Archive for the 'Agile' Category

Dana Mitroff from SFMOMA and I are running a session April 17 at Museums and the Web in Denver, CO called Play at Work: Applying Agile Methods to Museum Web Site Development.

Our goal is to give attendees a taste of some of the novel activities we use to encourage collaboration, communication and fun while engaged in the messy business of creating web software. The session is intended to be interactive – we want attendees to try some of this out with us – which should be interesting given that the conference organizers chose to put us in the Grand Ballroom, the same room used for the conference keynotes. “Gather around, everyone!”

Resources

Here are some follow up resources for attendees who are intrigued and want to learn more.

Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/presentations/52-effective-user-stories-for-agile-requirements
This series of slides by Mike Cohn is a good introduction to user stories as a means of capturing project requirements. We often use this presentation to introduce folks new to agile to the ins and outs of user stories.

Agile Estimating and Planning
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/books/1-agile-estimating-and-planning
This book by Mike Cohn is an excellent guide to the planning side of agile software development and what you do with those user stories.

Art of Agile
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Agile-Development-James-Shore/dp/0596527675
This book by James Shore covers the breadth of agile practices, both in planning and development, and includes many activities like those we cover in this session for helping your team collaborate and communicate effectively and efficiency.

Tasty Cupcakes
http://blog.tastycupcakes.com
Tasty Cupcakes is collection of games and activities designed to help illustrate the value and effectiveness of different agile practices. Rather than being specific techniques used in running an agile project, they are more targeted at teaching agile practices and values with short illustrative games.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development
http://agilemanifesto.org
This is a historic document (2001) in the Agile software movement where a group of folks advocating new values and practices in software development came together to recognize their shared goals and values.

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

After my talk at the Commonwealth Club last week our good friend Darren from Stimulant followed up with me to get a summary of the simple agile retrospective technique I described.

I thought I’d just send him to Google but a search for agile retrospective returned descriptions that seemed too heavy weight for the small, skilled, agile-literate teams we employ at Carbon Five.

There is certainly a lot of valuable information and insight out there I and definitely suggest doing some reading to understand the fundamentals and options for running retrospectives. However, since we want to do retrospectives often, we need a practice that doesn’t take much time or effort.

Here’s a recipe we are using these days. You can do this in 30 minutes. I actually did this with our architect for a home renovation project I am working on. Great things came out of it. I think it might have blown their minds.

Setup

Get alll team members in a room with a few stickies each.

You’re here to talk about an iteration, project, or other unit… with the goal of improving the next time around.

Thoughts: 5-10 min

Smiley face on stickies with good things from the last iteration.
Frowny face with concerns, risks, fears,…
You don’t have to be exhaustive, use the time you allocate.

Cluster: 5-10 min

Create two teams.
Give the smiles to one and the frowns to the other.
Group the stickies into related clusters.

Discuss: 20 min

Identify the primary smiley clusters.
Confirm that you will continue to see these benefits, can you increase them?

Identify the primary frowny clusters and list the themes on a whiteboard.
Vote to discuss – each team member has 4 votes – put dots next to
the issues you want to discuss.
Discuss the top 3 issues – identify SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria) steps to address them.

Rinse, wash, repeat. Don’t feel you have to talk about everything. You are trying to focus on top issues. Once you address those, the next most important issues will surface for discussion.

We do this every other week with our internal team and monthly including our clients.

If you have other recipes for simple reflection, I’d love to hear them.