Fabio Pereira

The so waited conference Agile Australia 2011 happened in Sydney last week. 2 days of overwhelming presentations talking about this software development philosophy that is celebrating its 10 years since its manifesto.

Agile is a means to an end

I felt like the message of the conference was that it’s not about being Agile, it’s about being BETTER. ThoughtWorks logo Get it DONE was aligned with this message.

Unfortunately many organizations are missing the point of the original reason why Agile was created. Some of them have strategies towards becoming agile, they even have the percentage of how much agile they’re aiming to be… And I wonder how can that be measured? And what problem they are trying to solve when being agile.

I hope the conference was a wake-up call as this topic was extremely discussed and I hope that people understand that agile is a philosophy, not a religion (as some pointed out) that ultimately helps teams achieve success and productivity.

Agile is not a religion

Lean Lego Game

Francisco and I ran a introductory workshop for Lean called Lean Lego Game. We had a lot of fun. The workshop had 24 seats and almost 50 people showed up.

Mingling

I had the opportunity to chat with some colleagues from ThoughtWorks, previous projects and also to meet new people with similar interests

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery was another big topic at the conference. It seems like this is one of the next logical steps towards becoming a highly productive team. Having the power to decide when and what features should go to production is the dream of every business person who has been locked by IT constraints and unnecessary bureaucracy.

Fowler brings us back to the roots of Agile

The end of the conference was triumphal with Martin Fowler doing his Uncle Bob impersonation and also reminding us all of what Agile is all about. I really enjoyed watching his presentations about Non-Determinism in Tests and Technical Debt, a topic about which I am quite passionate too.

More photos can be found here and here.

Technical

I’m very happy and excited that I’ll present the Lean Lego Game at the Agile Australia 2011 with Frank. The game was created by Danilo and Frank who have presented it at several conferences all over the world.

1 month to go and looking forward to it…

Technical Agile, agileaustralia, lean

If you have ever worked with ClearCase, you will understand this “adapted” version of the classic XKCD joke for programmers excuse for slacking off.

Technical Comic, Cool, Fun

Stand-up Meetings are a simple, yet effective, way of getting teams to communicate, commit to short term goals and solve problems. There is a proposed format for stand-up meetings which suggests that each team member should provide answers to the following three questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• Are there any impediments in your way?

Have you ever done that and eventually it turned out to get pretty booooooring? I have… Countless times…

Yesterday/Today Stand-Up Meeting (Traditional Proposed Format)

The Yesterday/Today format is a good way to start with, do not get me wrong. I think it’s very important for teams that are not used to communicating daily to start with that format. I just think that we should always look for improvements as opposed to just following a pre-determined format… Recently we have been trying something a little bit different and it turned out to be much more effective, I’ll explain why. Jason Marcotte coined the term as the Walk the Wall Stand-Up Meeting, I quite liked it.

Basically the sequence of the stand-up meeting is determined by our Story Wall. Each item on the wall gets discussed taking into account the 3 questions mentioned before. Martin Fowler reminds us on his post to “Focus on the Backlog” and this is what this new format is all about:

Walk the Wall Stand-Up Meeting

Here are some of the issues that we are addressing by doing the Walk the Wall Stand-Up.

Monologue/Soliloquy

During the Yesterday/Today Stand-Up we noticed that each team member ended up talking alone and in sequence, usually there were no discussions or quick Q&A. That defeats one of the main purposes of the stand-up, which is communicating. I found a word that describes what we were experiencing: Soliloquy.

Walking the wall allows more than one team member to talk about something, e.g.: explain what they were working on yesterday. It could be that they were actually pairing on that particular item and have similar things to say about it. It also allows people to talk to each other about a particular item (Story, Task or anything on the wall) that is relevant to the entire team. After implementing this we had developers/ba’s/testers talking more about a particular item.
But…
Keep an eye on the quiet members of your team… One of the good things about the Yesterday/Today stand-up is that everyone gets to say something, which empowers and therefore motivates them. The facilitator should perhaps ask direct questions sometimes.

Means to an End - Tasks/Achievements

The three questions above suggest that each member has to explain “what they did” as opposed to “what they achieved”. This leads people into explaining the “tasks” that they executed, as opposed to “goals” that they achieved. E.g.: “Yesterday I went to meeting A and I wrote document B and I paired with John on story D”. There’s a lot missing there:

• What was achieved?
• Do you need anything from anyone here in order to proceed?
• Is this harder/easier than what you thought? Can someone else help?

We see those discussions happening when it’s focused on the stories. It is easier and more likely that someone will mention that “In order for me to finish Story A I need help from a BA” for example.

Facilitator

We also learnt that it helps to have a facilitator during the the stand-up just like we do with retrospectives.

Walk the Wall Stand-Up Meeting with Facilitator

But…

• It is not a micro-management status update when the manager asks everyone what they are doing and how long it’s going to take so that he can update his Gantt Chart.
• Rotate the facilitator

And always try to think outside of the box… Do not just follow recipes, be creative and invent your own ways of improving, mix and match and see what happens…

Technical Agile, AgileWall, Collaboration, Communication

I have been reading a lot lately about what makes us happy. Hector and the Search for Happiness is a very good book on the subject.

I found this list on Jason’s blog and decided to repost. Thanks Jason. It also helps remind ourselves of what really matters:

1. Making comparisons can spoil your happiness
2. Happiness often comes when least expected
3. Many people only see happiness in their future
4. Many people think happiness comes from having more power or more money
5. Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story
6. Happiness is a long walk in beautiful, unfamiliar mountains
7. It’s a mistake to think that happiness is the goal
8. Happiness is being with the people you love; unhappiness is being separated from the people you love
9. Happiness is knowing that your family lacks for nothing
10. Happiness is doing a job you love
11. Happiness is having a home and a garden of your own
12. It’s harder to be happy in a country run by bad people
13. Happiness is feeling useful to others
14. Happiness is to be loved for exactly who you are (People are kinder to a child who smiles)
15. Happiness comes when you feel truly alive
16. Happiness is knowing how to celebrate
17. Happiness is caring about the happiness of those you love
18. Happiness is not attaching too much importance to what other people think
19. The sun and the sea make everybody happy
20. Happiness is a certain way of seeing things
21. Rivalry poisons happiness
22. Women care more than men about making others happy
23. Happiness means making sure that those around you are happy

Technical happiness

As a brazilian, it was very interesting to watch this video. It shows what americans think about Brazil. It’s pretty accurate, with some exceptions. Especially the fact that it mentions Lula, former president, as the responsible for stabilizing the economy. It was actually the president before him who did it Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Lula has just proceeded with most of Fernando Henrique’s action plans.

It’s true that the video doesn’t express the reality, but it felt to me like a small retrospective…

What’s good about Brazil:

- Growing at 7%, 3 times faster than America

- 14% of the world’s fresh water

- 80% of its electricity comes from hydropower

- For its size, the world’s greenest economy

- World leading exporter of beef, chicken, orange juice, sugar, coffee.

- Police has recently pacified 13 slums and there’s 27 more to go in Rio

- 1 trillion dollar of oil found recently 150 miles from the coast

- Economists are predicting that Brazil, China, Russia and India will dominate the world economy in the 21st century

- A country that would rather play soccer and make love other than fight a war

What can be improved:

- The brazilian way: “Why do something today that you can pay someone to do it the day after tomorrow?”

- Incredibly high taxes on almost everything

- 90% of the roads are still unpaved

- Public transportation

- Rich/Poor gap

- High tolerance for corruption

- Bureaucratic red tape

I’d be happy to hear comments… There’s a lot of comments for the video on youtube.

Technical Brazil, Economics, Video

A couple of months ago, ThoughtWorks set the challenge of an Android competition. Anyone from the Australian office could participate and write an Android app which would be presented and judged at the TeamHug. People should self organise in groups and each person from the winner group would receive an Android Phone as a prize.

At that time, Romain Prieto and I were flatmates in Brisbane and we decided to accept the challenge. So we worked on an app called ThoughtFerret. Why Ferret? Hummm… Because ferrets look happy and they are cute and… That’s pretty much it The objective of the application is to collect information of how happy a thoughtworker is at some point in time, using keywords and GPS location and… Well, let’s make use of the “show don’t tell concept”… Watch the video.

Everyone present at the TeamHug voted and the winning criteria for the competition was equally divided in 5 topics:

• Impact - Ability to credentialize ThoughtWorks with clients in the mobile app space or make a lasting impression.
• Originality - Innovation, revolutionary, have you seen this before?
• Presentation - Was it delivered well? Did they send the message across effectively? Engaging? Visually appealing?
• Usability and Usefulness - Can we use it now or is it still just a concept? Will it make your life easier, more enjoyable or speed up a process?
• Testing - As Android development is still new, QA processes are still rather immature, how did you test your app?

Romain and I presented this app at the TeamHug and we won!!! Congratulations to the other teams, they were amazing!!! Here are the slides from our presentation:

The prize chosen by us was the HTC Desire HD. Mine arrived 2 days ago… I can’t stop playing with it.

It’s been a pleasure working with Romain. He is such a talented person! He deserves the prize much more than I do… If this were a movie, he would have been the actor in a leading role and I would have been the supporting actor…

Technical

At the last TW TeamHug, I did a talk on Persuasion. It’s a summary of the two books I read recently: Predictably Irrational and Yes! 50 Secrets from the science of persuasion.

Technical

Just got back from an amazing weekend at the TW TeamHug. An event that happens twice a year and gathers people from all the offices in Australia plus some people from overseas. It was a record in Australia, around 150 people attended.

Talks, party, great view, games, drinks… One of the highlights was a the photo booth during the wild west party night. Even Fowler went into the booth

Technical

Technical