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YOW! 2011 Australia Conference – something for everyone, even the economists!

By Agile, Development, Lean, Space, TechnologyNo Comments

As the lunatics in charge of the Luna Tractor, James and I are fortunate to spend time with the 25% of Australian agile professionals who actually give a shit, who we often meet at industry conferences. The smarter among you will have realised I’m rudely suggesting  that 75% of so called ‘agile professionals’ don’t actually give a shit, which sounds harsh until you hear my benchmark number for traditional business people (waterfallers, 5 Year Planners, CMD+CTRL freaks) who give a shit – more like 1/100 or 1%. Maybe in some cases 0.1%, depending on the institution.

The British cabinet war rooms - agile wall, all the comms you need, the right people in the room, iterating by the hour in 1936.

Economics lesson aside, being invited to YOW! 2011 to present was a real highlight for us. James and I gave a 45 minute talk on the history of coincidentally agile-like practices over the past century, and how they have contributed to some great innovations (particularly in the engineering and space fields, our favourites), as well as some Class A ass-saving.

YOW is reputed to be a developer-centric affair, with a speaker roster even including several actual inventors of famous programming languages (check out the superstar roster here), so as the resident economist I was fairly nerve wracked! Should non-developers even go to YOW? Is it just too geeky and engineering focused? My experience is absolutely yes, you MUST go to YOW – per Martin Fowler‘s signoff at Agile Australia 2011, we are all complicit in software development now, and gathering an understanding of that craft is vital.

A speaker like Mike Lee might go over your head if you are not an engineer for 5% of the time, but he chooses to focus as much on issues like learning and intellectual property protection as development language choice (and he is damned funny while he’s at it). Someone like Kevin O’Neill from Melbourne prides himself on keeping it comprehensible for everyone, without losing the pointy stuff, and the joy of invention and discovery. The big kahunas like Simon Peyton Jones are talking as much about the history, sociology and philosophy of software engineering as they are lines of code. Meanwhile the Linda Risings and Mary Poppendiecks are there for everyone to learn from.

You can easily pick a path through the YOW! program that takes in the more social and cultural side of software engineering and working in teams (these are passions for organiser and founder Dave Thomas) as well as some more general interest code and development talks, and if ever there was an environment where it is safe for non-coders to ask dumb questions – it’s YOW!

It’s actually the developers who need to worry about their reputation in front of their peers – just say “hey, I’m not an developer, but I’d love to learn how that works in simple terms so I can understand…” and you will have an erudite, clear answer in no time.

Good software engineers love their work, and want other people to love it too.

We’d also love to see a few more software developers and testers at Agile Australia 2012 in Melbourne at the end of May, joining the lively community of product managers, agile coaches, lean gurus, analysts, iteration managers, project managers, thinkers, vendors and practitioners who gather there each year.

A great example of our agile community’s need to think more holistically was raised by Mary Poppendieck and Linda Rising at YOW, who both called  “bullshit” on agile’s current obsession with teams of 7 +/-2 people (read devs, testers and a scrum master) as ‘optimal’, when organisations that deliver products to end customers clearly involve everyone from the person on the phone to customers at the front desk, all the way to the intern. Teams of 30-70 are way more normal and work just fine, so stop obsessing about your tiny team at standup being the whole agile gang. That mirrors our experience at Lonely Planet for sure.

If you didn’t manage to get to YOW! in 2011, or as always seems to happen, were forced to choose between sessions, the majority of the papers are up on the site, and most of the presentations were video recorded – check out the YOW Eventer website put together by the Cogent crew in Melbourne for the video over the next days – there’s a couple up already including ours.

Craig Smith with Mary Poppendieck at YOW 2011 Brisbane - the gold standard 'hard act to follow' at a conference

A copy of our slides (with still images replacing the video we showed in Melbourne and Brisbane) can be viewed online here: Luna Tractor YOW 2011 Decades of Agile

YOW! is a multi-media affair, so naturally there’s a podcast – produced by two of the Australian agile community’s bright young things, Craig Smith (who blogs here when not

Breakfast at Brew Cafe in Brisbane - sensational

coaching and inspiring agilists) and Renee Troughton (who has a great site called The Agile Forest). This was done in a fab (very Lonely Planet) little cafe called Brew in Brisbane, so the background noise is fairly busy, and we discussed (I suspect that should read ‘Nigel talked about’ – Ed. JP) a vast range of topics around agile, Lonely Planet, consulting and change.

You can listen to that podcast here, and of course it’s available on iTunes: http://www.theagilerevolution.com/episode-19-luna-tractor-with-nigel-dalton

My very best impression of the French gallic shrug - perhaps in reponse to Charles' line of questioning on whether Microsoft could be agile 😉

And finally on the media front, Microsoft’s Channel 9 conducted interviews of many of the speakers at the conference.

You’ll find them all on their prolific and rich tech-focused website, while my own epic 30 minutes of righteous crapping on about everything agile, Lonely Planet, and offering unqualified advice to Microsoft about becoming agile can be accessed right here.

See you all next year.

Luna Guest: “You are NOT a Software Engineer!” by Chris Aitchison

By Uncategorized3 Comments

You are not a Software Engineer. You do not build skyscrapers. You do not build bridges.

You grow gardens.

You are a Software Gardener.

Do you try to plan your gardens in such detail that you know where each leaf will be positioned before you plant a single seed? Do people expect estimates (or are they promises in your organisation?) on exactly how many flowers will have bloomed in one years time? Do you have a bonus tied to that? Things that would be perfectly reasonable to plan for a skyscraper seem a little ridiculous when you are talking about a garden.

You probably have a good idea of what your garden should look like a week into the future. You might even have a rough idea of the shape you expect it to be in a year from now. But you have no idea of where each branch, leaf, stem and flower will be a year from now, and if you say you do then you’re really only guessing.

If you were building a bridge or a skyscraper and you told me, before you began, that you knew exactly how it would look when it was finished – I would believe you. If you told me that you knew to some insane degree of accuracy how long it would take to get to ‘finished’ – I would believe you again. That’s how Engineers roll. Tell me the same thing about your garden and I’m gonna call bullshit. Tell me you are going to make it grow faster by hiring more gardeners and I’m gonna laugh at you.

So why do so many gardens fail, yet so many skyscrapers succeed? With a few exceptions, the technique for building a skyscraper is similar whether you are in Europe or you are in Singapore. Gardens do not work that way. Every garden is different because the environment it is in is different. Even gardens that are within throwing distance of each other can have wildly different soil. That is why the lowest bidder can probably build the same bridge as the highest bidder, but your company can’t grow the calibre of gardens that Google can grow.

Remember that time when someone in your company unsuccessfully used an Agile gardening methodology, and then went around saying that it was horse shit that doesn’t work? Well horse shit does grow gardens, it just wasn’t enough to save your garden. Your garden was probably dead before it started – a victim of the climate of your organisation. Were you trying to grow a rainforest in the desert? You can’t just plant the same plants as Facebook, Flickr or Twitter and expect them to take root regardless of the quality of your gardeners or the climate of your organisation.

Unlike a skyscraper, your garden will grow weeds. It will never be ‘finished’. Just because you stop spending money on it doesn’t mean it is finished. If you stop weeding your garden the weeds will eventually smother it, and soon a re-plant will look easier than a pruning. The environment around your garden will also always be changing, and a neglected garden will become harder and harder to keep alive.

In most countries, Engineers need a license to build a bridge. Gardeners have no such government-mandated quality control. Unfortunately, the quality of your gardeners is going to have a bigger influence on your gardens success than any other factor – so you’d better be good at picking the wheat from the chaff. Only an experienced gardener really knows another good gardener when they see them. Someone who has merely managed gardening projects will have no idea what they should be looking for (though they won’t know this). So if you are not a gardener, but need to recruit good gardeners, then quickly find an experienced gardener you trust to vet your candidates. You can’t learn gardening in a classroom, so remember to focus on gardens your candidates have grown before, rather than how much gardening theory they learned at school (which nearly always won’t be applicable to the climate you are growing in anyway).

The engineering metaphor has had its time in the sun, and maybe it even used to be accurate, but now it really only serves to help non-technical people have unrealistic expectations about how software gets built.

I am a Software Gardener.

So are you.

(From http://chrisaitchison.com/)

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