Ariel Schapiro’s Blog

I had the chance to speak at the second Latin-American Conference on Agile Development Methodologies, running now in Florianópolis, Brazil. I’m having a really good time attending to some talks offered by great personalities of the Agile movement such as Brian Marick who gave an excellent opening keynote, Diana Larsen who’s talk about generating trust in teams I found really exciting, Roy Singham (founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, Inc.) who made from yesterday’s closure keynote an inspiring message of South America opportunities in the years coming and Dave Nicolette, a guru of agile metrics who’s work I follow very closely.

My session was about a process of measuring cross-project indicators that an agile company can follow once they are compliance with the baseline of measurements such as velocity, code quality. More details here.

Two collages from Southworks spoke at this event too: Martin Salias gave a high level view of practices to follow after succesfully adopting agile culture and practices, while Nicolas Paez gave a workshop around agile estimation and planning. We filmed our talks so I guess some time in the future they’ll be published.

If you follow (or intend to follow :)) agile practices and didn’t get the chance to go to any edition of Agiles, I really recommend you don’t loose the next edition (country to be defined) and in the meantime contact your local agile community for other local events.

Stay tunned for more updates!

Last Tuesday I attended to June’s meeting of an agile practitioners group called "Agiles" (Spanish). The topic for that meeting in particular was "How do you start your projects?". Overall product planning and project, team and process setup were some of the activities discussed as part of the first iteration of an agile project.

The format for the meeting was similar to a Lightning Talk; in this case a series of time-boxed presentations and Q&A (7 +3 mins). Presentations were very interesting, but especially I always find this kind of talks formats very effective: as opposed to long open discussions, they help the audience to get quickly to the point, have a fare amount of questions and then move to the next presentation. This way the audience (customer?) gets added value after a short iteration, in this case of 10 minutes. Any similitude with agile goals?

July 14th meeting will be around estimation in agile projects and they’ll use the same Lightning Talk format.

Last Wednesday I participated in a panel called “Agile: Mission Impossible?” where I presented one of Southworks’s case studies where we successfully implemented Agile methodologies (Scrum + XP mix) in scenarios out of the Agile comfort zone.

We had good feedback from the audience, as well as lots of questions from people facing similar scenarios. Let’s summarize the case study presented…

“Your mission, if you choose to accept it…”

Apart from the goal of delivering a mission critical product implemented with emerging technologies, the case study in particular that I presented had the following constraints:

1. “Distributed²“: The whole team was divided in 2: Southworks team (1 architect + 1 lead + 2 devs) and the client’s team (3-4 devs). These teams were distributed in space, separated by 360 miles. But they were also distributed in time: their working hours differed in 2+ hours.
2. “coached to coach”: Goals included the adoption of agile methodologies by client’s development teams up to the point where they must be ready to coach other teams within the client on successfully implementing agile.
3. “Agile = 0″: The client’s team had no experience in agile methodologies or tools such as TDD, pair programming, refactoring, etc.
4. “Tech = 0″: The client’s team had no experience in the models their where going to implement such as S+S or the technologies they were going to use: MVC, Ajax, WCF, Linq

The approach

After accepting that “mission” we used the product we started to build as the real-world scenario for applying a coaching roadmap that consisted of a mix of:

1. Global (team + stakeholders) methodology understanding
2. Continuous teamwork practice
3. Ownership enforcement
4. Partial team rotation to foster the knowledge transfer

The results

As part of the results of the case study, the product was delivered on time, on budget, with “over-delivery” features. The client’s team had learnt and successfully implemented agile methodologies as well as the new technologies, which they successfully started to apply to other projects in their organization.

Have you ever worked on similar scenarios? How did you solve them?

Looking for blogs related to SaaS I found one of those funny post that compares software development with something else. In this case James Green’s “cow milking” includes Scrum and SaaS. Although SaaS is not a software development methodolgy or process, is still funny:

WATERFALL:  18 months ago, one cow went into the milking shead.  The method was sound, but you don’t need milk any more.

AGILE:  Only milk when necessary. 

EXTREME PROGRAMMING:  You have two cows.  They milk each other.

TEST-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT:  Know the bucket before milking any cows.

OPEN SOURCE:  I have a cow, you and some other guy from Norway milk it on weekends or whenever you have some free time. 

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION:  Your team of two cows checks-in to the milking sheds every day.  Everyone has access to the milk.  Everyone feels good.

SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE:  We agree a schema for a cow.  No one feels dependant on any breed of cow, but no one has actually seen a complete cow.

SCRUM:  There is a backlog of milk orders.  Cows decide how they are to be milked.  Every 30 days the cows, pigs and chickens agree on an amount of potentially shippable milk.  The pigs and chickens get to decide when no more milk is needed.

SaaS:  You don’t own the cows.  You rent access to them and pay for it out of OpEx.  Owning cows is outside of core business - you just need some milk.

Any other?

Last week me and many southies attended the full-time first Certified ScrumMaster course in South America organized by the Scrum Alliance.
It was an inspiring experience for me not only because of the simple basis of Scrum and the huge impact it can make on Software Industry but because of the energy  that many of us discovered during the course that can lead many projects to success.

I´d like to thank our trainer Tobias Mayer; Alan Cyment who brought Tobias to Buenos Aires, and of course every attendee that made those 2 days a very rich experience.

We made a product called “Scrum in a box”… you can guess what kind of framework we used to build it….Scrum! That kind of product forced us not only to learn Scrum the right way, else to think all the time about artifacts, meetings, roles and flow of Scrum; all of this being part of that…

Here you can see a team gathered at the Backlog wall on the far left, me in the middle and another team (in this case my team: Garcilaso Jordana, Angel Java Lopez, Juan Gabardini, Cludio Schicht and Mariana Gomez in clockwise order) working on the 4rd sprint of Scrum in a Box. ¿Can you spot our tasks posted on the wall behind me?

Here are all the brand new CSM and Tobias on the top-left corner.

Finally, if you are interested in Scrum, you shouldn´t miss the following:

• http://www.controlchaos.com/
• http://agilethinking.net/
• http://www.agilealliance.org/
• http://www.scrumalliance.org/