Lean-Agile Thinking : Agile

Agile 2009 – the venue

Mads — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:47:00 GMT

In this slice about the Agile 2009 venue, I will write about the city, the hotel and include some elements from the two keynotes.

I liked to be in Chicago, it is a pleasant city with a breathtaking skyline. People asked me a couple of times, if I needed any help when I tried to figure out where I was on my city map. It looked like the residents were quite relaxed and helpful. Not like in some other US cities I have visited. The hotel was ok, but not special. Most of the conference rooms were located in the basement, so I used many of the breaks to get up and out of the building to breath fresh air.

Back in time, there has been a lot of innovation in Chicago and the city plans and architecture are quite unique. In 1871 there was the big fire in Chicago, where 17,500 buildings were destroyed, many people got homeless and a large part of the city had to be rebuilt. Chicago also had another very special problem: It stood on swamp. Actually they changed the catastrophe into an opportunity and found an innovative solution to the swamp problem by constructing the world's first completely iron-and-steel-framed building. The skyscraper.

It is interesting to think about the reason behind inventing and constructing the skyscraper. They had a huge problem, and found an elegant solution to solve it. That's innovation! Maybe we could learn something about innovation by looking back at the invention of the first skyscraper?

In the second keynote at the Agile 2009 conference, Jared M. Spool talked about what it takes to build a design team that meets today's needs. Jared talked about how to integrate the needs from the users in the design process and not "just" build more software. "Unfortunately" he had several examples of companies using billions of $ on designs that did not deliver more business value. I think we often in the software community are more focused on delivering more software in a high effective way, than actually inventing the innovative solutions. The solution with the skyscraper was great, because it was a solution to a huge need after the big fire and the problem with the city on swamp. It was tomorrow's solution for today's problem.

We might find much more value by looking at why we build software rather than building more software faster and faster!

In the first keynote, Alistair Cockburn talked about agile being more main stream, the iceberg is melted down in the ocean. He also talked about how important it still was to have trust and effective communication. It was very entertaining, but I think there is still a long way to have agile out in the big enterprises.

Agile 2009 – the conference

Mads — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:58:00 GMT

This year, nearly 1400 attendees contributed to the second largest Agile conference in Chicago, USA. Next year the Agile 2010 conference will be in Nashville.

I have used some time to do some reflection about the conference. I also got back to a more stable internet connection (the internet connection at the conference hotel was not that stable…), so now it is time to do some more thinking and writing.

Instead of writing about all the sessions I attended, I thought it would be more interesting to slice the whole conference in different areas combining the many different viewpoints into some kind of context. If you are interested in all the sessions, you can find the complete program with all the sessions at www.agile2009.com.

I have selected to view the conference from the following 5 slices:

For the following days, I will post a new slice. In that way, I will try to incrementally create a more complete view of the conference and try to put the value from the sessions into a context. At least from my point of viewJ.

Stay tuned more to come.

Kanban and iterative development

Mads — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:41:00 GMT

One of the very efficient tools I have used for many years to do visible, focused and shared planning is to create a task board on a whiteboard. When working in an iterative process, like Scrum, it is a good way for the team together to plan the iteration, create tasks and share knowledge.

In this post I have different examples of task boards and Kanban boards.

Figure 1: Task board extended with a visible state for Review

Figure 2: Example of Task board (see the max limits on QA)

Figure 3: Another Task board with more review states

Figure 4: Web based Task board for a global team with integration to Microsoft Team System

Describing the process on a whiteboard and moving into a Kanban board.

Figure 5: The process on the initial kanban board

Figure 6: Kanban board implemented, already with improvements