Etiqueta: agile

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.

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.

Self-organized people

As you may know, I ‘m teacher assistant at FIUBA. some weeks ago we asked the students to form groups. According to the number of students and teachers, we needed 6 groups of 8 members each. But…the students presented 7 groups, 3 of them with 8 members each, and other 4 groups of 6 members each. In a first attempt we try to dissolved one group and reorganized its members to have 3 groups, but after a while we decided to call the all the members of these 4 groups and we told them: «we have 3 groups of 8 members each and we can handle only 3 more groups, so we need you to form 3 groups as you like». Some minutes later the had solved the problem.

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!