Categoría: evento

Agile Open BsAs 2009 – Sessions part 3

This is the last part:

Session 4: What should I do with my junior developers?

One of the principles of the agile methods is the self-organized teams, but this is not an easy question when you have junior people in your teams. How much seniority is required to have a self-organized team? How can a person be able to estimate a task that he never performed? How to prevent this inexperienced people to get stuck when working with new things?  These were some of the questions that were discussed. In the next few lines I will share the two main ideas I get clear from the session.

1. Don’t let them get stuck

When  juniors start a task they may get stucked and there are two bad situations when this occur:

  1. they start asking all the time, interrupting the work of the rest of the team or
  2. they try to solve the impediments by themselves and waste too much time

One useful technique to prevent this situations is to use pair programming, making pairs senior-junior but also junior-junior, this last combination gives me great results in my teams. And to complement this it could interesting to make frequent «pings», I mean every three or four hours just see how they are doing with their tasks.

2. Allow them to choose their tasks

This could sound strange, how can they choose their task when maybe they don’t know how to perform them?. Well the key is how you create the sprint backlog. First of all try to split the work in small tasks, second when the tasks are asigned let the experienced developers to choose first. This way the experienced developers will choose the difficult tasks, and when the juniors have to choose the will have only simple tasks. Another benefit of this approach is that juniors will be able to estimate these simple tasks. Despite of this, it could happen that a junior choose a complex task that you know he don’t have the knowledge to perform it, in that situation make him some questions about how he think he will complete the task in order to make him realize that that task is not the best for him.

That’s all, more after the next Agile Open.

eSTImation MAnager (stima)

Last Monday, my classmate Maria Florencia Perez  finished her studies when she presented her proffesional work: Stima. It is a software that allow users to perform estimations of duration and effort for software development project. It is based on use case points method and it provides some useful features like metrics, estimation history and comparison.

The application is available under Apache License and can be downloaded from Google code rigth at this location.

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…

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.

Bertrand Meyer in Argentina

Last Wednesday I attend to an open class by Bertrand Meyer at UTN Buenos Aires. It was about «How we teach programming». It was interesting but it quite filled my expectations. In the first part, Meyer did a review of the different ways of teaching programming in introductory courses (first year courses), explaining the pros and cons of each. During the second part he introduced the way he uses in his courses and that is explained in his next book: Touch of class: Learning to program well with objects and contracts.

SmallTalks 2008

Last Thursday, Friday and Saturday, it took place the Second Argentine Conference of Smalltalk: SmallTalks 2008. One of most interesting tracks I attended was the one given by Mariano Martinez Peck, Esteban Lorenzano and German Palacios about their project: SqueakDBX. It is a driver to allow Squeak applications to connect to relational databases, you can get more information in the official website.

Congratulations to the organization team, it was great event!.

Agiles 2008 done!

After a long planning we did it. We are very pleased with the results;more than 400 people attended the conference coming from several countries like Brasil, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Colombia and Argentina; the quality of the presentations was excellent and all the schedule was followed during the whole conference. I want to thank the sponsors, speakers and the all the people that make conference possible.

I feel this conference will be the foundational milestone of the Latin American Agile Community.

If you are interested in being to part of the community, join our Yahoo! Group at: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/laasd/

During the next few days the conference website will be updated with the material used.

Say no more!

Technigth: Programando en Babel

Yesterday I attended to this event organized by Microsoft at Buenos Aires offices’. It was very interesting, I get some useful tools not only for playing but also to be applied in real world projects. The three main topics were: F#, Boo and IronPython each of witch had its own sponsor (AJLopez, RodolfoF y Martín Salias respectively). After the talk we shared some snacks and beers as usual.