ScanAgile 2015 submissions are open!

Just a quick note today to let you know that the Call for Sessions for ScanAgile, the Agile Finland annual conference is open for submissions.

You can read the whole call for sessions here. You will find the submission form in that page as well.

For me the most interesting tracks are:

• Off-Piste: interesting lessons learned about being agile and agile related topics, from other industries 
• Black Piste: Topics for experienced agile practitioners

These are just some of the tracks. In Scan Agile there will also be tracks for those starting up or that have already started but are in the early phases of their Agile transformation journey. 

The Agile Finland Community is very active and has a long history of agile adoption and promotion. They have some of the most advanced practitioners in the world, so I am really looking forward to see who the Scan Agile team chooses for the 2015 lineup of the conference! 

Hope to see many of you there! 

Patterns of Agility, talk at Scan-Agile 2011 and Agile Riga Day 2011

Some time ago I wrote a post here about Patterns we can identify in projects and how they relate to the life-cycle model in use for the project.

Some patterns are definitely signs of an Agile project (release working software at the end of every *very* short iteration for example). Other patterns are clear signs that we are in the presence of a waterfall project (writing never ending power point presentations to prepare a project approval and then rushing with the actual coding).

There was quite a lot of good feedback on that post and @lebedev_dmitry even suggested that I present a talk at Agile Riga Day on the same subject.

So I prepared a presentation to explore this theme. You can check out the presentation in my slideshare page.

But I felt that a presentation was not enough. Yes, we need to introduce the idea of patterns and how to recognize the context in your project, but we also need to reflect on the actual patterns we see in our projects. So I decided to end the presentation with a short reflection/retrospective exercise: the Agility Score Sheet.

Try it out. Read the presentation, then take the sheet and score your project. What did you find? What thoughts came to your mind after completing the exercise? What will you change tomorrow?

Feel free to edit the Agile Score Sheet. I've opened it so that anyone with this link can read it and edit it directly.

PS:
If you attended Scan-Agile 2011, you can rate my talk here
If you attended Agile Riga Day 2011, you can rate my talk here.



Photo credit: Bill Gracey @ flickr

We have Open Space for learning at Scan-Agile

I've been in many conferences, and without an exception the best part of every conference was the time I had to talk 1-on-1 or with a few people about some subject that really interested me.

This normally started in the hallways, during the coffee breaks. We started talking and suddenly we realized that we had just missed the start of the sessions. The conversation would go on and eventually some of those would continue over dinner.

I've met more people during conferences this way than by any other method. Conferences are excellent for this. You have lots of people with the same interest in one place, start talking and before you know it you have found people with which you can discuss the most difficult problems you've faced. Sometimes others pitch in with a solution, sometimes you just get a bunch of friends that share the same interest.

This effect, of getting to know people you did not know before, is what we are trying to create in this year's Scandinavian Agile Conference. That's why we have an Open Space (aka Open Space Technology) day in our schedule. Open space is the format that allows for the best networking to happen.

In the Open Space anyone can suggest sessions in the morning's "marketplace of ideas". This means that those people are committed to host a 50-55 min session about a specific subject. That does not mean that they want to explain the subject. The best Open Space sessions I've been in are those where the host just asks a question and the conversation flows from that.

For those more technically inclined an Open Space session can be an opportunity to explain a hard technical problem you are facing and have others pitch in to help you solve it or explore possible solutions that you were not aware of.

The Open Space sessions where I've participated have all been excellent learning opportunities for me, but some have been breakthroughs! Most importantly, in each Open Space session where I have participated, I've been positively surprised how people that may be reluctant to participate at first, end up participating actively and having lots of fun in the process.

Come to the Open Space in Scan-Agile. Listen. Teach. Meet your community!

You can start building your Scan-Agile community today! Just go to Twitter and use the tag #scanagile. All of us on twitter will be able to find you and, who knows, maybe even create a joint-Open Space session before the actual Open Space day!

Come on, join the community!

Photo credit: Peter Kaminski @ flickr

What can Science teach us about Agile? (or why you must come to Scan-Agile)

I'm sure that you've heard many things during your life that made you think: "Boy, that guy/gal doesn't get the basics of (put your favorite subject here)".

Well, there's a reason for that. People make assumptions and claims that are false because they have a faulty model in their head. They simply don't know better!

For example, Aristotle made a claim that we now know is ridiculous: "objects of different weights fall at different speeds". That's just plain wrong!

How come a serious, intelligent guy can make a claim like that? What makes us make false claims and sometimes even live according to those false principles?

Aristotle could have easily known that different weight objects do fall at the same speed. He would just need to take two rocks of different weights and drop them a few times from a high place and measure the arrival of the two stones. He would have found that there's no difference. The two rocks fall at the same time.

It took more than 500 years to discover this simple truth. Galileo proved that objects of different weight do fall at the same time and he established Gravity as a constant force with a precise value.

Why am I talking about this in a software blog? Because in the software industry we still have a lot of Aristotles running around and telling us that rocks of different weights fall at different speeds!

In the Scan-Agile Conference we will have an academic session where presentations from different researchers and Universities will try to make us understand what is true or false based on concrete research. We will have our own Galileos to tell you all about the latest findings in research.

For example:

• Dr. Nilay Oza from VTT Oulu will present results related to aligning Innovation and Agile Software Development.
  
• Dr. Burak Turhan from the University of Oulu will tell us a dirty little secret about TDD. The truth is that we don't yet know what the impact is. You'll have to attend the session to find out what he means by that!
  

Among other sessions we will have a panel lead by Pasi Kuvaja on the status and direction of Agile Software Development. You can expect some news from this panel. Don't miss it.

There are other very interesting sessions in the Academic track.

Check out the full schedule at www.scan-agile.com/schedule and when you are ready go and register here.

Photo credit: jurvetson @ Flickr

Why learning is *still* so important (or why you should attend Scan-Agile '09)

Last year I wrote a very personal story about how learning made a huge difference in the life of two people of similar age and in a similar context.

Check out my story about Grandpa Tony and Grandpa Frank (BTW: it's a real story!).

So, this year I thought of finding a different way to talk about how important it is to learn continuously to ensure our best options to survive in our jobs.

I'll pick a few sessions from the Scan-Agile '09 conference to explain how you can actually use what you will learn in those sessions to improve your skills and your career.

Let's take the example of the workshop "Executable Requirements in Practice" hosted by Pekka, Juha and Janne. In this session you can learn about one of the most important practices in SW development today.

Making sure that you continuously develop software that meets needs that are identified throughout the life of a project is a basic success criteria. How do you do it practice? And how do you do it in a way that does not transform the test specialists into click-robots?

Executable Requirements is a simple term to describe what tests should cover in practice: Requirements. Executable because we need to be able to run those tests 100's of times in a typical project and people are not very good at doing the same thing 100's of times, therefore we need to have those in a executable form to be able to run them over and over again.

In this session Pekka, Janne and Juha will explain how they've actually done it! Not theory, but experience.

In many aspects their work is quite unique world-wide and we are very lucky to have them present this in Scan-Agile. Look-out for this "Executable Requirements" to become a trending topic in Agile circles and come to Scan-Agile '09 to learn all about it!

Check out the complete schedule here and register here.

Photo Credit: David Den @ Flickr

Why learning is important (or why you should attend Scan-Agile '08). The story of grandpa Tony and grandpa Francis

I've come to realize lately that today's ability to learn is similar to last centuries ability to read. Confused?

Let me tell you a story.
One of my grandfathers (let's call him grandpa Francis) knew how to read, he was able to keep up with the latest developments in agriculture and even read the weather forecast in the newspaper -- a serious advantage in his time (early 20th century) over most people that depended on agriculture. My other grandfather (let's call him grandpa Tony) did not know how to read. Grandpa Tony could not keep up with latest advances except by word of mouth or (very much later on) by listening to the radio (and TV, even later).

Both grandpa Tony and grandpa Francis worked the land. They planted so they could collect and feed their families. What they could produce more (surplus) they could sell and buy other items such as  lighting oil, clothes and other ingredients they did not cultivate.

For them, yield and surplus were the name of the game. If they could collect more than they would consume they would become (so to speak) richer. Hence the importance of selecting the best plant breeds (such as potatoes, wheat, carrots, apples, etc. -- whatever grew in their climate).

Grandpa Francis was able to rent a farm and have therefore have access to better land, which in turn lead him to be able to have even more surplus. Grandpa Tony was not able to do so. They were both strong and hard-working men, both of them religious, both of them "good men" as they would say in those times. Both of them had a female first child and a male in the second birth -- an important economical factor in those times when work demanded hands and bodies. The only real difference was that grandpa Tony could not read, and grandpa Francis could.

Grandpa Francis would consult the farmers almanac for tips and hints of the latest developments. He was then able to choose the right plants to plant based on the most resistant and yielding seeds and was able to treat for certain diseases by learning about it from reading. Grandpa Tony had to rely on word of mouth and self-experimentation (not easy when you need to feed the family).

Grandpa Francis was able to rent a farm, to have a large(r) house and a larger family (more children = more wealth as families stuck together for long in those days).
Grandpa Tony did pretty well with his hard work and wild adventures (which should perhaps be a subject for another story), but -- critically -- grandpa Tony did not do as well as he could have done, had he known how to read.

What does this have to do with software? Good question, but there is a link. Today's factor in differentiating people's success in life is not reading, but something related: "wanting to read" or being able to learn.

Many people today go through their lives without reading so much as one book per year. That in effect prevents them from accessing knowledge that could transform their lives.

In Agile Finland ry, we are trying to combat that lack of learning by creating opportunities for learning, this year we are putting together the Scandinavian-Agile '08 conference. In this conference you will have the opportunity, not only to learn from the top-notch speakers, but also to network with like minded people and learn from their experiences also.

I'd say that this is an opportunity you should not miss!

Check out our web-site, and register ASAP. We expect a full house and seats are already flying!

Come and learn!