A prioritized user story backlog helps to understand what to do next, but is a difficult tool for understanding what your whole system is intended to do. A user story map arranges user stories into a useful model to help understand the functionality of the system, identify holes and omissions in your backlog, and effectively plan holistic releases that delivery value to users and business with each release.

How do you know you are ready to start iterating? In some cases, very little is needed before the first iteration. In other cases, rushing to iterate (because you were told to) can lead to weeks of time wasted overly focused on delivering a poorly understood product.

In this presentation by David Hussman titled Getting Ready to Produce at Agile Mumbai 2010 Conference, David provides concrete tools for discovering your product context and assessing whether you are ready to start building and / or iterating. Participants learned tools for defining how much process you need and tools for truly understanding what you are building and why, as well as who will use it, why they will (or will not) use it and why.

10 years after the introduction of agile methods, many communities are succeeding in their adoption while others are struggling or failing. Why? Many struggle because agile methods were introduced in an overly prescriptive manner. People were told to follow a set of practices instead of learning to use the agile practices and values to amplify their existing strengths and address their challenges.

In this talk, David Hussman shares successful coaching techniques he uses to grow sustainable agility that lasts beyond the early iterations or the first few agile projects. David begins with a series of tools to help you build a solid foundation: assessments, pragmatic practice selection, chartering and product planning tools. He then moves on to discuss ideas for finding a groove of discover and delivery that is best suited to your project community.

As a full time working coach, David uses coaching stories and experiences to discuss establishing strong cadence while also building the essence of coaching and coaches in your community Whether you are new to agile methods or you are a seasoned players, this session will help you grow your coaching skills and your ability to truly discover and deliver real value.

At the Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, Jann Thomas discusses and identifies ways in which agile enablers can facilitate the transition to Agile practices. She covered basic Agile practices as well as techniques for introducing them to the software delivery team. She also presents common software delivery problems and the Agile path to solutions.

J B Rainsberger & Naresh Jain share their experience on coaching agile teams. They present:

1. How to apply Theory of Constraint [ToC] to identify the bottlenecks or issues the teams are facing during their agile adoption?
2. Once we identify the bottleneck, how we delivered knowledge and experience to the teams, just in time to apply that knowledge to eliminate the bottleneck, using the Just-In-Time practice concept?

This 90 mins workshop was presented at the Agile Mumbai 2010 and Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference.

Usually when I’m wrapping up my 3 day TDD Workshop, I make it clear to the participants that they will have to deliberately practice, every single day, for a few years, to get better at TDD. In addition to practicing on their own, on pet projects and on production code, I also suggest they take 2 hrs every week on a fixed day of the week, as a whole team, to practice Test-Driving (TDD) the same problem as a team. During these sessions, I strongly recommend people practice Pair programming also.

Logistics: Before the meeting, one of the team member sends out the problem to everyone. On practice day, the whole team gathers in a conference room/team area, picks a pair, sets aside 90 mins to TDD the problem. After 90 mins, few pairs do a quick code walk-thru and explain their solution with important decisions they made during the session. Followed by an open discussion. I also recommend everyone checks-in their code in some common repository, so it can be used for reference by others.

Sample Problems: Next big question is, what problems do we use for Test Driving?

Usually I recommend starting with simple programs like:

• Games – Tic-Tac-Toe, Snakes and Ladders, etc
• Utility Programs – Convert Roman Numerals to Decimals, Diff 2 files, etc

Once you’ve done enough of simple programs, then I would suggest you take some large design problems from DesignFest and try TDD on them. The beauty of these problems is, they are quite big, can take up-to a week to finish it completely. Now we are talking real world, where

• We have limited time to solve/program large complex problems which needs to be simplified.
• Try to find a relevant System Metaphor that can help you visualize the design
• Do a quick and dirty, low-fi Interaction Design to understand how the user will use this
• Identify and prioritize the crux of the problem, figure out what is the most important, what will give us fastest feedback
• Further thin-slice the identified piece of functionality and
• Then try TDDing it.

This will truly help you get better at:

• Evolutionary Design
• System Metaphor
• Low Fidelity Interaction Design
• Thin Slicing
• Prioritization
• Divide and Conquer – Simplify large problems by breaking them down
• Eliminating Accidental and (to some extent) Essential complexity (Embrace Simplicity)

Deliberately practicing this way for a few years, even though you are practicing TDD on your production project, will really help you appreciate the depth and benefit of this approach to development.

Every week, I continue to receive several email from training departments from companies asking:

We are planning to roll-out Agile to our whole organization next week. Can you please provide me with the following information by end of today:

• Detailed course outline to train the whole organization on Agile.
• Detailed course outline to train our internal trainers on advanced Agile topics.
• Availability of a coach who can work with our internal coaches to roll out Agile to our organization.

Also please let me know how much this is going to cost exactly.

This is worst than a fixed-bid project (fixed-cost, fixed scope & fixed time). At least there you have some context based on the thick-spec they give out.

I usually respond saying:

I apologize in advance, my response might sound a little harsh.

I’m sure you can find few people in India who can provide you with the services that you are looking for. But let me give you some context so you understand the nature of the risk you are taking.

Every week, I get at least one such email from a company who wants to adopt Agile method. They want a pre-packaged courseware (in-person or elearning) that can be rolled out to all their employees. And they hope they can get a good coach in India who can guide their organization.

Personally I always advice companies not to go down this road. Very few companies pay attention to my advice. Others go ahead with this approach. They shop around for the best deal they can get. They hire an “Agile” training company. Invest Lakhs of Rs in training. Spent a lot of energy and effort in trying to make this work. Take a productivity hit on projects and so on. And after 6 – 12 months they came back saying: “This Agile thing does not work. We invested so much, but there is no improvement. In fact our organization is worse off“.

Let me explain why this is the most inefficient way to invest money, time and effort. First and foremost, one needs to understand that Agile is not a thing that one can learn in a 2-5 day class. Agile is a very broad & deep topic. Its not about doing a set of practices, nor is it just a process change, its a cultural, organizational change. It changes (or at least challenges) fundamentally how people build software.

Without studying an organization, their pain points, nature of their work, aspirations of the team members, other constraints under which they operate, etc. .i.e. without the knowledge of the organizational context, any training done on subjects like this, IMHO will do more harm than good. Any general, prescriptive advice on this subject is fundamentally wrong. Any overview session is too vague for people to relate to. Guidance on such matters has to be grounded in contextual land.

I touch on some of these points in the following presentation:

Before going ahead with this window shopping approach, my suggestion would be, get a practitioner to spend a couple of days in your organization, do a small assessment of the situation on ground, collaboratively put a small roadmap together about how you want to handle this change, based on that figure out what training (if any) is required, understand how would you position this to the management and the development teams and so on.

BTW, if your organization has excess money in their bank account and have a few years to waste, I can send you a few course outlines, some profiles of trainings & coaches and their per day rates. I have a dozen of those.

Format: Open Space

Who Should Attend? Today, in India, I believe we have many Agile coaches (internal and external, more internal coaches). If you are helping to bring Agile/Lean/Light-Weight thinking into your company, you are playing the Agile coach role (you like it or not). You could be in the leadership role doing this or you could have taken the ownership and facilitating/influencing your team. While doing so, we all need a lot of help, advice and reassurance of our strategies. This is what you can expect at this conference.

Agenda: Each day we start at 9:00 AM and end at 5:30 PM.

Each Day:

• Lightning Talks (1 hr)
• Opening the Space (30 mins)
• Creating the agenda (30 mins)
• Break-out sessions (5 hrs)
• Closing the Space / Retrospective (30 mins)
• Social Outing (optional)

Budget:

• We plan to hire the main hall for 2 days. Each day cost is roughly about 10,000 Rs. For 2 days it would be about 20,000 Rs.
• Lunch + Tea/Cofee Breaks would cost 200 Rs per person.
• Venue has good A/C accommodation. Its Rs 1500 per day for single room and Rs 1800 for double room.

(Please note that this is a special discount rate for Goa University.)

I’m expecting about 25 people to show up.

So basically each individual will be spending about:

• 3000 Rs for the room
• 400 Rs for food
• max 1000 Rs for the hall
• Evening outing: up to the individual

(if we find a sponsor, then the cost of the hall and food will be absorbed by the sponsor.)

Prep Work: Answers to the following questions will facilitate the following:

• help us come more prepared for the Coach Camp
• get a sense of the quality of the participants
• start some knowledge sharing amongst the group
• set certain context and potential topics for further discussion at the Coach Camp

We’ll confirm your participation on successful completion & submission of this form. The sooner you submit the form, the sooner we can confirm your participation.

*Dead line to submit the form: 22nd March 2010.

At the Agile India 2010 conference, there was a lot of interest for agile coaching in India.

Today, in India, I believe we have many Agile coaches (internal and external, more internal coaches). If you are helping bring Agile/Lean/Light-Weight thinking into your company, you are playing the Agile coach role (you like it or not). You could be in the leadership role doing this or you could have taken the ownership and facilitating/influencing your team. While doing so, we all need a lot of help, advice and reassurance of our strategies. To facilitate this, help people network and to push the boundaries of Agile, in 2008, Deb and I created the first Agile Coach Camp in US.

In the past I’ve considered doing something similar in India, but always felt we’ve not reached the point yet. Now (esp. after the agile india 2010 conference), I feel we might be at this point.

So if you are interested in participating in a 2 day invitation only, all open-space based conference, over a weekend in March/April, inform me by filling out the following form:

Also please vote for which city you would like to have the conference in:

And what dates work best for you?

What word/phrase comes to your mind when you think of Mastery?

Definitions of Mastery on the Web:

• Command: great skillfulness and knowledge of some subject or activity
• Domination: power to dominate or defeat
• The act of mastering or subordinating someone
• The position or authority of a master; dominion; command; supremacy; superiority; victory; triumph; preeminence
• Highest development in any band of the Great Continuum of Consciousness, where an initiate is Divinely empowered to minister to you and guide you
• The acquisition or the process of acquiring proficiency in an aspect
• Possession of consummate (complete) skill
• The status of Master or Ruler; Dominion; Control
• Full command of some subject or study

When I think of Mastery following words come to my mind:

• Effortlessness (easy with which a master can do/accomplish something)
• Joy & Pride (enjoyable experience worth sharing with others)

In my experience, when I’ve watched a master at work, they take pride in their work, make it enjoyable and make it look like its was smooth and effortless, even if you and I would think of it as complex or mundane (boring). A master exhibits no sense of frustration in their job. If something does frustrate them, instead of blaming the task, they are more keen on finding ways to make it enjoyable.

These are the qualities I watch for, when someone claims mastery on a topic. Anything else you would like to add/remove?