En evento se llevará a cabo el sábado 13 de marzo en las instalaciones de la UNTref en el Centro Cultural Borges (Viamonte esquina San Martín piso 3).
En esta ocasión el tema convocante es «Calidad en el desarrollo de software».
Los interesados pueden obtener algo más de información (pero no mucha, pues al ser open space no hace falta :-)) en http://www.agiles.org/agile-open-buenos-aires-2010—calidad.
Nos vemos el 13!
Saludos!
Nicolás
Salimos desde la terminal de Retiro junto con JuanG el viernes por la noche. Arribamos a Bahía hacia las 8 de la mañana del sábado. En la terminal de Bahía nos encontramos con Esteban y Julian que venían desde Tandil y luego en compañía de Jerónimo (uno de los organizadores locales) nos dirigimos hacía la biblioteca central de la Universidad nacional del Sur.
El evento arrancó a las 9.30 y tuve el honor de facilitar la apertura. Fue una muy linda experiencia.
Hubo alrededor de 90 participantes y si bien durante el día hubo algunas deserciones como suele suceder, en el cierre hubo más de 70 personas. Hubo alrededor de 30 sesiones propuestas, algunas de las cuales fueron unificadas al momento de armar la grilla, quedando finalmente alrededor de 20 sesiones efectivas.
Durante la mañana participé de una sesión sobre los distintos roles dentro de los equipos ágiles y de ello estuve en una sesión interactiva facilitada por JuanG en la que trabajando con globos repasamos la importancia entender claramente criterios de aceptación de los productos que generamos. Ya por la tarde estuve en una sesión que titulada con algo similar a “Documentación en contexto ágil” resultó un poco controvertida cuando uno de los participantes comentó que en sus proyectos tenía analistas trabajando un sprint adelantado escribiendo user stories detalladas. A continuación estuve en un sesión en la que hablamos sobre los pasos y opciones para la adopción de agile en organizaciones que trabajaban en forma “cascadosa”.
En el último slot del día dicté un workshop sobre user stories del cual participaron alrededor de 25 personas. De aquí puede descargarse el slide deck con los puntos más importantes que repasamos durante la introducción teórica del workshop.
Luego del cierre (a cargo de JuanG) Victor “Ferruchi” nos llevo en un mini city tour que termino con una picada en un bar muy pintoresco a escasos metros del teatro munipal de la ciudad. Hacia la 9 nos transladamos a la casa de Ariel Trellini nos los huddleanos preparaban un asado. Finalmente pusimos fin a nuestra jornada degustando una copa de vino y un sandwinch de asado entre juegos de dardos y charlas geeks. A las 10.30 subimos al micro que nos trajo de vuelta hacia Baires.
Realmente quedé muy contento con el evento y debo admitir que superó mis expectativas: mucha gente, excelente organización y muy buen contenido en las sesiones.
Last Saturday I took part on this event. There were about 70 participants. During the morning there were some introductory sessions and something interesting happened: there were a session called «implementing agile», there were about 20 people but none of them know about agile, so one of them went to the session next door (where I was) and ask for somebody to talk about the topic, there I went. At the same time JuanG was giving an introductory session about Lean.
There also some classic sessions like: agile & cmmi, distributed agile and intro scrum.
After the lunch we make the classic «Scrum Bird Game» where I was the facilitator. It was much more organized than the one we did at Tandil, I think that because in this occasion there were much less people (4 teams, 5 members each) . During the last iteration of the game I had an idea for future games: change the birds between teams, this could be compared to common situation in software development projects: work on a product developed by someone else.
Finally I attend to a session about estimation were I had the pleasure to share experiences with «the huddleans» : Guille and DiegoF.
I like the event very much, it was over my expectations. My congratulations to Martin, Horacio, Liliana and the other members of the local organization staff, great work!!!
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:
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.
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:
After the lunch break there were three slots of 4 sessions each. I took part of the following:
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.
We have just finished the retrospective and these are the main items we got:
I am here at Tandil having lunch in the middle of the journey. During the morning we played » the scrum bird game». It was a really interesting experience; we built eight teams (about 8 people each). Well I will continue later because the afternoon sessions are starting right now.
The next stop in the Agile Open Tour is Tandil, on May 16. Yesterday I wrote my position paper to complete my inscription and now I invite you to write yours. Here is the registration page: http://www.agiles.org/agile-open-tandil-2009.
See you in Tandil!
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:
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.
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:
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…
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