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Must See Wednesday
By admin | September 30, 2008
Wednesday is the last conference day at JAOO, so now is the time to select the best talks. These three will (perhaps) maximize your JAOO experience. But don’t come complaining if they don’t work for you.
First of all, if you missed James Copliens talk Tueday, he’ll do a rerun Wednesday at 10:30. Go see him if you haven’t already.
Wednesday, 11:30 – 12:20: Programmer’s Dozen: Thirteen Recommendations for Reviewing, Refactoring and Regaining Control of Code by Kevlin Henney
Kevlin Henney is a must see, so this talk must be attended. His purpose is to give 13 recommendations for controlling code quality, and if everything goes as planned, you’ll be both entertained and educated.
Wednesday, 13:20 – 14:10: Real-world Refactoring by Neal Ford
Don’t we all know refactoring? Then why would Neal Ford talk about it? Maybe there’s something we’ve missed? There are so many questions… Something’s up, and I’m going to find out what.
Wednesday, 15:40 – 16:30: Lean and Agile In the Large – Principles, Practices and Experiences for Large Scale Software Development by Dave Thomas
Large agile teams are an urban myth often referred to by certain scrum masters. Dave Thomas will introduce some new practices which are relevant when working in large organizations. Whether this will facilitate large scale teams will be interesting to see.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Especially the last one I look forward to. Comming from a large company with more than 100.000 employees worldwide, where the intend to work to work in an agile way exists, but I still just haven’t seen this done in practise.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:37 pm
I went to the last one “Lean and Agile In the Large”, and I think he got it all wrong. I don’t doubt that he has succes with his projects because of lean, but it hasn’t got anything to do with agile. Maybe he mixed up agility and agile. If you are agile, you also have a certain degree of agility. But it is not neccesarily true the other way around.
He didn’t mention the end-user at all, only the costumer once or twice, but not as an active part in development. ´The “requirements” from another department (collegues) was apparently very importent. So where is “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”
Lean was a big issue for him, but it hasn’t got much to de with agile. Agile is about processes and people. Lean tends to reduce people to ressources (as he mentioned several times), and tend to optimize the workforce in a way that leaves little time for dynamic interaction between people. So where is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”
Dave also mentioned, that it was importent to measure and do metrics because otherwise people would cheat, hide things, be lazy and so on. What kind of leadership is that? You don’t get happy and effective developers with mistrust and force of will. A way to agile is giving up control for trust and engagement.
If that is what Dave Thomas believes to be agile, I would recommend contacting Agile Alliance and get a little crash course.
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:45 am
I have a feeling that you kind of missed the point. Dave wasn’t trying to explain agility, as he assumed we all knew about that already. He was mostly trying to discuss how it would work in large companies. So really as far as I understood it, he was talking about how the whole agile team would interact with the organisation it lived in as a whole.
But then his talk was actually a bit larger than the time allowed so he had to skip through a lot of stuff, which might have gotten the point across better.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
[...] Kim Hansen in category “Most controversial” for claiming Dave Thomas doesn’t get agile [...]
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Hm. Got a point there. I must admit I haven’t seen the slides he didn’t show at the session. Maybe I didn’t get the whole point. And you’re right, he talked a lot about organization, which is cool and important.
But then again, he emphasized lean, which in some respect is similar to aspects of Agile. But lean is more a production optimization “method” which is perfect for cars, but not neccesarily for people. Agile is a set of values which is good for people but very hard for management.
For my part I don’t really know if I am “agile” in the deepest sense of the definition. But I act according to values which in my book is closer to agile than acting according to the production line and organization.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Am I off the point here?
Now I’m being controversial?
As an author of the Agile Manifesto Dave Thomas must have some pretty good idea about the ideal and essense in how to achieve the best in software development. Off course:-)
But I still haven’t seen how it’s implemented in a large company and in large scale projects. Was it too hard? Did he forget along the way? Was it a dream that is impossible in those settings? What about culture?
He apparently had great successes with large scale projects on time and budget, so he really must be a magnificent manager and couch. But he just didn’t succeed with agile, as I see it.
In Denmark we have very small companies on small projects, so it’s not a big deal to be agile if you want to. It’s absolutely possible in our culture.
But I would like to know about large companies. If it can be done i a large american company, it can be done anywhere.
Isn’t that an interessting point?
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:41 am
Well you must realize that the number of comments haven’t been all that great. I got a prize for “sheer volume” with all of seven posts.