Agile Training Game Board

Yesterday's talk at the BayAPLN meeting was on the Agile Training Game Board, proposed by David Chilcott from Outformations and Pat Reed from The Gap.

The basic concept is very simple. The same way that some of us actually use an agile dev board alike scrum at the training courses we offer, the ATGM shows the flow of stories from backlog to completion. What I think the contribution was is the emphasis on short timeboxes, 10 min in average and 20 min tops. This is particularly useful for training to executives because details are not necessarily important to them and they rather get the succinct version of things. They also encourage the thumbs-up-down-sideways feedback to consider stories Done. The board had extra columns at the end for value points and time, both important aspects to executives.

The talk included a stand-up game on self-organization to show how some concepts can be "explained" effectively and in shorter time through games.

Jim Highsmith's talk: Beyond scope, schedule, and cost

I'm back home from the monthly BayAPLN meeting. This time we had Jim Highsmith give a talk entitled "Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: rethinking performance measures for agile development". I read Jim's most recent book on agile project management and actually wrote a review on it (posted on by blog and on Amazon.com) and thought this talk was going to have as central point the new Agile Triangle as proposed on the book. I was very pleased that the presentation went beyond that. Jim exposed different ways in which we can measure performance by considering value and quality; and gave a good number of examples. He mentioned the importance on having a better standing point to evaluate and measure performance. A common factor on all of them is adaptability. The metrics must allow changes and be effective measuring under real-world variations. Quality could very well be the most important metric of all; but doesn't mean it should be the only metric to have.

APLN chapters in Latinamerica

Back last June I came up with the idea of staring an APLN chapter in Mexico. After talkng about it with several people in both the USA--at the BayAPLN mainly David Chilcott and Cesar Idrovo--and Mexico (polling people to see how much enthusiasm there is about it) I decided to go for it. Coincidentally an agilist from Costa Rica, David Alfaro, contacted BayAPLN in October and so we held a teleconference USA-Mex-CR (since I was in Mexico on business those days) to brainstorm how to get those chapters started. I suggested David A and I to keep in close contact to share experiences and help each other out in addition to getting coaching from David C and Cesar.

Then in November I had the opportunity to meet a group of Brazilians let by Guilherme Chapiewski, who were in San Francisco for the QCon conference, and invited them to the BayAPLN meeting to be held the following day (talk about good timing). They all attended and loved it. Guilherme told me he would like to get a chapter started in Brazil.

Long story short, David A has been actively increasing awareness on agile in Costa Rica and is working towards getting the first meeting. We learned that a chapter in Brazil was started a while back but didn't succeed and current efforts are towards re-starting it. From my side the first MexAPLN (unofficial for now) took place on Dec 8th in Mexico City and was a great start, with 8 executives from diverse enterprises attending.

Several ideas I have in mind are:

• Leveraging the fact that we have close relationship with BayAPLN (with me now being part of the Coordinating Committee) to figure out ways to help those chapters get up and running.
• Growing the MexAPLN to become the prime chapter in Latinamerica
• Create a latinamerican APLN metachapter to have higher impact in that geographical area and organize world-class events.

Last BayAPLN meeting of 2009

The last BayAPLN meeting, held a the Tacit Knowledge offices, was a retrospective of the year. There were 24 people at the meeting, which is low for BayAPLN meeting standards but understandable given that lots of people are either out of town, shopping, or wrapping things up at work to finish the year in balance.

What was done and accomplished throughout the year was quite impressive, for example:

• 329 registrations at the yahoo group
• 394 registrations at the linkedIn group
• Average attendance per meeting was 44, and topped around 70.
• We had a pretty good number of Agile-Lean celebrities giving presentations at meetings on topics related to agile and: current economy, adoption patterns, group coherence, learning games, agile transition styles, scaling scrum, Personas and story maps.
• Co-sponsored the Agile Open California 2009 open space.

We also noted areas of improvement and action items for next year, such as:

• Better task distribution
• Make presentations more easily available on our website
• Increase knowledge, e.g., adding terms on Wikipedia
• Give support to new APLN chapters such as those in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil
• etc

We all look forward to an even better 2010. First meeting is Jan 19 and the activity is Chartering.

First MexAPLN meeting

The first MexAPLN meeting took place today at 7:45 PM at the Marie Callender's restaurant in Mexico City located on Insurgentes Avenue. Attendees were executives from diverse entities: Sergio Eduardo Duran Rubio (Accival), Martin Villalba Paredes (FIDEM), Alejandro Escamilla (Software Guru magazine), Armando Peralta and Ivan Carlos Rivera (Infotec), Jesus Flores, Jennifer Vazquez and René Molina (Bytline), and myself.

After introductions I talked briefly about how agile got started under a bottom-up approach and how as time has passed by, the practices matured, and the chasm has been crossed, executives are taking a more important and proactive role towards adoption thus the increase of top-down adoption. I then talked about what APLN is and, as a case, how BayAPLN operates. Next explained the benefits that MexAPLN can provide to industry and to us as professionals by bringing awareness on agile-lean.

Last we talked about the success factors and did some action planning for the next meeting, that time to be held at a company instead of at a restaurant.

To finish we did an intro planning pocker exercise for those new to it.

Growing Pains

The invited speaker at the coming BayAPLN meeting (Oct 20) is Ed Kraay, whose presentation is entitled Growing Pains: Why scaling scrum hurts and what you can do about it.

Since I'll be out on a business trip that day I contacted Ed and we agreed on a symbiosis: he would give me the presentation 1:1 beforehand so that he could practice it, and I would give him feedback on the format and content of the presentation. We skyped Saturday morning and I highly recommend it highly to people about to scale agile at their enterprises and equally to those who are or have scaled since the presentation will give everybody great advice and pointers on what to do and what to avoid.

Thanks Ed , you are a good friend (and no, I didn't feel like a ginnea pig).

North BayAPLN August meeting note

I'm back home from this month's North BayAPLN meeting, which took place at the Salesforce building in Market St, San Francisco. David Chilcott, principal at Outformations, gave a presentation on Effective agile meetings. The premise is to apply lean thinking and to extrapolate scrum practices to the way we plan and conduct meetings, and that by doing so meetings become cost effective and productive.

David suggests to manage a meeting as a sprint where the agenda is the backlog, an agenda item a feature, the desired outcome a user story, the agenda item owner is the product owner, etc.. Amongst other things he also talked about having roles and responsibilities within the meeting attendants, which I think is cool because not only the roles can rotate bu also because, and this is my point of view, is a subtle way to get attendants more involved and as result more attentive and productive. His presentation is available at the Outformations website.

Same as with agile-lean, most of what effective agile meetings is about is actually common sense. And as with agile-lean, even being common sense meetings are rarely planned and done right (or just good enough, if you know what I mean) until it is presented in a "formal" way.