I just presented Ilio Krumins-Beens’ [and my paper] on unbounded collaboration between the product owner and development team at the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. (I’ll link off to the paper when the transaction is published on the IEEE site.)

HICSS is an interesting mix of academics and practitioners. On the list of presenters in the agile mini-track were Jeff Sutherland, Stephen Cohen from Microsoft, and Gabrielle Benefield from Yahoo as well as researchers Ann Fruhling from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Kevin Kwiat from the Air Force Research Laboratory, and David F. Rico.

HICSS is an instance where the academy has invited us developers into their living room to discuss what we do, the way we actually do it.

There’s a huge disconnect between what I practice as a software developer and what many institutions of higher learning teach.

Theoretical exercises in waterfall practices are not helpful precursors to TDD, pairing, continuous integration, refactoring, interdisciplinary collaboration, self-organizing teams, etc. etc.

Arguably, they are not even helpful precursors to waterfall as it’s actually practiced. If you think XP requires experienced developers what the heck do you get when you make someone with little experience architect a market trading system in UML!

We need the academy to understand us. They not only train our workforce, their research informs policies, standards and business management practices that shape government and industry expectations.

We need business schools that train prospective CXO’s to build lean businesses that will in turn build out agile/lean IT and product development organizations.

Another big barrier to agile adoption is lack of empirical support for the benefits of specific Lean, Scrum and XP practices. We need original research that correlates to the obvious things: quality, risk mitigation, market performance, productivity and cost reduction.

I’d also really love to see original research on how agile, highly collaborative practices correlate to ethical behavior on the part of individuals and organizations, gender and ethnic diversity, and sustained innovation.

Short link: http://jkat.me/gHk6sE

Tag(s): agile, Air Force Research Laboratory, Ann Fruhling, David F. Rico, Gabrielle Benefield, Jeff Sutherland, Kevin Kwiat, little experience architect, Microsoft, Nebraska, Omaha, product owner, scrum, software developer, Stephen Cohen, the University of Nebraska, xp, Yahoo

Comments: none

• Small is better than big
• Great teams are better than star individuals
• Courage and heroism are different
• Earning reputation is better than acquiring status
• Agilists in a non-agile business are not agile enough
• Your career is more important than your job
• We crave human contact with the people who use our software
• We can earn wages and be fair, honest, and worthy of trust
• Robbing people of joy is evil
• There are worse fates than being a dead sheepdog

Short link: http://jkat.me/ki0yEs

Tag(s): agile, Fortune Cookies

Comments: 2

Jeff Sutherland said he was finding more developers who will only work in agile software development teams.

He also said that to his estimation about 10% of shops that claim to be practicing Scrum pass the Nokia test and have self-organized teams, product backlogs prioritized by a product owner and estimated by developers.

And that doesn’t even speak to refactoring, test driven development, pairing, continuous integration, built in quality, acceptance testing, etc.

And that doesn’t speak to knowledge creation and sharing practices across the entire organization, clarity of vision, understanding competitors, collaborating with customers, continuous improvement, and embrace of change.

I’ve come to understand that agile values place demands on development, management and business practices.

Two questions arise from this:

• Would you only work in an [agile] shop?
• What do you mean by [agile]?

for [agile] feel free to substitute: Lean, XP, Scrum, XP/Scrum, Crystal, Adaptive, etc. etc.

Short link: http://jkat.me/hIl8HV

Tag(s): agile, Jeff Sutherland, product owner, software development teams, xp

Comments: 1

My colleague, Wendy, posted a quote from our former CEO describing the benefit she gained from collaborating in an Agile environment.

The way to win over an entrepreneur is to out-perform expectations set from painful, past experience.

Before Scrum/XP

…six months later, they deliver what the assignment was. And you look at it and say, “Oh no, that’s not what I wanted.”

With Scrum/XP

…you work on a two-week cycle… You agree on what the priorities are in the meeting. You review the priorities. You evaluate where you are, and you move to the next step…

Short link: http://jkat.me/eaolQr

Tag(s): agile, CEO, entrepreneur, Geraldine Laybourne, Wendy, xp

Comments: none

Team managers should till the soil with their teams.

Anything else is waste and waste must be rooted out.

Still it is hard.

Luke Melia wrote about how he performed as functional manager and dedicated 75% of his time pairing.

There are two tremendous challenges with this.

The first is limiting distractions in order to remain a reliable contributor.

Luke has tremendous reserves of focus and enthusiasm. As his manager, I did everything I could with our scrum master, Salim Divakaran, to support him, remove distractions and share workload.

The second challenge is being both the boss and a peer.

Luke recruited most of the team, he held weekly one on ones with each person, he insisted on unvarnished feedback, and is worthy of respect as both a peer and a manager.

So, here is the pattern: An experienced coach with people skills and authority over development practices pairing in with the developers. An experienced scrum master. Functional management residing in one or the other or divided up in some sensible and easily described way among the two of them.

This enables direct participation in the work, management attention to the team, and strategic contribution to the rest of the company.

Short link: http://jkat.me/ekY5ny

Tag(s): agile, experienced coach, Functional Manager, Luke Melia, management, manager, Manager in Agile Team managers, Salim Divakaran

Comments: none