keskiviikko 19. elokuuta 2009

Agile Dinner in Tampere

Yet another agile dinner in Tampere is over. Good food and discussion. Below a short summary of the points made on the theme and links to material I mentioned on other topics discussed.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Agile+Dinner+in+Tampere+20090819
  • Physical task board got most attention, spreadsheets was distant second.
  • Buy extra sticky post-it notes (from a good bookstore) or use a special glue to get index cards stick.
  • Updates can be done as often as team likes, but usually at least once a day.
  • Co-located teams usually like task boards, as it is easy to maintain and fits the purpose of showing them how much work is left.
  • Updating burndown chart by computing the remaining effort from task board manually does not take much time.
  • Documenting changes (for communicating them to distributed stakeholders) can be done by taking a photo.
  • If someone wants to document daily changes when using a physical task board, changed notes can be turned upside down.
  • There is seldom need for saving backlogs for further analysis after the retrospective.
  • Estimates are usually in hours in sprint backlogs (not in story points).
  • You can present the size by giving bigger tasks a bigger post-it note! However, usually a number on the corner will do.
  • Tasks in Sprint backlog are usually refinements / breakdowns of product backlog items.
  • Team should do the estimates (not managers or such) in order to better understand the work to be done.
Discussion was not on the theme most of the time, which I did not find problematic. Among things discussed were TDD, acceptance test-driven development, Scan-Agile, lean software development, how to take open bugs into account in sprint planning. Below some links which I mentioned during the evening.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/poppendieck-agile-leadership
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/poppendieck-lean-2007

http://www.cs.tut.fi/tapahtumat/projektinhallinta09/JimCoplien_12082009.pdf
http://www.cs.tut.fi/tapahtumat/olio2008/esitykset/coplien.pdf

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/07/coping-with-bugs

http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2007.75
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2008.34
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/03/TDD-Improves-Quality

http://stopandfix.blogspot.com/2009/04/all-about-testing.html
http://huitale.blogspot.com/2009/03/unit-testing-is-overrated.html

http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=187
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/test-or-not

keskiviikko 12. elokuuta 2009

Project Management Days at TUT

I did not get an invite this time (trying to figure out why), but luckily noticed colleagues going to TUT. I managed to listen to the last talk, by James Coplien, on the differences between agile and lean.

I have to admit I did not understand his previous presentation ("For those who were agile before agile was cool", OO Days 2008) at all, or at least it was against my views on agile and people associated with it. This time it was all different, I really enjoyed the presentation.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/tapahtumat/projektinhallinta09/
http://www.cs.tut.fi/tapahtumat/projektinhallinta09/JimCoplien_12082009.pdf