Mes: marzo 2009

Agile Open BsAs 2009 – Sessions part 2

Here are some others sessions I was:

Session 2: How can I evangelize my team?

This session was proposed by me. During the time I have been practising agile I have found some people that do not «believe» in some practices and because of that they do not perform the practices that most team members agreed to follow. Example: in a team of 8 members there is one that do not like sticky-notes, he prefer to track his work using Excel spreadsheets. Of course the team leader could oblige him to use the sticky-notes, but everybody knows that that is not the best alternative. So what should we do in these cases?

There were about 30 people in this session and it was very useful for me. I get some interesting ideas to try with my teams, here are some of these ideas:

  • Try to change the roles along the iterations so everybody can experience the different task and responsabilities
  • If somebody does not perform some of his tasks, you (as a leader/scrummaster) take care of the task. This way you show the importance of the task.
  • I was used to implement a punish policy, for example, when somebody brakes a Build he must pay crosands for the whole team. A better alternative to punish can be prizes, for example if the build remains successful during the whole team, the company rewards the team with crosands.

Session 3: Popurri of Tools

This session was proposed by Juan Gabardini It was very interesting. I recommend you to read Juan post about it.

To be continue…

Agile Open BsAs 2009 – Sessions part 1

In this post I will try to resume some sessions I took part on.

Session 1: Technical debt

This session was proposed by Vincens who introduced it commenting this article. I think that we all agreed that we should try to minimize it to prevent it to convert in a big ball of snow and that oblige us to make a full re engineering of the system. It should be kept small, so it could be attack applying refactoring techniques along the iteration. One point of discussion was how to plan that refactoring: should that refactoring effort be visible to the product owner and added to the product backlog?  should it be handle by the team without telling the product owner? what if I am working on a legacy system that has a huge technical debt that can not be handle with refacting? is it possible to have an entire iteration to make just refactoring?

The conclusions were:

  • We should prevent it
  • We have to be honest with the product owner
  • We must understand the value of not having technical debts

Session 5: Next steps of the Latinamerican community

There were more than 30 people in this session. After explaining the current situation and the need of having a formal structure, we talk about the pros and cons of joining SADIO and finally we decided to try joining it. We also decided that to be part of the community members will have to attend to at least one of the major annual events organized by the community.

More comming soon….

After Agile Open Buenos Aires 2009

During the last weekend I was participating in this great event. As part of the organization group I am very happy with the results, there were almost a hundred participants and the sessions were very interesting.aobsas2009

It was my first experience with the open space technology, I felt very comfortable with the format and I liked it very much.

In futures I will shared the conclusions of the session I took part on.

To close this post here are some pictures taken by Xavier.