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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Agile 2008 Recommendations

Following on from some posts that have been shared in the Agile2008 FriendFeed Room, here are my recommendations for what to attend (excluding my sessions!) Tuesday Morning Behaviour Driven Development Using Plain Old JUnit, Elizabeth Keogh & Dan North – should given an interesting insight to how BDD is compared to plain old TDD. Learning Kaizen from Toyota (with Mindmaps), …

Agile 2008 Sessions

Agile 2008 is almost here and I’m looking forward to presenting 3 sessions this year. Managers Introduction to Test Driven Development (with Dave Nicolette) Wednesday 6th, 16:00 – 17:30, Civic Ballroom South, Customers & Business Value Stage The purpose of this session is to help non-technical managers understand the business value of one of the popular agile software development techniques. …

The Anatomy of an MMF

I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about how User Experience work fits into an Agile process.  As a result a trying to articulate my position, I’ve come up with the following explanation of the anatomy of an MMF. The following diagrams assume the following key: Lets start by looking at a typical waterfall model: In this case, all …

The Conductor as an Agile Leader

One of my background areas of interest is the use of musical metaphors to describe agile software development. I’m a classically trained musician, and I’m always surprised by the number of other musicians I meet in the agile community.  I can’t help thinking that the training and experience gained by musicians is applied by them in their software careers.  I …

KFC Consequences

One of the regular questions I get asked when I talk to people about KFC Development is about how it is different.  As a result I came up with a set of KFC Consequences to try and help articulate this. Kanban Consequence – Eliminate backlogs, timeboxed iterations and estimates. Eliminate might be a slightly strong word, but there is certainly …

Predictability v Efficiency (or not)

Allan Kelly blogged recently about whether kanban systems trade predictability for efficiency.  Its an interesting viewpoint, but I’m not entirely sure I agree! Firstly, I don’t believe any agile process gives predictability.  One of the reasons for preferring agile methods is that software development just isn’t predictable.  Rather, I would say that agile methods can give reliability and that both …