MexAPLN meeting: March 2010

----- English version on top and Spanish version at the bottom -----
----- Versión en Inglés primero y version en Español abajo -----

--- English ---
MexAPLN meeting on March 25 took place at Software Guru, again. Many thanks to SG for hosting us! I like their offices quite a bit, btw. Given the fact that a long vacation time starts next week and many people start early I expected few people but to my surprise there were 8 of us; which is great considering previous meetings have had between 8 and 12 people.

Agenda for the meeting was primarily to:

• Work on the charter's objectives. We covered a little over the list we had and added new ones. We have enough to get started and will cover the remaining ones by the next meeting, hopefully.
  
• Next meeting will be the first double-meeting, meaning a CoCo meeting followed by a general meeting. Venue is TBD and topic will be either one to be proposed by Alberto Balderas or one on project management by Masa
• Learning. I talked about the project management triangles and showed a new polygon I call the lean-agile prism, which I am currently proposing and submitted and article about it to Agile Journal.

--- Español ---
La reunión del 25 de marzo tuvo lugar en Software Gurú otra vez. Muchas gracias a la SG por recibirnos! Por cierto que me gustan mucho sus oficinas un poco. Dado el hecho de que las vacaciones de semana santa comienzan la próxima semana y que muchas personas inician su vacación días antes, esperaba poca gente pero para mi sorpresa hubo 8 de nosotros, que es fabuloso teniendo en cuenta que las reuniones anteriores han tenido entre 8 y 12 personas.

La agenda fué primordialmente:

• Trabajar en los objetivos de los estatutos. Hemos cubierto un poco más de la lista que teníamos y añadimos otros nuevos. Tenemos suficiente para empezar a trabajar y cubriremos los restantes en la próxima reunión, de ser posible.
• La próxima reunión será la primer reunión doble: reunión del CoCo seguida de una reunión general. Lugar para el event está por determinarse y el tema será uno propuesto por Alberto Balderas o uno sobre la gestión de proyectos de parte de Masa.
• Aprendizaje. Hablé acerca de los triángulos de la gestión del proyecto y mostré un nuevo polígono que yo llamo el prisma lean-agile, que estoy proponiendo en la actualidad y he presentado un artículo sobre el tema al Agile Journal.

Book review: Innovation Games

Everybody wants to better their businesses and make serious efforts to do so, but maybe we could be more effective is the efforts were less serious and more fun. Business communication is always challenging within the organization, with customers, providers, contractors, etc.. This is in part because they are not face-to-face and because most times one or more people who could add significant value take a passive role, in part because most times there is someone who enjoys dominating the meeting. End result is incomplete and biased information and decisions.

One main reason why games work is because (a) they are fun, and (b) they make everybody to actively participate. Hohmann's book is a great starting point. The games cover diverse needs and conducted properly add significant value (and save costs) to teams, projects, and entire enterprises.

Don't get serious... instead, start using this book!

Writing Spanish version of new Kanban book

Great news, I have been given the opportunity to translate David J Anderson's new book entitled "Kanban: Evolutionary change for you technology company". Needless to say I am thrilled by this.
:-)

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.

Lean-Agile editor for the Software Guru magazine

Software Guru magazine invited me to be the editor for its lean-agile section and I gladly accepted :-)

This is a great opportunity to help in contributing more effectively to the penetration of lean-agile in Mexico and hopefully Latin America as well; and at the same time increase de presence of Mexico within the global lean-agile community.

The best way to fix the Prius sudden-acceleration problem is by not fixing it.

Did I get your attention? Good!
Tonight's news included yet another case of a Prius sudden-acceleration problem, this time in San Diego where the driver ended up being assisted by a police officer who used his police car to stop the Prius by driving in front of it to slow it down to a stop. Toyota's engineers are really scratching their heads over this problem and that particular Prius is now being analyzed very thoroughly in hope to figure out the cause.

So, how to fix this problem? Probably Toyota's engineers already thought about what I am about to propose but here it goes anyway: do not fix the problem! Okay so, before those of you who are still reading on what I think should be done is two things:

• Verify the algorithm and its implementation. One very likely cause is the software that controls the car's acceleration and brake systems. If that is the case and engineers cannot find and fix the bug(s) then a better course of action would be to start from the beginning and (a) create a new algorithm, (b) analyze the algorthm quality as such, i.e. as an abstraction, (c) implement and test it simultaneously. Step (b) is extremely important because that is the best way to make sure the algorithm is robust. If we wait until implementation time to do testing then it will be harder to know if the problem is the algorithm itself or its implementation. I think this is the most viable, fast, and cost-effective course of action.
  
• Unit level testing is not enough. One well know problem with measurement, from the physics standpoint, is that any attempt to measure something will affect what is being measured and therefore the measurement will be inexact. This means that once the algorithm and its implementation are robust it will be more effective to test at subsystem and system levels instead of inisolation.
• Reproduce internal and external test conditions. The best way to reproduce a behavior is by recreating all conditions that triggered the undersired behavior. In addition to the car conditions this includes road, slope, weather, etc.

Building things anew might be a quicker and better way compared to trying to identify and fix what is wrong.

Presentaion on Lean-Agile and Innovation at the ITESM

This morning I gave a presentation on Lean-Agile and Innovation at the ITESM (Monterey Advanced Studies Institute of Technology), which was broadcasted to its 33 campuses nation-wide via satelite and was also webcasted.

I talked about the motivation to create better products and services considering Quality, Value, and Design, then moved on to talk about fundamentals of Lean and Agile. Last I talked about the advantage of using games to foster innovation and did examples on planning and estimating, group cohesion, and product analysis. More specifically I used planning poker, pair drawing, and prune-the-tree games.

The oopsy part was that I used all of the allocated time giving the presentation so Q&A had to be off-line. But it was possible to compensate at least with the local audience through 10 min. of Q&A.

BTW, the ITESM staff did an extraordinary job with logistics, production, etc., and the campus is impressive and functional.