Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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QCon London 2010!
March 10-12, 100
Speakers, 80 sessions,
"THE" team leads and,
architects conference.
Addressing another Agile Myth (we don't need no analysts!), Shane Hastie, Chief Knowledge Engineer at Software Education, outlines how the Business Analyst can help Agile teamwork - when properly aligned with the business, rather than the development team.
A rule generally refers to the defined standards for an activity. It is required to be adhered to. In other words, a law, may informally be called a "rule". Guideline on the other hand attempts to streamline a particular process according to a set routine. By definition, a guideline is never mandatory.Should Agile teams talk about rules or can we have just guidelines?
Once all your teams use Agile and are busy implementing local improvements, what happens to the larger organization formerly called "IT" or "Systems Development"? A coach with a large Agile program shared the strategy they designed to let the larger community spot trends and benefit from all this learning. Paulo Caroli calls it "Retrospective of Retrospectives".
Dave Nicolette, Agile Coach with Valtech, addresses the question are short iterations better than long. Dave demonstrates that short iterations: allow for more rapid response to change, the opportunity to discover and fix problems more often. He also deals with the concerns that short iterations might lead to burnout and other issues.
The discussion of applying lean principles to software development has largely focused on identifying and eliminating waste (in Japanese: muda). Lean Thinking equally aims to remove overburden (muri) and unnecessary variation (mura). Roman Pichler discusses the relationship of the "three M's" and proposes to eliminate overburden as the first step toward a leaner process.
At NFJS Venkat Subramaniam, author with Andy Hunt of "Practices of an Agile Developer," shared his pragmatic approach to some of the important technical and non-technical factors contributing to project success, including: coding, developer attitude, debugging, mentoring and feedback.
Of course, "anything more than 'barely sufficient' process is waste," but what does that mean for your team, or my next project? In this 60 minute presentation from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, Todd Little shared a model to help choose the right "flavour" of Agile for different kinds of projects, and discussed the importance of 'steering' throughout the project's duration.
In this interview filmed during Agile 2008, following the presentation "Who Do You Trust?", Linda Rising shows how prejudices can affect the relationships between team members. According to Linda, we all have a tendency to categorize others based on characteristics like race, religion, sex, but also based on more trivial characteristics, and many times we are not even aware we are doing it.
At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!
