I had the privilege of attending the Alt.Net conference last weekend in Austin.

What I experienced was a happy collision of contrasts: mastery and inexperience, idealism and pragmatism, hope and frustration.

During the conference, the cause lacked coherent expression — though JP Boodhoo, who has a touch of the poet about him and can evoke the beating heart of it. Dave Laribee and others are very articulate in their blogs.

Still you can infer a group’s intent from its actions and over two days here’s what I connected with:

• Fellowship: Alt.Net is a loose affiliation of master developers who attract others (like me) who wish to learn.
• Shared Values: These developers aspire to excellence and independent judgement. They embrace passion, courage and honest reflection (articulated by JP). They seek to apply the handiest tool to any given situation and deliver value to their customer.
• Common Cause: These developers want to bring innovative tools, concepts and practices to the .Net platform whether they arrise from within Microsoft, an open and independent developer community, or other platforms. They are calling on Microsoft’s to introduce these innovations to the larger .Net developer community — or at minimum — to not hinder their use by those who wish to adopt them.

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

Tag(s): Alt.Net, altnetconf, Austin, Dave Laribee, handiest tool, Microsoft, poet

Comments: 1

Yesterday, I got to sit in while members of Microsoft’s Surface™ team showed my CEO, Gerry Laybourne, a working demo.

I’m a convert. The interface relies on organic human gesture and, more importantly, encourages eye contact and collaboration. Truly beautiful. And the simpler they make it the more emotional and purposeful it will be.

I realize there are similar systems out there but Microsoft’s hardware implementation is novel and potentially more powerful than other multi-touch displays.

Watching Gerry interact with the surface team, I was reminded why she is such a force for invention and creativity. She has an expert’s blink response to new ideas. Her feedback was immediate and unexpected in the best sense. As a Surface™ team member said, “it feels like we’re learning more from you than you are from us.”

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

Tag(s): CEO, creativity, Gerry Laybourne, Microsoft, similar systems, Surface™ team member

Comments: 3

Gerry spoke at the Microsoft Women’s Conference this week.

I joined her so that we could meet with some key players at Microsoft to talk about Ript™, our WPF application.

Attending were Henry Hahn, WPF Program Manager, Darren Mc Cormick, Worldwide UX Role Owner, and Katherine Westgate, a Marketing Officer from Microsoft’s NY office.

The conversation ranged over the whole history of our project: our Scrum/XP practices, how our team collaborates on user experience, how we created our product vision and our plan to monetize the product.

The three of them were entirely approachable, engaged and enthusiastic. They also came prepared. They’d all downloaded and worked with our application. Henry actually submitted feature suggestions from his team he knows are easy to implement given what we’ve already created.

Katherine helped pull the attendees together and lined up our hands on demo of Surface™. She was interested in figuring how our experiences with Ript™, agile software development and collaborative product ownership might help her enterprise clients. She also asked Gerry how Oxygen approaches advocacy for women, corporate good will and citizenship. Katherine is sharp and conscientious. I could tell Gerry hit it off with her.

Darren described the Developer Platform Evangelists (DPE) programs for joint marketing and developer assistance around products built in WPF and Silverlight. We discussed some of Microsoft’s goals for Silverlight distribution and what Oxygen’s next steps are to engage these resources. Darren is clearly passionate about user experience at the level of product, brand and within an organization. Yet another example of Microsoft going outside its organization to bring in new thinking.

Gerry’s main points were that women are the principle market for consumer technology, that usability testing with women provides valuable insight, how software should playful, purposeful, simple and accessible and how product development should not focus on early adopters but the people who will make up the vast majority of end users should the product be successful.

The conversation also ranged over tech issues. Henry is a fan of our application and left an open door for further communication. He said the .NET team is working on some of our core concerns:

• breaking up the .NET 3 installer into server and client modules making the package smaller
• improving the experience of their default install (it plays out like a windows update, hiding itself in the system tray – this is very confusing in an application install process)
• making it easier for ISV’s to run a silent install and wrap their own UI around the install
• improving cold start time
• providing more expressive API’s for automated UI testing

Don’t expect any of this soon unfortunately.

Clearly there are employees at Microsoft in leadership roles determined to engage with and support, not simply consume, innovative work originating outside the company. I had the same impression at the ALT.NET conference earlier this month.

This bodes well for both Microsoft’s future as well as for those of us looking to innovate in the marketplace using their tools and platforms.

Short link: http://jkat.me/fFr0LI

Tag(s): Alt.Net, api, consumer technology, Darren Mc, Henry Hahn, Katherine Westgate, Marketing Officer, Microsoft, Ript, Ript Gerry, software development, Worldwide UX Role Owner, WPF, WPF application, WPF Program Manager, xp

Comments: none

Nice post from Frank Arrigo, the Microsoft evangelist responsible for all Technical Communities in Australia.

“Since I am always on the lookout for WPF apps, I had to download it and it is really really sweet…“

I’m very proud of our application and our team. Now we need to get Ript™ in the hands of more users.

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

Tag(s): Australia, Frank Arrigo, Microsoft, Ript

Comments: 2

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