Jun
04

XP Days Benelux 2013 – Call for session proposals

XP Days Benelux is an international conference where we learn to bring software to life and grow mature systems that support business needs.

It provides an excellent environment for exchanging ideas, hands-on exercises and extreme experiences.

The best way to learn is to facilitate a session. We like sessions where you explore ideas as well as questions.

The conference will be held on 28 and 29 November, 2013 in Mechelen, Belgium.

The best way to learn is to facilitate a session at XP Days!

We’re looking for sessions where you explore ideas as well as questions. Sessions that dig deeper, going beyond the basic techniques and practices. We really want to find out why/how things work or don’t work. We invite you to propose:

  • hands on coding/design/architecture sessions;
  • discovery sessions – open ended workshops that explore new topics, common problems, promising techniques, or burning questions;
  • experiential learning sessions; get people learning by doing & reflecting; for example games or simulations.

We’re not only interested in agile and software related topics but we also want to explore boundaries and cross borders. What can we learn from other disciplines or sciences?

Available timeslots are 75 and 150 minutes.

We also welcome short experience reports (30 minutes) that focus on what didn’t work and why.

Do you have an interesting story, idea or question?

Send us your session idea today.

What’s so special about XP Days?

For one thing, we constantly try to apply XP, agile, lean, systems thinking, theory of constraints and all the other stuff we talk about. It wouldn’t be an agile conference if it wasn’t organised by using agile values, principles and techniques.

For example: how is the way we build the program agile?

Collaborating to get the best possible sessions

We don’t think BDUF is appropriate or possible, not even for a session description. Therefore, we ask session authors to send in a simple proposal: title, subtitle, presenters, description. It’s the equivalent of a story card: the promise for a conversation about the session.

Once the proposal is sent in, the author(s) can incrementally fill in more information, as the session becomes clearer. There’s a separate deadline for submitting proposals (July 13th) and finalising the proposals (August 28th), to avoid “student syndrome” and last-minute session hurried submissions. Within those two timeboxes, the authors work at their own (sustainable) pace.

Session authors help other session authors by asking questions and giving feedback using the “Perfection Game“. The proposal authors (and the conference organisers) act as “peer coaches“. Through the magic of questions and feedback, the proposal author iteratively improves their proposal(s). Aren’t session authors helping their “competitors” in the race for a place in the program? We typically get 3 proposals per slot, so the competition is fierce. Well, nobody said collaboration was easy. In the end we all benefit from a better conference program. And the organisers see who applies the agile values and who just talks about them.

Isn’t this coaching only useful for beginners? It certainly helps new presenters to marshal their ideas. But, as we’ve experienced while pair programming, experienced presenters get new insights and clarity when “juniors” ask naive questions.

Kickoff 2011 goals-s

The most powerful coaching questions focus on goals and benefits for participants. Why should someone come to this sessions? What is the one idea you want to get across? What will participants be able to do after attending this session that they couldn’t do before? How will you know this session was a success for participants?

A common problem with session proposals is that the authors try to “pile on” too many ideas. The usual session feedback reads “not enough time”. The solution is not to take more time, but to present less material more thoroughly. Think deeply: what is your Minimum Viable Product? If there’s any time left in your session you can spend it on interaction with participants and exploration of your central idea, rather than adding more ideas.

Release early, release often

A session proposal is not a session. You may have created the greatest session proposal, that doesn’t mean you’ve got the greatest session. There’s only one way to know if your session design works: implement it, release it and get feedback from participants. We therefore encourage presenters to do “tryouts” of their session. We offer places to do this at the Agile Belgium and Agile Holland meetups. You may be able to schedule a tryout at a local user group or in your company. Or just invite a few friends and colleagues to try out your session.

Seasoned presenters know that it takes at least three iterations to get all the details and the timing right.

Preparing to select sessions

Now that we’ve iteratively improved session descriptions, the most difficult task is to select the sessions for the program.

Near the end of the session improvement process we ask all session authors to select the sessions they want to see in their “ideal track”. We use these votes as a start of our selection process.

We also use these votes to calculate the “value” of a draft program. We do this by calculating the Program Attendance Factor (PAF) for each voter. The PAF value indicates how many of their preferred sessions a voter can attend, given the layout of the program. To count, a preferred session must be in the program and it must not be at the same time as another preferred session. A program that has a higher total PAF has more value for voters, because they can attend more preferred sessions.

In preparation for the program committee meeting we create a card for each session. Making a conference program requires a lot of visual management:

  • The color of the card indicates the type of subject so that we can quickly see if the program has a good balance of sessions
  • The names of the presenters are clear so that we can ensure no presenter has more than one session in a day (sustainable presenter pace)
  • The card has coloured dots to indicate the type of session and the experience level so that we can see at a glance if there’s a good balance for participants with different learning styles and experience
  • The cards have different sizes representing session length so that we can’t put them in program slots of the wrong size

The program committee reviews all session proposals before the program committee meeting. There are so many proposals that program committee members can’t review or even read them all. Therefore, the committee divides the sessions among its members and trusts that the other members have good judgment.

Before the program committee meeting, the proposals are put into four categories:

  • the sessions we really want to see in the program. Each program committee member can “champion” a session
  • the sessions that we won’t consider because they’re incomplete, withdrawn or inappropriate
  • the sessions that were selected in the voting process
  • other sessions

Sessions on the board

We have large sheets of paper that represent each of the days with drawn slots that are just the right size for the session cards.

programboard

Building a program happens in three rounds:

  1. Create a first version by putting the championed and most voted for sessions in appropriate slots. We do this track per track. For example: first fill a track on both days with technical sessions, then fill a track with process sessions… It’s OK if some slots are still empty.This first step should go quite quickly, without too much discussion. The goal is not to create a perfect program; it’s not even a workable program. We just need a version to start iterating.
  2. We spot a constraint violation, for example. a presenter who does two sessions in one day or we’ve selectedtoo many sessions of one type or subject. We resolve the constraint by swapping the problem session with another same-sized session already on the board or not on the board. We may also spot improvements in balance or PAF score. These are also performed using swaps. The only constraint is that we can’t introduce constraint violations by this swap. We keep iterating until the program stabilizes. We select a few “backup” sessions that we can add to the program in case one of the selected presenters can’t come.
  3. We internally publish a draft version of the program. All organizers can review the program at their leisure to spot any constraint violations or improvements. We often have to take a bit of distance to spot these. When nobody has any more improvement ideas, we contact the authors of selected and rejected proposals. Sometimes presenter availability can introduce new constraints (for example, the presenter can only be present on the first day but his session is scheduled on the second day). In that case, we go back to swapping sessions to resolve the constraint.
  4. DONE. Until something happens like a presenter dropping out.

Getting better

Kickoff 2011 retro-s

We continuously improve this session proposal-improvement-review-selection process. We’ve incrementally built a tool that supports our workflow. New features get added just-in-time as we notice irritations or get new ideas for improvement. Most of the organisers participate in other conferences where we “‘steal” the best ideas. In return, we invite everybody to “steal” any idea they like.

In summary: creating a proposal, growing and refining it, coaching other to improve their proposal, doing tryouts and refining the session is a lot of work. And then you might not even get selected because there are so many great proposals.

Is it worth it? What’s the worst thing that could happen? You spent some time to understand an interesting subject better. That’s not so bad, is it? If you get selected or if you just attend, you get to spend two days with open, intelligent, helpful and experience people to explore and discover interesting new ideas and problems. And one of those ideas or problems could be yours.

Feb
25

Mini XP Day Benelux 2013

Mini XP Day 2013 logoApril 26th in Mechelen, Belgium

Mini XP Day reruns 12 of the best sessions from last year’s program in 3 parallel tracks. The conference takes place in Mechelen in Belgium (between Brussels and Antwerp).

There’s room for 90 participants and the conference usually sells out. So register now to ensure you don’t miss out on this great event.

xp days product box

Picture from the “Product Box” session at XP Days Benelux by Yves Hanoulle

Apr
26

Call for Session Proposals – XP Days Benelux

Mechelen, December 1st – 2nd 2011

XP Day Benelux is an international conference about Agile methods, intended for people from all walks of life who are involved with IT. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in Agile methods. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.

XP Days Benelux 2011 will have something for everyone. Sessions for people who are new to Agile, sessions for experienced people, a good mix of technical, experience, management and process sessions. We’ll have sessions on Agile in real life, stories of success and horror, hands on workshops, and sessions that will completely surprise you!

You can be a contributor too

We’re looking for enthusiastic people who want to lead these sessions. People who work in any role, business or form. People who are willing to share, and are prepared to learn. Reflective practitioners who are not only interested in quality work but also want to know why things work as they do.

Are you new to presenting? Do you have a nice idea, but you don’t know how to shape it into a session? Don’t worry, we will offer lots of ways to help you:

  • We have coaches who can help you create your session.
  • Through our session proposal system you will get feedback that will help you shape your session
  • We provide opportunities before the conference to try out your session.
  • We have a set of personas to give you some idea of the type of participants you’ll meet at XP Days.

Have you presented sessions before? The extensive feedback will give you an opportunity to improve your session further. And you can use your experience to help other presenters to improve their session.

How to propose a session for XP Days

Becoming an XP Days presenter is simple (but not easy):

  1. Submit a session idea (until July 9th, 2011)
  2. You’ll receive a login to our session improvement tool
  3. You complete your proposal and improve it with the feedback you receive (until August 27th, 2011)
  4. You give feedback on other proposals to help their presenters to create the best proposal they can
  5. Early September, the program committee selects the sessions for the program based on the following criteria:
    • Quality of the session
    • A balance of session subjects and formats
    • Participation of the presenter in the improvement process
    • Votes from everybody who proposed a session

Important dates

  • Now to July 9th, 2011: submit session proposals
  • Now to August 27th, 2011: improve session proposals
  • September 12th, program committee meeting
  • September 19th, program decided

Propose a session now to get as much time as possible to get feedback and improve your session.

See you at the conference!

Apr
17

Slides for “Agreeing on Business Value” online

Agreeing on Business Value slides

Here are the slides for the “Agreeing on Business Value” session we ran at Mini XP Days Benelux 2011 and will run again at the SPA conference in June.

The exercise uses a case study that’s not published, so you can’t peek and prepare for the session 🙂

Apr
16

Agreed on Business Value at Mini XP Day 2011

“Agreeing on Business Value”

Portia Tung and I ran the “Agreeing on Business Value” session at the Mini XP Days Benelux 2011 conference. In the workshop participants have to create a “Business Value Model” for a case we provided. The Business Value Model shows the most important goals and measures of the company and the relationships between goals. We often run this workshop to let a team come up with a common definition of “Business Value”. As a result of the workshop, everybody’s has a clear and common understanding of the value the project or product is going to deliver.

We asked the teams to add what they learned at the workshop on the posters. Here’s a gallery of the outputs of different groups. Click on the images to get a larger picture.

Team 1


In the model different types of goals have different colors: financial goals are blue, organisation goals are green and people goals are yellow. At the top are the “lagging measures” (those that can only be measure late). At the bottom are the “leading measures” (that can be measured early) that will be used to predict the achievement of the desired lagging goals. Arrows indicate that one goal has an effect on another. You’ll see that most things are interrelated. The good news is that achieving one goal can help achieve other goals in reinforcing loops. The bad news is that you may have to achieve many subgoals to achieve your desired goals.

This team identified the following learnings:

  • Makes a complex project more clear
  • Business alignment. Today business cases are made individually
  • Helps to give an overview of goals for all stakeholders
  • Make decisions at goal level, not at feature level
  • (You can use this for) portfolio management!
  • Thinking about measures

Team 2


Here we se a simpler model, but still representing the financial, organisational and people goals with their relationships. Everything leads to “Make Profit” 🙂

What they learned:

  • When we talk about business value, we need to think about how to measure leading and lagging indicators
  • Adding the relationships generated new insights
  • Plan-Do-Check-Act
  • Eliminate “business value” that doesn’t really add value

Team 3


Another very clear model with positive (+) and negative (-) effects between different goals. In the end, it all results in “Cost Cutting” 🙂

What they learned:

  • It starts with a vision
  • You involve everybody
  • To build a model, iterate over the following steps until satisfied:
    • Identify goals
    • Define Lagging and Leading measurements
    • Identify relationships (“Diagram of Effects”)

Team 4


This model has exactly one leading and one lagging indicator per area. Together, the goals result in profit.

This team created a diagram of what they learned:

  • Value is not just money
  • Value must be measurable
  • We have leading (“early”) and lagging (“late”) measures
  • We need to identify the relationships between the measures

Team 5


This team considered more lagging (yellow) and leading (pink) goals. Many of the goals have more than one possible measurement. If you have multiple ways to measure a goal you can choose the cheapest measure to collect or find some data that’s already being collected.

The important points for this team:

  • Identify
  • Categorise
  • Quantify
  • Relationships

What the presenters learned

  • Everybody got the same case, but there are differences in the models. There is no “right model”, the team has to find one that’s useful. Over the lifetime of a product or project the business value model will probably change, as different goals change in importance
  • The case is not too simple, and there’s lots of information, just like a real project. Despite that complexity teams of six “strangers” came to a clear agreement on the goals of a project within 90 minutes. How long does it take in your project to come to agreement on goals and priorities. If your projects are like mine, probably the whole duration of the project 🙂
  • Making our definition of business value clear, finding ways to measure and thinking about effects and relationships helps to come up with new insights
  • Participants don’t ask many questions. We were available the whole time to answer questions about the technique or the case, but despite having real live “customers” in the room, participants concentrated on the written materials
  • We started by describing and drawing the company vision on the whiteboard. Most teams quickly lost sight of the vision. Once they “rediscovered” the vision, they found that it answered some questions about value and priority. It would be good to remind people of the vision before every turn. Maybe we could do this in our work too? Why not start each project meeting with a reminder of the vision?

If you want to know more, head on over to the agilecoach.net site where you’ll find more about Business Value Modeling and some other useful tools.

If you applied any of these techniques, let us know how it went.