Categoría: agile

Agile at UADE

Last week Sergio Candelo and Federico Arambarri invited me to talk about agile project management in the their subject at UADE. It was very interesting for me because it was the first time I talk about agile with people from other industries (not software). There were some IT people, but there also were people from marketing, chemistry, electronics. One of the topics of my presentation was the state of the art in agile adoption. To talk about that I used Roger’s innovation adoption curve. and in my opinion were have crossed the chasm. The slide deck I used for my presentation is available here.

Agile Baires: monthly meeting

Yesterday was the June’s meeting. I was the facilitator and the topic of the meeting was «How do I start my project». We use a format called lightning talk, witch consist in a sequence of a time-boxed presentations. We gave 7 minutes to each speaker to make his presentation and 3 minutes more  for answer and questions.

There were 5 presentations and all  of them were very interesting. Here is the slide deck I used during my presentation.

See you.

More about Agile Open Tandil (estimation session)

Two folks asked me to write a bit more about the afternoon sessions, especially about the estimation one and here I go, I will resume what we talk in that session.

The format of the session was open, there were more that 20 people and each talk about the way he uses to estimate.

In may opinion the natural process is to first estimate the size, then the effort, and finally considering a certain team you can deduce duration and cost, but not everybody uses this process (or unless not explicitly), some stated to estimate duration at once.

In few words, the following methods were mentioned:

  • Parametric methods (or magic formula-based methods that is the way I like to call them), basically this methods propose to analize your requirements and count points to determinate the size. Then you use that points in a formula that adds some variables to adjust the estimation based on particular information of the project (programming language, experience in similar projects, etc). In this category are Cocomo methods.
  • Expert opinion and manager manipulation methods (this original name is mine): maybe this is one of the most commonly used methods. Several people in the session told to used it and I know that some colleagues in my company use it all the time. It is very simple, a manager (boss, project leader, project manager or whatever you call it) ask an expert (some time not so expert) to estimate certain items. Then the manager adds some buffer and that’s it. Not very formal, not very precise but fast and easy.
  • Several-experts-based methods: I know this is a very ambiguous name, but that is the idea, I want to use this name to refer several different methods that include Delphi methods and planning poker (I think that planning poker is a Delphi variant). In these methods you have a team of experts (when I say experts I am just referring to people that is capable of give a realistic estimation because of his experience). Something very interesting of these methods is that under certain conditions these methods get a probabilistic support: if there are 4 or more experts and each expert opinion is independent, then we can apply the central limit theorem and get an confidence interval.

In my case I always try to use methods in the third group, in particular to estimate the complete product backlog at the start of a project I prefer to use Wideband delphi and then when estimating tasks at the begining of an iteration I prefer planning poker. During the session I mention a spreadsheet I use for Wideband-Delphi and after the session some people asked me to share the spreadsheet, so I published it here.

When I started writing this post I get the idea of preparing an estimation workshop, I think it could be an interesting activity, well I will analyze it.

That ‘s all, see you.

After Agile Open Tandil

Well, finally I get some time to write about it. The meeting took place at the Unicen building in the center of the city.

We started about 8 in the morning setting up the place. During the morning we had only one session:»Scrum bird game», 4 product owners (jgabadini, dfondevila, mbelnicoff and me), and about 60 participants divided into 8 teams. I took us about 2 hours. Some retrospective items after the game:

  • Several teams try to build the birds assuming things about the requirements without asking the product owners
  • After the chaos of first iteration most teams improved their organization and that allow them to improved their performance.
  • It was not a good experience to have one product owner for two teams at the same time. The product should be always available.
  • The products should be full tested by the product owner, I let the team to test the flexibility of the bird :(.

After the lunch break there were three slots of 4 sessions each. I took part of the following:

  • How to work less: the idea was to debate about how collaboration with the customers can make us work less as a result of delegating some task on the customers/users. I gave the example of UAT written and executed by the user.
  • Estimation methods: it was an open session were each talk about the way that use to estimate.
  • Tools for agile development: after talking about different tools, we agreed that in every project is necessary to have certain tools: a source code repository (svn, cvs, whatever), a tracking tool to manage issues, risks defects, etc, and a wiki to use as a knowledge base.

I am very satisfied with the results and I hope to see some folks from Tandil next month in the La Plata.

That is all, see you.

Agile open Tandil first results

We have just finished the retrospective and these are the main items we got:

  • Organize some agile activities in Bahia Blanca
  • Organize monthly meetings in for the agile community in Tandil
  • Organize some workshops about agile implementation
  • Document a real case on agile implementation by the Tandil ‘s community
  • Promote integration activities between the different agile communities in Argentina.

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.