Steve Freeman

Now the dust has settled, I can reflect a little on the recent XpDay Manattan. I was impressed by the quality of the people there, and how everyone pitched in to the OpenSpace sessions, I have vague memories of people trying to sort out J.B.’s life whilst my jet-lag kicked in. Some people came quite a distance to get there, so Joe’s providing a useful service. Unfortunately, Naresh Jain, who was also talking, got stuck on the way home

For my talk, I chose the concept of Sustainability, in its widest sense, partly because I’ve done a couple of project where I end up looking like the picture above. I used a definition from the UN’s Bruntland Commission

[meeting] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

which sounds to me like a pretty good description of how we should run development teams.

There were so many things I wanted to cover that I ended up doing an Alphabet Talk. That way, if the audience didn’t like a topic there’d be another one along in a couple of minutes. The list is below. Most of the topics should be obvious to a sophisticated Agile expert (like you, dear reader), but there were a couple of points I noticed along the way. First, most of the points are about people, but you still have to have the technical skills to deliver. The other thing I realised (finally) about putting all the data up on the walls is that it’s an invitation to stakeholders to join the team.

Accountability	Looking around
Attitude	Mistakes
Build	Nice (Be)
Continuous	Ownership (Collective)
Deming, W. Edwards	People over Process
End-to-end	Planning
Estimates	Quality
Feelings	Rest
Fix it Now	Retrospectives
Get up from your chair	Self-respect
Gold cards	Skills
Habitability	Transparency
Help (Ask for it)	Uncertainty
Initiation, Project (Regular)	Value
Initiative	Values
Just in Time	Whole team
Kaisen	XP
Kanban	YAGNI
Learning Organisation	Zero Bugs

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¹Picture from http://www.hi.is/~oi/siberia_photos.htm