AvailAgility
Karl Scotland – Using Agile to Deliver Value
Posts tagged Conference
Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010 Atlanta
Nov 16th
The first Lean Software & Systems Conference will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA between April 21st and 23rd 2010.
Registration and the Call for Papers is now open at atlanta2010.leanssc.org
The first 50 registrants enjoy a super early discount rate of $800 plus entry to the exclusive speaker luncheon and a special limited edition Ltd WIP Society t-shirt, sponsored by David J. Anderson & Associates.
The Call for papers closes on December 14th.
Use the Twitter search tag #lssc10 to filter tweets about the event. Follow @lssc10 on Twitter for news from the organizing team.
If you are speaking or attending the conference you might like to tell people about it by adding these buttons to your web site design. If you want to use these assets on your site just paste the HTML code provided straight into your web source code or content management system.
Source: <a href=”http://atlanta2010.leanssc.org/”><img alt=”Atlanta 2010 Attendee” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/lssc10/Atlanta2010Attendee.png” border=”0? /></a>
Source: <a href=”http://atlanta2010.leanssc.org/”><img alt=”Atlanta 2010 Speaker” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/lssc10/Atlanta2010Speaker.png” border=”0? /></a>
Conference Chair: David J. Anderson
Track Chairs: Alan Shalloway, Joshua Kerievsky, James Sutton, Eric Willeke, Chris Shinkle, Richard Turner & David Anderson
Event Planner: Kelly Wilson
Organizing Sponsor: Software Engineering Professionals (SEP)
Event Team: Dennis Stevens, Janice Linden-Reed, Aaron Sanders, Eric Landes
Sponsorship opportunities email info@leanssc.org
Skills Matter Lean and Kanban Exchange
Nov 13th
I’m going to be speaking as part of the Skills Matter Lean and Kanban Exchange on December 1st. From their website:
The aim of the Lean & Kanban eXchange is to promote awareness and adoption of Lean and Kanban ideas and techniques. With David J. Anderson providing the conference keynote and two Parkbench sessions, the programme is structured to encourage discussion and bring together the leading thinkers and passionate members of the UK Agile, Lean & Kanban community. With a maximum number of 125 delegates, we aim to provide an informal and intimate environment where you can share experience, demonstrate new ideas and techniques, talk to the experts and generally have lots of fun.
There are still a few places left. If you’re in or around London, I’ll hopefully see you there.
#lkuk09 – A Tweetrospective
Oct 6th
I ended up making notes at the Lean & Kanban UK Conference with good old fashioned pen an paper. Rather than try and write up those notes into something coherent and meaningful, I have decided to write them up in the style of a twitter stream. These are the things I would have tweeted if I’d been on my laptop. The quantity of “tweets” in no way represents the quality of the presentations. I also make no promises that all of the following “tweets” are actually <= 140 chars!
Monday
Mary Poppendieck – The The Tyranny of the Plan
- Plans – what did construction do before computers?
- Eliminate design loops by consulting experts early
- Design for decoupling workflow
- Cash Flow Thinking – Cost of Delay
- Design based on constraints of situation
- Establish a reliable workflow 1st
- Schedule is orthogonal to workflow
- Build schedules based on experience, not wishful thinking
- Variance from plan is a learning opportunity, not a performance failure
- Reliable workflow – output, pathway, connection, method, improvement – Steven Spears, Chasing the Rabbit
- Polaris Success – Quality of Leadership, Focus on deployment, Decentralised Competitive Org, Emphasis on Reliability, Esprit de Corps
Alan Shalloway – Creating a Model to Understand Product (and Software) Development
- 3 types of value: Discover what a customer needs, Discover how to build it, Build it
Jeff Patton – Lean Product Discovery
- There is a difference between Delivery & Discovery
- Undelivered software is a solution hypothesis (usually incorrect)
- Include discovery in the VSM
- Market demand = pull (but is post delivery)
- “Lets go to marble”
- Discovery Kanban + Delivery Kanban
- Visualisation creates collaboration
- Storyotype 1: Bare Necessity – minimally demo-able
- Storyotype 2: Capability + Flexibility – options-
- Storyotype 3: Safety – invisible
- Storyotype 4: Usability, Appeal, Performance – differentiating
- Chess analogy – Opening Game, Mid Game, End Game
- Use options when cost of iteration and failure is high
John Seddon – Re-thinking Lean Service
- If you manage costs, costs go up
- Failure demand is a signal
- Incentivising workers get less work done
- Predictable failure demand is preventable
- Lean is getting a bad brand
- The only plan is to get knowledge
- Improve flow – walk the flow
- Pull the help, keep the work
- Do “productivity” tools improve productivity?
- Make them curious
Tuesday
Don Reinertsen – Second Generation Lean Product Development: From Cargo Cult to Science
- Understand causal relationships and salient phenomena
- Scientific v Faith (Science Free) based approaches
- Faith based = Cargo Cult
- Every system has Push / Pull interfaces
- No bad tools, only wrong times to use them
- In Product Development, Requirements are a degree of freedom
- Inventory is information and invisible (physically and financially)
- Agile practitioners are going a better job at LPD than LM practitioners
- In engineering we are making economical (Profit + Loss) decisions and we have no clue what we are doing
- Quality = Process x People – If either drops to 0, the quality of the result will drop to 0
- Don’t tolerate initiative – demand it
- Chief Engineer doesn’t know better than the customer
Kenji Hiranabe – Learning Kaizen from Toyota
- Balance process control and process improvement
- Management fosters human potential
- Go to the gemba != PowerPoint
- To know and to understand are different
- Think within your constraint
Hal Macomber – Lessons from Target Value Design
- Meld planning with execution + control
- What signals do we pay attention to?
- Articulate + activate the network of commitment
- Only start work when it is in the condition to be finished.
- Embrace the contradictions of Lean
- Focus on tool users, not the tools
- PDSA – Study, don’t Check
- Creating constraints creates innovations
- Create constraints so that we can do our work
- Don’t open the trenches until you know you can fill them
Marc Baker – Lean Thinking: what is distinctive about it and where it is going?
- Pull means take the payment first
- Visual controls mean that nothing is hidden
- Standardised tasks are the foundation of employee autonomy
- Go see, ask why, show respect
Reflections on #Agile2009
Aug 31st
I’m just about recovered from Agile 2009, and about to disappear off the grid for a much needed break in the sun. Before I do so, I wanted to jot down my immediate reflections on the conference while they were still fresh.
The conversations in between sessions are always great at the Agile conferences, but this year, I think these conversations were the main highlights for me. I met lots of new people who I’d only previously known online, as well as re-acquainting myself with people who I usually only see once a year. My top 3 highlights were:
- Discussing team maturity and explicit and implicit Kanban WIP limits with Alistair Cockburn.
- Splitting hairs on the finer points of Lean (Kanban) and Theory of Constraints (Drum Buffer Rope) with Mike Cottmeyer (apparently it was a highlight for Mike as well)
- Debating all sorts of ideas around Kanban with Arlo Belshee and Bonnie Aumann – including drawing on beer mats and using beer glasses and other implements to aid visual representation.
As far as scheduled sessions went, Mary Poppendieck gave a good talk on Workflow and Scheduling in which she nicely transitioned from a time-boxed schedule to a kanban work-flow using a form of cumulative flow diagram. Jon Dahl also gave a thought provoking talk on Aristotle and the Art of Software Development, which for me tied in nicely with Alistair Cockburn’s keynote, and some other thoughts I’ve recently had. I’m planning on blogging more on both these topics more when I get back off holiday. See you then…
Agile 2009 and Scan-Agile
Aug 21st
I’m going to be at Agile 2009 next week in Chicago. I’m not presenting any sessions this year, but I’ll be hanging around the Kanban stand at the Freshers Fair, and probably spending some time in Open Jam to hopefully catch up with people in person while I have a chance.
I’m also really pleased to have been invited to speak at the Scan-Agile conference in Helsinki, where I’ll be talking about Five Steps to Kanban. Here’s the abstract.
A Kanban System for Software Development provides an alternative means of creating an Agile Development process using Lean Thinking. Creating a Kanban System is not as simple as adopting a previously defined process as a starting point. Instead, a team needs to come up a model of its own process which will form the basis for further continuous improvement. This talk will introduce 5 steps that a team can use to create their own Agile process using a Kanban System for Software Development.
Lean & Kanban Miami 2009 Videos Available
Jul 28th
This is the announcement from David Anderson on his blog:
After some delay while we arranged for hosting, the videos from the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference in Miami are now available.
I need to thank InfoQ for making all of this happen. As a media sponsor, InfoQ intended to use these videos together with the presentation slides on their own site. However, the videographer didn’t follow their format instructions and the result was that they couldn’t use them. So after some editing and cleanup they donated them to the community – in this case the Lean Software & Systems Consortium.
As a sponsor of next year’s Lean Software & Systems Conference, Software Engineering Professionals (SEP) kindly offered to host this year’s videos.
In particular, I’d like to highlight the video of my Kanban, Flow and Cadence presentation.
Kanban, Flow and Cadence News
Jul 16th
I did a re-run of Kanban. Flow and Cadence at miniSPA yesterday after being selected as one of the best sessions from the main SPA conference this year. I’ve just uploaded the slides on my downloads page. I had some good and appreciative feedback, and Mark Stringer has bee good enough to post some of his thoughts. I’m always glad to get this sort of feedback as it helps me understand how well I am explaining myself, and improve future presentations.
I have also recently agreed to do session at Skills Matter in London on the evening of July 30th – please sign up. This is the start of what I hope to be series of events jointly organised by Skills Matter and the London branch of the Limited WIP Society. While most of the ideas I will talk about remain the same, I am going to spruce up the slides and base them on the talk I gave in Zurich. The original version of Kanban, Flow and Cadence is nearly a year old now, and is refusing to die, so I’m keen to bring in some of my latest thinking.
Lean & Kanban Conferences – Looking back and looking forwards
Jun 11th
Its a month now since the Lean & Kanban Conference in Miami and I haven’t had chance to blog about it. There’s probably not much I can add that hasn’t been said elsewhere already. It was an incredible week; stimulating, inspiring, focussed, energising. I learned a lot, and made and met old and new friends. For those who couldn’t make it, the presentations are available for download, and the proceedings book is available to buy. All profits from the proceedings will go towards the formation of the Lean Software and Systems Consortium.
Plans for the equivalent event in London are taking shape nicely. Registration is now open and we have had 40 registrations in the first week so it looks like demand will be high – book early to avoid disappointment! We have a fantastic line-up of speakers confirmed, and the program has now been published. The vision was to create an event which generates discussion and debate with a format that is hopefully a little different from the norm. The mix of presenter talks with interviews is intended to stir up some debate, and the Masterclasses are an opportunity to discuss ideas more interactively with the speakers and fellow attendees – more of a roundtable than a teaching session.
Zurich Lean Agile Scrum Slides
Jun 11th
I have posted my slides for the talk I did at the Zurich Lean Agile Scrum event on my downloads page. Inspired by the quality of some of the “Zen” presentations at the Lean & Kanban Conference in Miami, I created a new deck, and included some more slides on some Lean history. I have added some notes to the slides so I hope they have some use for those that weren’t in the room!
The conference closed with a speakers panel, including Ken Schwaber, when the question of “Is Kanban an alternative to Scrum” was asked! Fortunately Ken and I are still friends after the discussion, and the general consensus was that regardless of what we do and what we call it, the primary focus should be on doing the right thing.
SPA 2009 Highlights
Apr 9th
This week I was at SPA2009. Possibly one of the best conferences I’ve been to recently. Diverse people with lots of great ideas. There are my highlights.
Coaching Self Organising Teams
This was an excellent session but Joseph Pelrine, full of useful and interesting ideas I hadn’t come across before.
- Behaviour is a function of a Person and their Environment. Thus while we can’t change a person, we can change their environment.
- Thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the popular Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing model
- An alternative cooking based model: Solidifying, Congealing, Stagnating, Cooking, Burning
- Understanding Flow, in terms of balancing skills and challenges
- The Cynefin ABIDE model: Attractors, Boundaries, Identities, Diversity, Environment
- Social Networking theory
In particular, the ideas around Flow (“the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity”) resonated with me. While this is different from the MMF based Flow of Value I tend to talk about, I did find some interesting other parallels for thinking about kanban systems. A topic for a future blog post.
Estimation Fallacy
This was a great goldfish bowl discussion around the value of estimation. A recurring theme was trust. Should we spend our time building trust so that we can rely less on estimation, or should we spend our time getting better estimates because we can’t achieve trust? The output of the session can be found here.
Automated Ajax Testing
This was run by a couple of guys from Caplin, who have an extremely Ajax based Rich Internet Application. They presented their experiences and learning from using Selenium as their automated testing tool. Their conclusions were that, while Selenium isn’t perfect, when used with its Custom Locator functionality, and a UCD/DSL approach to structuring tests, it can be extremely valuable. A good example of a positive, art-of-the-possible approach to automated acceptance testing.
The session also introduced me to WebDriver, which looks like it could have potential as a new emerging automated web testing tool.
Complex Adaptive Systems
Jurgen Apello ran a thought provoking session on “What’s next for Agilists”? He based his assertions on learning from Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), so I found it a useful recap of those ideas. It also generated lots of discussion about whether Agile has already applied CAS ideas, whether there are new things we can learn, or whether the ideas don’t apply at all. The slides can be found on Slideshare.
Haskell
Probably the most popular topic at the conference was functional programming, and in particular Haskell. One keynote, two scheduled sessions, and at least three BOFs. I went to a workshop on TDD and Haskell, and we looked at an approach to testing a Java application, via the Slim framework using Haskell and Model Based Testing. While I didn’t fully understand all the Haskell concepts, and I’m probably not going to start using the approach on a day to day basis, it was hugely eye opening as a different way of approaching a problem. Another example of smart people being creative and practicing the art-of-the-possible.
Lean & Kanban
As well as running my Kanban, Flow and Cadence tutorial, I was asked to help lead a Lean & Kanban BOF which had a really good turnout. We had some interesting discussion and it was nice to see some interest in looking at being successful from a different perspective.
XTC
Finally, there as a special evening event with the Extreme Tuesday Club which involved a panel discussion with some of original XTC crowd. The main point of debate was around how optimistic people were about the future of Agile. Personally, I think there are enough new ideas emerging (e.g. kanban got a mention) and enough people doing great things (e.g. the Selenium and Haskell sessions above) to be optimistic.
