Wendy & Ilio participate in our daily standup. Note the talking tokens…

Posted: September 14th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2

It’s a privilege to be granted authority in another person’s company.

It’s easy to criticize. It’s hard to raise capital and make payroll.

I have never been an entrepreneur. My passion is to build teams. To be of service. To make things better.

I’m that second generation that feeds off founding vision and hopes to sustain an organization.

This has been a good week.

• We achieved our first business objective on our standard bearing product initiative, Ript™.
• My CEO is championing agile values in my division’s executive team – accountability to specific commitments within a time box.
• Managers in a peer group recognize the potential of self-directed, cross-functional teams and are interested in introducing the first scrum outside my department.

I am a cautious optimist. Success is far from inevitable. Actually, all this represents is an opportunity to start the really hard work.

Still some moments, especially ones years in the making, need to be savored.

Posted: September 14th, 2007 under scrum.
Comments: none

I’ve posted about why I need to encourage agile practices outside my department.

If Scrum is isolated within one team, its very success can be used to counter further adoption. “Agile works for you but what we do is different. You do X we do Y.”

This resistance is a direct result of what Andy Hargreaves calls balkanization — groups insulated from each other, with hard boundaries, loyalties and a political complexion.

Creating a culture where groups work together to improve the organization is core to lean and agile. So the best ways to counter balkanization are the very principles under challenge.

I’m tackling this top-down by lobbying senior executives to bring in an agile/lean coach, bottom-up by removing impediments for my team, and, perhaps most significantly, sideways by initiating a Scrum in another department.

I have tentative approval from another department’s senior managers. Now, I have to meet with line managers and identify a backlog of work. Then solicit volunteers for a team.

I’ve taken Ken Schwaber‘s words to heart and asked them to Scrum their hardest challenge or the work they think least suited to agile.

So many things can go wrong. Of course, nothing that isn’t already going wrong. That’s the point.

Scrum will highlight those problems and make solving them obvious and necessary if no easier.

More to come…

Posted: September 9th, 2007 under scrum.
Comments: none

There once was a carpenter building a metal box. Try as he might, he couldn’t get nails to stick into much less attach two pieces of metal.

Apparently, other people were having a lot of success using nuts and bolts. So he got some.

Hammer as he might, all he ended up with was dented metal and bent bolts.

So he consulted an expert. Careful observation indicated the expert used a screwdriver. Great! He happened to have one in his toolbox.

He noted that the useful part of a screwdriver was the slotted tip at the end. So, he cut it off and taped it to the head of his hammer.

After one strike, the tip broke off and fell to the floor.

“Boy, my hammer is really letting me down,” he thought to himself. “I guess I’ll have to use the whole screwdriver.”

He went to the store and bought another one.

Once he got home, the man held it in his hand. It didn’t feel right. Any decent tool has a grip that goes at right angles to the head. He found a piece of wood and attached the screwdriver to the end.

That felt a little better but the screwdriver was very light. No decent tool was that insubstantial. So he attached a weight to the tip. That felt better! Now he was making progress!

Confident in his tool, the man pounded away at more bolts.

He managed to make a dozen deep scratches and bend several bolts before the screwdriver broke.

“That was worse than before! Screwdrivers are really overrated and it took so much work before I could even use it, ” the man said to himself.

“I’m not making that mistake again. I’m going out and get a really good hammer!”

Posted: August 31st, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

I’ll be presenting two talks at the November Scrum Gathering.

One of them is dear to my heart. I’ll be using this blog over the next few months to work up my ideas and document conversations I have around this topic.

The Ethics of Scrum and Agile Software Development.

Here’s what I proposed:

Presentation Description

Are Scrum and XP inherently ethical?

In the face of contradictory beliefs over what we do and how we do it, we software developers, agile or not, experience pressure to compromise our work and our due care for others. Meanwhile, as our products become more beneficial, more pervasive and inter-connected our potential to harm grows.

Attempts by the ACM and IEEE to engage us in a dialog on norms of conduct has resulted in a controversial code of ethics that borrows heavily from established engineering disciplines – mandating specifications to ensure effective software.

We, agile software developers are making an under-appreciated contribution to ethical practice in our field.

Whether our work is a profession or craft, we need to engage the larger community in a conversation about how our day to day actions affect our employers, our peers, and our society. This presentation will attempt to frame professional ethics in the context of agile values and practices.

Why is this topic of interest to Scrum Gathering attendees?

The discussion over norms of ethical conduct happens outside the earshot of most working developers. The day to day experience of Scrum practitioners is at a distance from those who concern themselves with software ethics.

As a Scrum community, we have a responsibility to help shape the expectations placed upon us by others. We cannot delegate our integrity. Nor can we defer concerns over negligence, recklessness, or intent to harm the human beings who use the systems we create. We openly discuss our projects, our working conditions, and our advancement but to protect those very interests we often deal with issues of conscience privately.

Yet the passion behind Scrum is, in part, an idealistic one – a hope that by dealing openly and responsively with our stakeholders we will build something of real value. We need to harness this idealism to encourage each other make better decisions in the interests of stakeholders who do not pay us and do not always have a seat at the project table.

Given the downstream effect ethical lapses large and small have on society, we need to engage in this discussion or have the wrong solutions imposed upon us by employers, institutions, and regulatory agencies.

Presentation Objectives

1. Is it important for us to establish a shared commitment to ethical conduct?
2. What obligations a software developer should feel beyond fulfilling the requirements of their employer?
3. How the Agile Manifesto and Scrum/XP practices suggest a partial set of norms of ethical conduct.
4. How agile organizations have started to provide their own statements of principles to extend agile values and encompass conduct towards our peers and society.

Posted: August 30th, 2007 under scrum.
Comments: none

ACM Technews referenced this article from searchcio.com.au.

IT still trying to find what women want

The world is flat. Better go out and hire some women.

That seems to be the gist of a recent Gartner report on the gender gap in information technology …

The article lists five gender-based traits CIOs should pay attention to when building IT staffs.

There’s a danger of drawing conclusions about individuals from differences in large samples. Just because men are statistically greater risk takers than women doesn’t mean I’m bolder than any particular woman. Or that she has better listening skills.

But at the level of an entire industry statistical differences are meaningful. Software would be better if we had collaborated and communicated better. Our products would be better if we had more empathy for customers and end users. Attracting qualified women into the field is a contribution to that end.

As the article suggests, the only appropriate way to do that in the context of a specific hiring decision is to include people skills as a requirement of the position, cast a wide net and hire the best candidate.

But you need to have a workplace and compensation package that is attractive to someone with people skills, technical chops and wants to give you their best at a sustainable pace.

To the argument that inviting women into a dysfunctional IT culture won’t make things better, I’d say that’s not my point. More women in IT is a hoped for result of humane workplaces — not a solution for creating them.

We have to work from within to make our companies better. In my software development team, our use of Scrum and XP has helped us do that. So far, my employer has been receptive.

I know that isn’t true everywhere. All I can say is those of us who have a choice sometimes have to make tough decisions about where we choose to collect our paycheck.

Posted: August 29th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

I began advocating agile principles at my company four years ago. Over time, my co-workers and I have grown into a Scrum/XP team. We have a track record of successful projects and a handful of supportive sponsors. Senior executives value our developers. My CTO understands the team dynamic itself is the prize asset.

Having reached a milestone on one of our larger projects and seeing ambitious work ahead, I wanted to write about how I stood at a crossroads: contribute to the team or attempt to nurture agile values elsewhere in the organization.

It’s a pleasant, contrasting choice. But it assumes a lone agile team can thrive after becoming visible to the larger organization. There are two pressing reasons why I doubt this is true:

• An agile team attacks impediments from within or without. Either the team makes progress against these obstacles or it declines.
• Human nature abhors exceptions however exceptional. If the organization doesn’t become a little more like us, it will surely, inevitably re-make us to be more like it.

So, no crossroads. One path lies before me and it looks surprisingly familiar.

As I did four years ago, I must advocate agile from within and peer to peer. This time around, I have success at my back but face longer odds.

Scrum the project. Scrum organizational change.

I can only make progress one step at a time. I must demystify what we do by allowing more chickens into my team’s reviews. I must find and coach others predisposed to agile values. I must find at least one executive willing to scrum a thorny project with their staff. If I get the chance, I must seek out expert coaching for those above and across me in the organization.

As four years ago, success relies more on others than on myself. But I believe, as before, that not trying is worse than failing in the attempt.

Posted: August 27th, 2007 under scrum.
Comments: 1

Our team just beta-released our first consumer product. Along the way, they accomplished something of more strategic value. They matured into a performing, self-directed team.

A decent manager encourages software developers to do their best work while allowing them full personal lives. The heart of this effort is fostering strong teams. Individuals have bad days, make mistakes, lose momentum. A team watches each other’s backs, challenges each other, teaches each other. They build upon each other’s creativity.

The beauty part for a manager is — if you create the right conditions, start with the right people, trust them and hold them accountable — the team does the hard work of becoming. They deserve full credit for their achievements including the most ambitious achievement which is themselves.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Getting this consumer product to the general public has taken fifteen months. From our first study of agile principles to our current practice has taken the better part of four years of continuous improvement.

Posted: August 23rd, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

Ken Schwaber made an audacious comment today. To paraphrase:

“One of my canaries in the coal mine is the number of women in the software industry. Women are smarter than men. They tend to gravitate to careers where they are compensated well and find the work rewarding. They are fleeing the our industry in droves.”

He was speaking at Agile 2007 on The Enterprise and Scrum.

The Stanford Daily reported that “13 percent of CS undergraduates are female this year, down from 24 percent in the 1999-2000 school year.” This despite National Science Foundation statistics that show more women are receiving bachelors degrees than men.

I agree with Mr. Schwaber, a software industry more inviting to women entering the workforce would provide a better, more humane environment for all employees.

Also, what potential innovation is being lost? History is rife with examples of gender inequality in service and outcomes across a wide variety of industries — most troubling being medicine. A male dominated field should not be confident it is best serving its women consumers.

My company’s own research indicates that women are men’s peers when it comes to the use, ownership and purchasing decisions around technology. So this is an opportunity as much as it is a concern.

A 2006 paper by McDowell, Werner, Bullock and Fernald found that pair programming practice “may help increase female representation in the field.”

Agile values and practices support a collaborative, empowering and sustainable work place. As practitioners, we should encourage research on whether this can contribute to a more diverse workforce.

Fundamentally, we have to make software development more conducive to the contributions of half our population.

Posted: August 17th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2

Oxygen Software Development is off to Agile 2007. Four of us are speaking:

Ript™: Innovation and Collective Product Ownership
by Ken H. Judy and Ilio Krumins-Beens
XR11: Product Ownership
Thursday, 4:00pm

In 2006, Oxygen Media CEO Geraldine (Gerry) Laybourne, the woman largely responsible for Nickelodeon’s early success, partnered with her XP/Scrum development team to create a new mission and new revenue stream for her company. This experience report covers product conception through initial release of a single product. It describes how Gerry’s leadership qualities paired with agile practices to engender deep mutual trust and collective ownership over technical execution and business outcome. This unbounded collaboration provides a template for future projects at Oxygen and other organizations with innovation as part of their agile product development strategy.

The Gentle Art of Pair Programming
Oksana Udovitska and Wendy Friedlander
Wednesday, 8:30am

The presenters build upon their experience as software professionals and the pair programming practices employed at Oxygen Media, the first and only cable Network owned and operated by women, to teach The Gentle Art of Pair Programming. This tutorial will cover the basic principles of pair programming, why it is a worthwhile practice and how to get started. Discussion will include how to take full advantage of pairing and how to cope with its challenges. For those new to pair programming, this will serve as a good introduction and include concrete first steps. For those already in a pairing environment, this presentation will include new viewpoints and interesting discussions on familiar topics. Additionally, everyone will benefit from the interactive and fun games for improving and enhancing communication skills. Being women in a male dominated profession gives the presenters unique perspectives and insights into pairing which they are eager to share in passionate and exciting ways.

Posted: August 12th, 2007 under scrum.
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