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:
Recently at the Agile Mumbai 2010 and Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, we tried to make the conference as green (environment friendly) as possible. Following are the things we tried:
We did not hand over any conference program, printed hand-outs & slides or any other printed material (except for what the conference sponsor handed over). All this info is already available on our website. To make it convenient for the conference attendees, we took 3 large (A2 size) printout and stuck it outside each hall (track).
We also skipped handing over notepads & pens. I my experience very few people use them. Also those who want to use it, it’s easy to carry a notepad and pen.
Lunch and snacks were served in washable plates & steel spoons. Usually conferences use throw-away plates and plastic spoons.
For drinking tea, coffee & juice, we requested the conference participants to carry their own mugs & water bottles. This did not work all that well. We had only 3 people carry their own mug. In future, we plan to hand out a mug to each participant. (For Bengaluru conference, since it was in a hotel, they took care of serving tea & coffee in porcelain cups. Water was served is proper washable glasses)
Conserving Electricity: We tried to switch off projectors and Air Conditioners when ever possible. This is an area of huge improvement. We need to find more interesting ways to conserve energy.
Originally we had planned to request the participants to return their lanyards so we could reuse it. This one fell through the cracks.
At both the conferences we had an enlightening talk from Captain Planet (aka Saurabh Arora) showing the effect of global warming and how we can take small steps everyday to avoid further worsening the situation.
Overall I think there are lot more things we can do to make the conference more environmental friendly.
The conference theme this year is “Post-Modern Agile - Be done with the Dogma“. The conference is really targeted at Agile practitioners, who want to explore ideas beyond the basic Agile stuff.
Also this year, for the first time, we are hosting the World-famous Programming with the Stars contest during the conference.
The conference theme this year is “Post-Modern Agile - Be done with the Dogma“. The conference is really targeted at Agile practitioners, who want to explore ideas beyond the basic Agile stuff.
Also this year, for the first time, we are hosting the World-famous Programming with the Stars contest during the conference.
Also for those who cannot attend the Mumbai conference, don’t worry. We have another conference coming up in Bengaluru. Check out: Agile Bengaluru 2010 Conference.
Over the last year, I’ve been helping (part-time) Freeset build their ecommerce website. David Hussman introduced me to folks from Freeset.
Following is a list of random topics (most of them are Agile/XP practices) about this project:
Project Inception: We started off with a couple of meetings with folks from Freeset to understand their needs. David quickly created an initial vision document with User Personas and their use cases (about 2 page long on Google Docs). Naomi and John from Freeset, quickly created some screen mock-ups in Photoshop to show user interaction. I don’t think we spent more than a week on all of this. This helped us get started.
Technology Choice: When we started we had to decide what platform are we going to use to build the site. We had to choose between customer site using Rails v/s using CMS. I think David was leaning towards RoR. I talked to folks at Directi (Sandeep, Jinesh, Latesh, etc) and we thought instead of building a custom website from scratch, we should use a CMS. After a bit of research, we settled on CMS Made Simple, for the following reasons
We needed different templates for different pages on the site.
PHP: Easiest to set up a PHP site with MySQL on any Shared Host Service Provider
Planning: We started off with an hour long, bi-weekly planning meetings (conf calls on Skype) on every Saturday morning (India time). We had a massively distributed team. John was in New Zealand. David and Deborah (from BestBuy) were in US. Kerry was in UK for a short while. Naomi, Kelsea and other were in Kolkatta and I was based out of Mumbai. Because of the time zone difference and because we’re all working on this part time, the whole bi-weekly planning meeting felt awkward and heavy weight. So after about 3 such meetings we abandoned it. We created a spreadsheet on Google Docs, added all the items that had high priority and started signing up for tasks. Whenever anyone updated an item on the sheet, everyone would be notified about the change.
User Stories: We started off with User Persona and Stories, but soon we just fell back to simple tasks on a shared spreadsheet. We had quite a few user related tasks, but just one liner in the spread sheet was more than sufficient. We used this spreadsheet as a sudo-backlog. (by no means we had the rigor to try and build a proper backlog).
Short Releases: We (were) only working on production environment. Every change made by a developer was immediately live. Only recently we created a development environment (replica of production), on which we do all our development. (I asked John from Freeset, if this change helped him, he had mixed feelings. Recently he did a large website restructuring (added some new section and moved some pages around), and he found the development environment useful for that. But for other things, when he wants to make some small changes, he finds it an over kill to make changes to dev and then sync it up with production. There are also things like news, which makes sense to do on the production server. Now he has to do in both places). So I’m thinking may be, we move back to just production environment and then create a prod on demand if we are plan to make big changes.
Testing: Original we had plans of at least recording or scripting some Selenium tests to make sure the site is behaving the way we expected it to. This kind of took a back seat and never really became an issue. Recently we had a slight set back when we moved a whole bunch of pages around and their link from other parts of the site were broken. Other than that, so far, its just been fine.
Evolutionary Design: Always believed in and continue to believe in “Do the Simplest, Dumbest, thing that could Possibly work“. Since we started, the project had taken interesting turns, we used quite a lot of different JavaScript libraries, hacked a bit of PHP code here and there. All of this is evolving and is working fine.
Usability: We still have lots of usability and optimization issues on our site. Since we don’t have an expert with us and we can’t afford one, we are doing the best we can with what we have on hand. We are hoping we’ll find a volunteer some day soon to help us on this front.
Versioning: We explored various options for versioning, but as of today we don’t have any repository under which we version our site (content and code). This is a drawback of using an online CMS. Having said that so far (been over a year), we did not really find the need for versioning. As of now we have 4 people working on this site and it just seems to work fine. Reminds me of YAGNI. (May be in future when we have more collaborators, we might need this).
Continuous Integration: With out Versioning and Testing, CI is out of question.
Automated Deployment: Until recently we only had one server (production) so there was no need for deployment. Since now we have a dev and a prod environment, Devdas and I quickly hacked a simple shell scrip (with mysqldump & rsync) that does automated deployment. It can’t get simpler than this.
Hosting: We talked about hosting the site on its own slice v/s using an existing shared host account. We could always move the site to another location when our existing, cheap hosting option will not suit our needs. So as of today, I’m hosting the site under one of my shared host account.
Rich Media Content: We questioned serving & hosting rich media content like videos from our site or using YouTube to host them. We went with YouTube for the following reasons
We wanted to redirect any possible traffic to other sites which are more tuned to catering high bandwidth content
We wanted to use YouTube’s existing customer base to attract traffic to our site
Since we knew we’ll be moving to another hosting service, we did not want to keep all those videos on the server which then will have to be moved to the new server
Customer Feedback: So far we have received great feedback from users of this site. We’ve also seen a huge growth in traffic to our site. Currently hovering around 1500 hits per day. Other than getting feedback from users. We also look at Google Analytics to see how users are responding to changes we’ve made and so on.
We don’t really have/need a System Metaphor and we are not paying as much attention to refactoring. We have some light conventions but we don’t really have any coding standards. Nor do we have the luxury to pair program.
Distributed/Virtual Team: Since all of us are distributed and traveling, we don’t really have the concept of site. Forget on-site customer or product owner.
Since all of this is voluntary work, Sustainable pace takes a very different meaning. Sometimes what we do is not sustainable, but that’s the need of the hour. However all of us really like and want to work on this project. We have a sense of ownership. (collective ownership)
We’ve never really sat down and done a retrospective. May be once in a while we ask a couple of questions regarding how something were going.
Overall, I’ve been extremely happy with the choices we’ve made. I’m not suggesting every project should be run this way. I’m trying to highlight an example of what being agile really means.
It appears to me that the Agile Community is falling behind the innovation curve. At conferences, user groups, mailing list, etc, we see the same old same old stuff (may be I’m missing something). So where is the real innovation happening? What space should I be watching?
These were the questions I posed to the group @ the SDTConf 2009. Later, during our discussion at the conference we tried answering them. After a wonderful discussion we come up with some suggestions:
Web 2.0
Highly Scalability, Performance and Operations space
Complex Adaptive Systems and its implication on our social interactions space. Dave Snowden’s work is a good starting point
eLearning and visual assessments (feedback) of a programming session. Check out Visualizing Proficiency
Polyglot Programming space
With Google Apps, people are able to build 100s of Apps each month and get instant feedback on their ideas
Social Networking and Second Life space
Conference: Lot of interesting experiments are been conducted in the conference space. Conferences have evolved to something very different from before.
Distributed Development and Remote Pairing space
If you would like to contribute to this list, please add your point on the SDTConf Wiki.
At the Agile 2009 conference, Martin Fowler, Ron Jeffries, Chet Hendrickson, Mary Poppendieck and I had a very interesting discussion about “why some of us felt that there was nothing new at the Agile 2009 conference”. (or even if there were interesting topics, the signal to noise ratio was too small to find it).
Martin’s hypothesis (paraphrased):
Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the core of the software development problem with regards to process was hashed out and most of the principles & techniques were flushed out via the Agile Manifesto and other techniques. (which of course was the easy bit). What is happening now is, most companies are trying to implement those ideas on their projects inside their organizations. Implementing those ideas is rather tricky and needs a lot of creative tweaking at project level. Its difficult to pull out any generic topics from these implementation and present it to a broad audience @ Agile 200x confs. Hence it feels like there is nothing new.
After which Martin asked Ron, if he has seen anything new on the mailing lists. Ron resonated with Martin. Everyone else seemed to agree.
Overall I’m convinced that this hypothesis makes sense. However I feel:
Personally I don’t find agile implementation @ large enterprises interesting. But I do see a lot of innovation happening in start-ups and small product companies. They are doing things which agilists might consider taboo. If we look at some of the Web 2.0 product companies, they are solving a lot of interesting problems like deploying to production multiple times a day, embracing fully distributed teams, etc.
Integrating UX and Operations team into the development team is still an open issue. Few companies have done some interesting work in this space.
And so on…
I feel majority of the Agile community has got into a “preaching mode” and very few people are actually building their own products (eating their own dog food.) This attitude attracts a certain kind of people to the conference and I’m quite skeptical to find innovative new ideas in this crowd. With so much noise its also very easy to miss some weak signals which have potential.
I do know a few people who are doing some really interesting stuff (they are turned off by the Agile brand and generally don’t hang around in these circles). Personally I want us, as a community, to be more inclusive of these people.
