attendees after the break. Net result the quality of the conversation suffered.

Suggestions

Better wireless Internet access
Provide wired Internet access in the open space and other key areas
Food - more protein options, berries and vegetables for snacks.
More of the conference rooms in one area
Film every session and make them accessible via the web after the fact. Make access to that part of our conference fees. If you didn't attend the conference then you can buy access to the sessions for $200-300 after the fact.
Provide family events every day. This will especially important in 2011 when the conference is in Europe. There needs to be something for family members with young kids to do while there spouses are at sessions.

What did you like about the conference? What needs improvement? Please share.

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Meeting Ground Rules Updated

2008-08-14T16:40:34-04:00

At Agile 2007, I attended Jean Tabaka's (author of Collaboration Explained) session "Why I don't like Monday's", among other things she recommended establishing some ground rules for your team meetings. At the time my team created the following set:

No email or surfing the web.
No side conversations (via IM etc)
No cellphones or blackberries
Join the meeting on time

At this year's conferences in a session entitled "Beginner's Mind"- Jean mentioned a couple of new ground rules that she offers to teams for consideration:

Focus on the "Art of the Possible" – what could possible work here – the goal is open minds and replace conversations around that could never work here.
"But's are ugly" – we drop the word the use of the word but – which leads to more conversations like 'and we could try that'.

Finally we should be aware that the question: "Are there any other questions" (a yes/no question) is the fastest way to shut down questioning. Instead try asking open ended questions like: "What else?" or "What other questions do you have"? are very different. They are very open. Staying with these two open styles of questions and allowing silence for up to 10 seconds can provide a nice nudge toward further information.

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Coaching Self Organizing Teams

2008-08-07T01:00:46-04:00

In the best session I’ve attended at Agile 2008 Joseph Pelrine talked about some of the ideas and science around self organization teams. The talk has an excellent subtitle “Hard science for soft skills”. I’ve already covered some of the presentation and exercises on InfoQ so I won’t repeat that here. Instead I will focus on the additional material we covered.

Conflict

Based on the work of his partner Ben Fuchs. In an attempt to suss out our differing definitions of conflict we were asked:

So when you think of conflict in your environment, what do you think of?

Do you see it as threatening?

Is it struggle between right and wrong, good and evil?

Or is it the struggle for intimacy?

Is it a natural consequence of differences and opportunity to deepen
relationships?

Is it evidence that our social and power structures are distorted and not in
harmony?

Does it prove that our group is healthy enough to engage with differences

Perhaps it is a synchronous and meaningful signal that something in the wider system needs attention?

How does the experience of conflict feel to you? Is it painful, frightening, or
perhaps a little exciting?

Within our small group there was a surprising range of difference where some thought a little conflict was necessary and good to grow, while others thought all conflict was bad. Joseph used the analogy of a soccer coach and team to illustrate how a little conflict can help push the entire team to a higher level. A soccer team has 24 team members only 11 of whom will play in any given game. The result competition and conflict pushes people to both greater individual and team performance.

When conflict happens its important to recognize that there three levels of conflict:

Pre conventional – primitive feels of fight or flight that evolved to handle life threatening events.
Conventional – personal identity and sense of self – likely evoked when “personal values and beliefs, self-esteem or rank” are at issue.
Post conventional – threats beyond the individual to the group that the person is involved in.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow Model (Revised)

Skills vs. Challenges – we were challenged to think about various tasks and see where the map into the diagram. Do we spend our time in Boredom, Flow, Control, …? For instance if we’re programming in a new language and using to solve a non trivial problem then we will find ourselves either in Anxiety or Arousal. If we’re doing complex tasks that we no longer find challenging then we’re in Boredom or Relaxation. As we think about teams and team members we can consider where do they fit on the circle for specific tasks. If we see people in Anxiety or Arousal then we should consider what can we do to help move them towards Flow and Control – so that the project will be in a safer place. Conversely if they’re Bored or Relaxed then we need to consider how to challenge them to help move their performance around the circle.

Power bases

Reward power - you give someone reward power if you believe that someone will do something good for you.
Coercive power - you give someone, if you believe that someone can do you harm
Legitimate power - explicit (work), implicit (children) contract - mix of reward and coercive
Expert Power - on the basis of your belief in someone's expertise.
Referent power - based on their personal integrity example: Ghandi, Mandella, Dalai Lama, ...

Which power bases can you raise?

Expert power - learn, professional development
Referent power - be open, honest, deliver on your promises.

Tidbits

If you make the interpretation then you have to accept to the conclusions. If you have people who are having troubling accepting the conclusion then you have to get them to do the interpretation.

You have to listen for weak signals - not all problems that teams have are obvious.

Baseball bat – apparently from Ron J.

First time person does something - explain the effect of the behaviour on the team
Second time - explain the effect on themselves.
Third time - implement it on them aka the baseball bat/rolled up newspaper.

Now turn the model on its head - why should the person change? If the behaviour violates the team norms under some circumstances the team will adapt. Either the team will adapt or the person will. In many cases instead of intervening step back and let the team sort the issue out: maybe the team will regroup around this person to protect.

J's law of groups - groups larger than seven tend to sub-divide when you add the eighth person. In part this happens because the number of communication channels grow too large for the group to handle.

In addition when the group organisation changes (adding/removing members) all the relationships need to be renegotiated. So if change of team membership must happen its better to get it all out the way at once. For the same reasons groups must reform as per the Tuckman.

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Multiple Returns from a Single Method

2008-08-03T22:57:57-04:00

It’s funny just about the only thing anyone really objected to from my recent post on Minimal Coding Style was multiple return statements.

Lets start by looking back to where this idea stems from. As best I can tell objections to multiple returns stem from Dijkstra's 1968 paper “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”. From David Tribble who has written a Retrospective on the letter, from the introduction:

This paper was written at a time when the accepted way of programming was to code iterative loops, if-thens, and other control structures by hand using goto statements. Most programming languages of the time did not support the basic control flow statements that we take for granted today, or only provided very limited forms of them. Dijkstra did not mean that all uses of goto were bad, but rather that superior control structures should exist that, when used properly, would eliminate most of the uses of goto popular at the time. Dijkstra still allowed for the use of goto for more complicated programming control structures.

Here is what I believe about methods:

Short, Short, Short – at most one screen long – anything more requires the reader to scroll up and down to understand the code.
Do only one thing – for the ultimate anti example of this: Munger (MacOS 7/8/9) the swiss army knife of memory allocation that did different things depending on the combination of parameters. Note the linked article doesn’t describe a fraction of what Munger did. Be afraid.
Have descriptive (but not verbose) name.
Be simple and easy for the maintainer to read – this implies reducing the complexity of the control structures.

Some reasons I dislike the single exit argument:

If there are cases that aren’t applicable (invalid method arguments, …) I like to exit the method early to avoid additional indentation.
Without early exits we have to keep track of whether each additional branch was intended to execute.
Without early exits the ‘result’ might accidentally get changed, meaning the wrong value is returned.
If more code is added later it might accidentally get run even though its author intended the method to be finished.
If you need to clean up use a try/finally block since even early returns pass through finally blocks.
If multiple return statements make a method hard to read then the method is probably too large. In addition most IDE’s will allow you to highlight the control statements in any colour you need to make them visible.

More than a few other people have written on this in recent years: Bruce Eckel, Java Think (Taylor Gauthier), Java Basics, Peter Ritchie.

Do the person reading your code in the future a favour. Use early return statements to minimize the complexity in your code.

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Agile 2008 Thursday and Friday Sessions to attend

2008-07-31T20:33:59-04:00

...ok I'm running out of steam here, this one will have little in the of extra notes sorry.

8:30 - 10:00

Using Agile engineering tools and practices to achieve Organizational Change: Christian Gruber "Christian will examine these practices, their effects, and provide examples where such a grass-roots approach helped convince management to support or pilot fully agile approaches. He will also provide counter-examples and anti-patterns which can often lead to such an effort being blocked. Attendees should leave better armed to start practising “stealth agile” but with a mind to ultimately demonstrating its value and shifting the organization." Been there, tried that.

Creating Cultures Where Agile Emerges: Pollyanna Pixton - "Agile practices emerge in a collaborative environment. As the leader on several projects, I saw the emergence of iterative development, test first, evolving functional specs, pair programming, minimal documentation, and customer involvement at every step of the way. Successful tools to create this environment cover creating an open environment, bringing the right experience, skills, and thinkers together, how to stimulate and foster the free flow of ideas, and letting people to decide what they want to do and by when (self-accountability). Tools to lead collaboration will also be introduced." Its three hours.

Refactoring of Cultural Smells: Orit Hazzan and Yael Dubinsky - "The participants become familiar with patterns of cultural smells and appropriate refactoring activities, and are guided to check their fitness for their organizations as well as to develop new ones." As many will know this is right up my Alley.

Beginner's Mind--The Zen of Agile: David Hussman and Jean Tabaka - "We believe that if teams don’t stay in the moment, look below the surface at the here and now, and maintain openness and wonderment, they will ultimately adopt a fake Agile and fail in their adoption. They will kill the whole intent of Agile for software teams; that is, they will miss the maturation and growth born of team and self inspection and adaption without judgment and without adherence to pre-conceived notions of some gross-level Agile practices." Its three hours.

10:30 - 12:00

From High-performing to Hyper-performing Agile teams Facilitator: Gabrielle Benefield - Panel: Jeff Sutherland, Rob Mee, Jason Titus

Measuring Agile in the Enterprise: 5 Success Factors for Large-Scale Agile Adoption Michael Mah

Good Virus / Bad Virus: How Organization Culture Impacts Agile Adoptions (and Vice Versa) Michael Spayd "Research shows culture is the single most important factor in organizational success. Four culture types have been identified: Control, Collaboration, Competence, and Cultivation. This session explores how Agile fits within each, including when it synergizes with the culture’s natural tendencies, and when like a virus it spreads unwanted “germs”, undermining the natural balance. With this context, we explore how Agile can change cultures, when it is advisable to try to do so, and how to make the best of the corporate culture you find yourself in."

The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach: Lyssa Adkins a workshop "We will reveal and discuss the essential mindset shifts a Project Manager must undertake to become an effective Agile coach. We will talk about how that leads to changes in actions and changes in conversations and decision-making — both within your team and with the external world. We will look at the latest thinking on highly-collaborative and high-performing teams and consider our own actions relative to fostering such teams"

I'm leaning towards David and Jean's workshop - my thinking I learned a ton from Jean last year with "Why I don't like Monday's".

14:00 - 15:30

"We suck less!" Isn't mediocrity great?: David Douglas and Robin Dymond - "There are two fundamental problems with the current state of Agile adoption: 1: Companies suck less than we did before and that is acceptable 2: Most companies are blind to the game changing benefits of pursuing excellence in Agile organization"

Use-Case Recording: Testing a rich client UI by recording in a domain-specific language: Geoff Bache - "Which is all very well, but how can we get around the brittleness that has plagued automated UI tests in the past? A key is to address the form in which the tests are recorded - how they identify what is being done with the GUI. Once upon a time this was the screen mechanics - click on pixel 124,21 - and the tests broke as soon as you ran with different monitor settings. Now it’s usually the GUI toolkit mechanics - find this JTable and click in the third cell of the second row. But what if we ended up recording intent instead of mechanics - in a domain language?"

Artful Making for Agile Teams: Lee Devin and Stacia Broderick "We all know folks who seem to be naturally creative, outrageously productive, somehow able to do things we can’t do. We call them “talented,” “artistic,” “super intelligent,” or some other word that means they’ve got an inherent ability that we don’t have. Thing is, most of what we call talent is actually skill, and can be learned. Not only can it be learned (by you), but it can be practiced, and you can get better at it with practice."

Probably Use Case recording - since this might be a valuable technique for a team I know

16:00 - 17:30

Touchy-feely Impediments to Agile Adoption: Amr Elssamadisy - why do some Agile Adoptions fail? Amr explores.

Colossal, Scattered, and Chaotic (Planning with a Large Distributed Team): Wes Williams and Mike Stout

For Agile Leaders Only -- Exploring the "Hard Bits": Bob Galen - "This session is for any Agile coach or leader who is facing challenges and looking for creative ways for facing them. In this practical session we hope to do two things. First, mine some of the hardest, real-world problems that attending Scrum Masters and other Agile Leaders have faced within their teams."

What Are They Doing? What A CIO Wants To Know From An Agile Development Team: Niel Nickolaisen

I'm going with Amr's and will have to ping Wes and Niel for their slides/notes.

Friday 8:30 - 10:00

Acceptance Testing Clinic: FitNesse: Micah Martin

Style and Taste in Writing FIT Documents: Mike Hill and Steve Freeman

Dude, Where's Our Release Plan?: David Hussman

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