agile « Thinking for a Change

Agile Summer School in Varese

Matteo Vaccari invited me to participate in the “European Summer School on Agile Programming” (ESSAP) in Varese. The school ran for 5 days. Each morning, there were one or two tutorials; each afternoon we applied what we learned on a small project. Frederico Gobbo and Matteo acted as our customers for an application to set appointments for exams at the UniversitÃ dell’Insubria. Many of the participants are students, so they had lots of ideas for features for the application.

The course was set in the stunning “Villa Toeplitz”, with a fantastic park (see the pictures).

Villa Toeplitz in Varese Villa Toeplitz park

XP Days looking for sessions

Yes, it’s call for session season again.

XP Days Benelux are looking for sessions

XP Days London are looking for sessions

XP Day Germany is looking for sessions

Hosting a session at a conference is a great way to learn something about your chosen topic, about presenting, about ways to make a topic understandable and about yourself.

XP Day Benelux

I’m one of the organizers of XP Days Benelux, so I’d like to encourage you to propose a session for this conference.

We’re looking for lots of different sessions, to cater to a diverse audience. Some people claim they’ve been doing agile all their life; others have just heard about it and want to know more. Some people are interested in hardcore technical topics, some are more into management, others want to explore more of the “soft skills”. Some people want to explore the fringe, new ideas, others want to learn practical techniques that they can apply the next day at work.
If you haven’t organized a conference session before, there are plenty of friendly people who’ll help you prepare and present.

And best of all: Belgian hospitality, great food and fantastic beer. See you there!

Some guys have all the luck

June is Busy Busy Busy. No time to blog, no time to think.
In July I’ll do a bit of traveling to meet some agile people in Italy and Switzerland.

Villa Toeplitz in Varese I’ll be participating in the European Summer School on Agile Programming in the beautiful “Villa Toeplitz” in Varese, near Milan.

Matteo Vaccari at the UniversitÃ dell’Insubria organizes this 5 day course on Agile development.

I’ll be doing a session on agile planning, based on the XP Game.

This’ll also give me a chance to meet with the people from the Milan XP group. If you’re in the neighbourhood, let me know.

After a few days, I travel on to Geneva, to meet with Freddy Mallet from Hortis. I met Freddy and Jacques Couvreur (who just joined Hortis) at the French XP Days, where Hortis was one of the sponsors. Hortis uses agile methods and open source to better serve their customers.

Freddy and Jacques have invited me to present the “Toyota Way” in Geneva. Come to the seminar to learn how the most succesful manufacturer in the world manages. Discover how lean is like and unlike agile. Who wants to take a 5-10 year head start on their competitors and become the Toyota of IT?

Toyota Way at KVIV Agile seminar

The “Technologisch Instituut” of the Flemish Engineers Society (KVIV) organizes a one day seminar on Agile software development.

There are several case studies of companies that have adopted agile techniques, amongst others Ardatis. I wrote about their story before. I recommend you hear their story of how they succesfully applied agile software development in a large project.

There are also two session on testing techniques and how to introduce them in your team. I’ll be presenting the Toyota Way session, about the parallels between lean management and agile management. Should be fun.

More info and registration here. See you there.

The Toyota Way at XP Days France (update)

The Toyota Way

Last March I did a presentation about the Toyota Way at XP Day France in Paris.

Jacques Couvreur was there and now he has written an interesting article (in French) about the parallels and differences he sees between the Toyota Way and Extreme Programming. The main differences he sees are in the practice of Hansei (reflection) and the fact that the Toyota Way explicitly defines how people and teams work together, throughout the whole organisation.

Indeed, retrospectives weren’t an “official” part of XP v1, but all agile teams I know of, have incorporated some form of reflection and process improvement in their process. XP is intended specifically for the development team; all interactions with the outside world go through the mythical customer, whose job definition is left as an excercise for the student.

I particularly like the way Jacques starts the article with some nice, big, hard numbers about Toyota’s business. He ends with the rethorical question “which IT company would like to be as successful as Toyota?”. Jacques follows the advice Charlie Poole gave in his keynote at XP Day France: if you want to talk to deciders, talk their language. Money talks.

Pictures of XP Day FranceAlexandre Betis has published some pictures he took at XP Day France. Some great pictures of Charlie Poole telling his story, all the while the same slide up on the screen with one word: “Extrême”. Charlie has been watching Presentation Zen.

You can see me presenting with a laptop on a chair, the chair on the table. Near the end of the presentation, electricity fell away. No more beamer. The audience self-organized: they put the laptop on a chair and rearranged themselves to sit closer to the small screen.

Luckily, I used a “Takahashi” style presentation with really large fonts. Since that day, I’ve made the fonts even larger, as large as I could make them. Even if the laptop had gone too, I could still have continued to tell my story. I just had to “call an audible“. We did just that shortly after this image, the last 35 minutes. A nice talk with the audience about the parallels between Lean, agile, martial arts and our experiences applying these ideas. I enjoyed myself and learned something new; I hope the other people in the room did too.