Announcing Lean & Kanban 2009 Miami

The Lean & Kanban 2009 conference in Miami (KSE : Miami) is officially open for registration at http://leankanbanconference.com/. Its February 18th-20th at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

From the Flyer:

Two and half days featuring a full day of presentations with separate tracks for Lean and Kanban, plus a full day of open space and a half day of lightning talks. You will learn the latest thinking in applying Lean techniques like kanban to shorten cycle time and deliver more value from your software projects. Mix with the experts and practitioners using these ideas every day in organizations around the world.

Come and enjoy the beautiful South Beach venue. Enjoy the Florida sun in winter. Mix with your peers, extend your network and enjoy deep discussions during frequent breaks, open space and at our cocktail  reception Feb 18th sponsored by Ultimate Software. Be part of our community. Be part of the next wave of software management and leadership.

Keynotes:

  • Donald G. Reinertsen
  • Alan Shalloway
  • David J. Anderson

Other speakers include:

  • Myself
  • Amit Rathore
  • Dean Leffingwell
  • Corey Ladas
  • Peter Middleton
  • James Sutton
  • David Laribee
  • Others

I’ll be opening the kanban track with a version of Kanban, Flow and Cadence to introduce the basic concepts and set-up Corey to talk about Scrumban – Scrum & Kanban,  I’m really looking forward to it – it should be the start of a regular conference which has the potential to grow into something big.  Hope to see you there!

XP Day London Wrap-up

XP Day London 08 was last week.  The slides and spreadsheet from my Kanban, Flow and Cadence are now available on the download page.

All in all, the conference was a good one.  Open Space went really well.  Too many interesting options to choose from, which is usually a good sign.  I ran a session on the Evolution of the Agile Model which was an interesting and lively discussion.  No concrete conclusions, but I’ll upload photos of the notes to the conference wiki.

It was also great to have Daniel Jones and Marc Baker giving a keynote on Lean Thinking.  While they haven’t worked in software development before, their general insights were useful and entertaining, with some horror stories from the NHS!  They also seemed genuinely interested in getting more involved in helping learn how to apply Lean to software development.

Agile Business Conference 2008 Review

The conference was opened by BBC’s Ian Palmer, who also hosted Day 1, and he began by making the analogy between delivering a software project and delivering a news story.  There is a deadline, and a budget, but at the end of the day, its the story that’s important.

Keynote: Peter Morowski – Senior VP R&D Borland – Driving Agile Transformations from the Top Down

Peter talked about how Agile helped ‘bind’ together management and execution ‘planes’ of projects as opposed to simply ‘bridging’ them.  For example, frequent releases directly enables better market timing, customer involvement directly boosts quality and efficiency and ensures the right product is built, and demonstrations directly enable transparency and instil confidence.  His blueprint for an agile transformation is:

  1. Establish a Foundation – herd the converted
  2. Build Confidence – Guide the Curious
  3. Socialise Change – Win over the Sceptics

His results so far have delivered 100% improvement of on time delivery, smaller product teams, increased and higher moral.

Agile Development – Enterprise Delivery

This session was about delivering and large enterprise project with Agile.  My one line summary would be that the presenters showed that it is possible by using the usual tools and techniques with discipline.  Their ‘pillars’ were:

  • Risk first, architecture-centric approach
  • Quality built in
  • Monitor & Control
  • Frequent, Demonstrable Milestones
  • Development Processes & Tools

A couple of other ideas that stood out were the ideas of design documentation being a TOC into the code (necessary and sufficient) and the differentiation between a requirements catalogue and requirements detail.

The Battle of the Somme to the Present Day: Lessons in Agile

This was an interesting session which looked at various successful military leaders and battles and drew analogies between which ones were agile, and which ones weren’t.  Not surprisingly, the successful examples were agile, and the others weren’t.

Keynote: Rob Thomsett – Implementing Agile Project Management and Development – Key Learning from the Real World

A very entertaining talk.  Rob began by suggesting that Agile is primarily a cultural revolution, which I agree with.  He compared traditional engineering and construction culture, with an agile culture:

Traditional            Agile
Closed                 Open
Distrust               Trust
Dishonesty             Honesty
Lack of Courage        Courage

He then introduced Agile Project Management (APM) and its principles:

  • Simplicity
  • No Bureaucracy
  • Light Touch
  • Face to face over paper
  • Discretion

Finally, he talked about Rapid Planning Sessions (RAPS) which include a set of tools such as success sliders which can help make sure everyone has the same understanding of the project.  This sounded interesting and is something to look into more some time.

Keynote: Jutta Eckstein – Staying Agile in a Global World: Distributed Agile Software Development

Jutta began by describing some non-agiel specific research which had concluded that distributed projects worked best when there was:

  • Personal relationships
  • High Communication
  • High Trust
  • Bridging of Culture Gaps

Given that these are strongly aligned to Agile values, it can be concluded that distributed projects need Agile! She went on to talk though a list of tools or ideas she had found to be useful in her experience:

  • Don’t have a “remote side”.  Vary meeting locations and be wary of language e.g. if there is a “nightly” build, who’s “night” is it?
  • Prefer location feature teams, but its not essential.  They can be dispersed feature teams, which has the advantage of enabling cross team communication at each location.
  • Communicate with the highest available “common” bandwidth.  If one person or group is on the phone, then everyone should be.
  • Encourage discussion of common interests across locations e.g. weather, sport.
  • Have a Communication Facilitator role
  • Have location Ambassadors, who represent locations in other offices
  • Short iterations for quicker feedback
  • More frequent integration – typically 10% should be spent on integration between locations
  • Use a retrospective of retrospectives to scale the continuous improvement

Keynote: Chris Avery – Personal Agility and your Ability to Respond

Chris talked about the difference between the dynamics and the mechanics of agile, where the dynamics is the culture.  He suggested that the greatest opportunity to add value isn’t assigned to anyone, because it usually sits between groups.  He also differentiated between accountability and responsibility, where accountability is an external agreement, and responsibility is an internal ownership.  the best results come when responsibility is greater the accountability.  Chris’s model for responsibility takes the follow path upwards:

  1. Responsibility
  2. Obligation
  3. Shame
  4. Justify
  5. Blame
  6. Denial

His “Keys to Responsibility” are:

  • Intention
  • Awareness
  • Confront (as in face up to)

Agile 2008 – Friday

Alan Cooper’s closing keynote turned out to be surprisingly good for me.  There were points when I wondered where he was going, and whether I agreed, but by the end I was won over.  His closing sentence was “Agile is the best thing to happen to Interaction Design”, and his key message seemed to be to iterate more at the start, and increment more at the end.  Iterating early over a walking skeleton allows good understanding of the problem, after which incrementing becomes a less risky activity.

Finally, I was able to go to a repeat of some of Kenji’s sessions about Toyota and Lean ideas.  The highlight was his translation of a Japanese video about what happened when a student of Tahichi Ohno want into a Sanyo factory and how a Kaizen, process improvement initiative went.  Both informative and amusing!

That’s it for Agile 2008.  Its been a different conference for me this year.  On the one hand, I don’t feel to have been inspired by as many new ideas.  On the other hand, I feel the kanban software development ideas are gaining traction, and I’m exciting about being able to contribute to this growing community.

Agile 2008 – Thursday

Thursday morning was take up with presenting “KFC Development”.  We were really pleased with how this went – around 20 people came along, and I think everyone stayed the course!  Unfortunately we ran a bit over and had to stop short the final simulation, but I think we had got the ideas across by then.  If you attended, please leave feedback in a comment!

In the afternoon I made it to Joshua Kerievsky’s “Estimating Considered Wasteful”.  It was great to hear someone like Joshua proclaiming that he didn’t use backlogs (“piles of stories” instead), timeboxed iterations or estimates.  It sounded like a very simple kanban system.  He also asserted that his wasn’t an advanced technique, which I also agree with.  Rather, I think were learning new ways of explaining and teaching these new ideas.  A couple of other new terms – feature fat (i.e. gold plating) and bargains (i.e. high value, low cost features)

The day finished with the conference banquet.  Bob Martin gave the keynote, and was on top form as usual.  A great political metaphor, comparing Scrum to Obama and XP to McCain. The 2008 Gordon Pask Awards were also announced.  It was delighted that the winners were Arlo Belshee and Kenji Hiranabe.  Arlo’s “Naked Planning” last year was big influence on my interest in kanban, and Kenji has also been a vocal kanban advocate. Kenji also arranged a performance of “Dear XP” at the banquet.  Rather then try and describe this, simply have a look!

Agile 2008 – Wednesday

Wednesday kicked off for me with a talk by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson on “Natural Laws of Software Development” where they began with some basic ideas about delivering features and value early, and from that, derived most of the XP practices.  On the way they described some continuum, which struck me as good ways of thinking about approaches to software development:

Paper      <-----> Conversation
Distance   <-----> Close
Infrequent <-----> Continuous
Abstract   <-----> Examples

Two things struck me as conspicuous by their absence – timeboxing and estimation.  Asking Ron about this afterwards, he suggested that they weren’t critical, although he didnt know how to develop without them.  I was reassured to hear this, given my focus on kanban systems for software development.

No other highlights, unfortunately.  In the afternoon, I went to “Come and Take It! Lean Pull Applied”, but found it disappointing, although the exercise had potential.

We also presented our “Managers’ Guide To TDD” which went well and was videoed for InfoQ.  I hope the edit turns out OK and will post details when its available.

Thanks to VersionOne for finding me a ticket onto their cruise in the evening.  A great trip round the lake with beer, food, conversation and gambling (with fake money).

Agile 2008 – Tuesday

This is a quick brain dump of the day for me – brief summaries and key highlights that stood out.

The conference kicked off with an interesting keynote by James Suroweicki, author of Wisdom of the Crowds.  Essentiallly this is about how collective intelligence can be better than individual intelligence.  For example, we had a live experiment where all attendees were asked to guess the number of lines of code in Visual Studio as part of the registration process.  The average guess was 47 million and the actual answer was 43.2 million – only an 8 percent difference.  In fact only 2 out of the 15000 attendees had better guesses. (The closest guess as actually by a Conchango colleage, Toby deBelder).  Other examples given were Who Wants To Be a Millionaire’s Ask The Audience option, where the audience is correct 90% of the time, and horse racing betting, where the ‘favourite’, as determined by the crowd of gamblers, is invariable the winner.  In order for the wisom of the crowds to work however, a number of conditions are needed, including cognitive diversity, in order to have different perspectives, and independence, to avoid group think.  All of this makes perfect sense when relating it to cross functional teamwork as a basis for agile software development teams being successful.

The Feature Injection by tutorial Chris Matts was essentially a guide to how the business analysis role fits into Agile.  Rather than trying to push every requirement into a system (via documentation) the BA ‘injects’ value-derived features using a pull model by describing examples.  From a kanban perspective, Feature Injection describes how the features in the system are discovered and scheduled.

In the afternoon I was part of an Open Jam on the Evolution of the Agile Model.  This was a follow up to a similar conversation last year, planning on how we can be more active in taking things forward next year.  More to follow soon hopefully.

Finally, I went to the talk on Code Metrics & Analysis for Agile Projects by Neal Ford and Ram Singaram.  The metrics themselves are really useful, but its important to remember that they are just numbers – information to be shared and used to inform decisions about the code base. They need to be “read like tea leaves” as they are context dependant.  One really cool things I found was the use of tree maps to visualise the state of the code base.