Brown bag presentation by Craig Smith at Suncorp and the Brisbane XP meetup retrospecting the experience at Agile 2008 in Toronto Canada.

1. Agile 2008 Retrospective & Slide Show
September 2008 Agile Change Program
3rd September 2008

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Overview
In Toronto,
Canada to
represent
Suncorp and
present two
experience
reports

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Three Little Pigs
The first paper –
Agile Project
Experiences –
The Story of the
Three Little Pigs

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Three Little Pigs
Experiences from
EasyDoc,
Guidewire &
Promina
Payments
projects.
People showed
up!

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Dials To Eleven
The second paper –
Technical Lessons
Learnt turning the
agile dials to eleven.
Paul King presented
two other talks also
on Groovy &
performance tests

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Dials To Eleven – Coming Soon to InfoQ
Info Q recorded
the session and
will be way on
their website in
November (only
18 out of 400
were recorded).
http://www.infoq.com/agile2008

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Chasing Waterfalls
Niagra Falls is 90
minutes down the
road.
Powerful waterfall
right next to an
agile
conference??

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Niagra Falls

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AAFTT
Day 1
Agile Alliance Functional
Testing Tools Workshop

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AAFTT
Lightning Talks
• 5 mins
• Video taped
Open Space Sessions 3x3
• Narrative testing
• Tool selection
• Understandability for
users vs the power of
programming
Futurespective
• Positive (green)
• Negative (red)
• Surprises (purple)

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So Many Choices...
• 19 stages – developer, testing,
process, distributed agile,
leadership,...
• More than 30 choices per session

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The Wisdom Of Crowds
Keynote:
“The Wisdom Of Crowds”
James Surowiecki
• The aggregation of information in groups,
results in decisions that are often better than
could have been made by any single member
of the group
• Large organisations set up obstacles to the
flow of information
• Group average is usually very close and
usually a large percentage of the group
• Livestock example – crowd average 1197lb
and actual weight 1198lb
•At Agile 2008, for Visual Studio LOC –
average guess 47 million, real answer 43.2
million, only 2/2000 better than
group collective guess

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Ten Terrific Transition Tips
“Ten Terrific Transition Tips”
Joshua Kerievsky
• Don’t sell pair programming – focus on
risks of solo programming
• Build community – bigger than you think,
retrospectives build community
• Celebrate chaos – you will get there soon
• Empower experimenters – give things a
fair shot
• Start sooner!
• Most people who don’t program don’t
understand technical debt – demonstrate
• Customers are really happier when
focussed on quality and not features

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Code Metrics & Analysis For Agile Projects
“Code Metrics & Analysis
For Agile Projects”
Neal Ford & Ram Singaram
• Hawthorne Effect – Western Electric measured
worker activity based on lighting level
• Use metrics, don’t just collect, apply to codebase
• Byte code analysis - Findbugs – run on Struts,
found copy/paste bug 3 times
• Source analysis – PMD, CPD, Simian
• Coverage – Cobertura, Emma, nCover
• Flog – for Ruby, adds up language values as you
cannot measure static analysis
• Effrent/Affrent coupling – number of classes used
/ use this class – Jdepend
• Crap4J – crap threshold
• Information Radiators - Panopticode

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Build Your Coaching Skills
“Build Your Coaching Skills”
Johanna Rothman
• Don’t confuse coaching with feedback or
teaching – feedback is longer term and about
behaviour, mentoring is about milestones and
achievements
• Always have an end time for coaching – then
re-evaluate
• Coaching under the covers – spouses do it all
the time
• Coaches do not have to be a domain expert
• Most organisations have blind leading the
nearly blind
• Every problem has 3 possible options – then
move to goals
• Exercises in coaching and listening

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Prioritizing Your Product Backlog
“Prioritizing Your Product
Backlog”
Mike Cohn
• Iceberg- well formed with small number of
stories at the top
• Spend 10% of iteration getting ready for
the next
• Kano analysis – exciter/delighter,
mandatory/baseline, linear
• Theme screening, Theme scoring,
Relative weighting – ways to identify
important features for next release
• Break big projects into release horizons

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New Arrows For The Agile Quiver
“New Arrows For The Agile
Quiver”
Jim McCarthy
• Agile is common sense but not very
common
• Take the job offer to manage the dumbest
group – only way is up
• Shared vision works – 4 people on Excel vs
200 on Access!
• Core Commitments for teams – doomed to
be great if you follow them – a number of
protocol checks – eg. “I propose” or “let’s act”
means everybody should listen, promise not
to do anything dumb on purpose, etc...

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Guerilla Agile
“Guerilla Agile”
Johanna Rothman
• Lots of examples - Bring Me A Rock, Queen Of
Denial, We Can’t Say No, etc...
• Want management to think your resources are
scarce – how do you free them up?
• Happy Date – MS Project will tell you the first
possible date you cannot be done
• Releasable product does not mean walking out of
the building
• How little can you do to be successful?
• Measure what is done, not just the milestones
• Normally don’t recommend Monday to Friday
iterations – people will use the weekend
• 90% done – use inch pebbles

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Quintessence
Keynote:
“Quintessence”
Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin
• Political metaphor – Scrum is Obama
and XP is McCain
• Agile Manifesto needs a fifth value –
“Craftmanship Over Crap”
• Later changed this slightly to
“Craftmanship Over Execution” –
because we value craftmanship more
than execution – we don’t value crap at
all!
• Jury is in – TDD works
• Manual testing is criminal
• Green Band – Clean Code – sold out!

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The Wisdom Of Experience
Keynote:
“The Wisdom Of Experience”
Alan Cooper
• The father of Visual Basic
• Agile is a new toy – developers jump
on new toys – but agile is unique
• Mixing big ideas, design, engineering
and construction is the most common
source of failure
• We can know what users need,
interaction designers works with
developers to discover this
• Challenge management
• Demand quality lines not deadlines
• First to market is not better
than best to market

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Dude, Where’s My Release Plan?
“Dude, Where’s My Release
Plan?”
David Hussman
• Product owners are usually slapped in the
role because they know the system
• Suggests use of big fat stories rather than
epics or themes
• Realise that somebody is rolling up your
planning to a budget and converting your
points to days
• Release planning – involve all those who
want a say, give management/sales a plan
• Recharter when you don’t have a vision
• Have a visible release plan / iteration map

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10 Ways To Screw Up With Scrum & XP
“10 Ways To Screw Up With
Scrum & XP”
Henrik Kniberg
• Don’t throw out stuff that works – don’t
need it all at the start, start simple
• Have an agreed definition of done
• Guess velocity to get going
• Do retrospectives well- look for
mechanical, use a timeline to get started
• Use a flashlight, make velocity visible
• Deal with technical debt – stop making it
happen, slow down, add definition of done
• teamwork – can have specialists, ask
team what they need to go faster
• use product backlog
• mergophobia

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After Dark
Microsoft Function & Banquet

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Vendors a.k.a. Free Stuff
Thoughtworks, GreenPepper, Microsoft,
Borland, Version One, Rally, Electric Cloud...

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Explore Toronto

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Explore Toronto

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Key Items of Interest for Agilists
• Strong focus behind quality testing and
approaches to making things better
• Clean code and craftmanship
• Technical debt & legacy code
• Agile practices over theory – Pragmatism has
replaced religion
• Mixed crowd – new to agile and experienced
agile but much less why agile
• Questions about what’s next in agile?
• Enterprise and distributed agile learnings
• Planning, planning poker cards & story points
• Lots of practical learnings from practitioners
• Prioritised backlog

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More Information???
• Check out the Agile 2008 website to see if there
were items of interest – http://www.agile2008.org
• Watch InfoQ for presentations and commentary-
http:///www.infoq.com/agile2008
• Talk to the attendees from Suncorp - Craig Smith,
Paul King, Phil Abernathy, Marina Chiovetti
• Email me for access to slides or presentations –
craig.smith@suncorp.com.au
• Request brown bags on specific areas of interest
from the conference
THANK YOU!