There are still a few places left for the London XpDay, an event designed by practitioners for practitioners.

We’re trying the half-Open Space format again, with a day of prepared sessions (some promising experience reports this year) leading to a day of ad-hoc sessions. This means we can have a conference that’s more responsive to the needs of the attendees in the room—if I want to cover a topic I can propose a session.

And we have some interesting keynotes. Apart from Mark Striebeck, talking about scaling up some agile techniques as only Google can, we’re continuing our tradition of bringing in ”outside“ speakers to trigger discussion. We have Doron Swade (who built the calculating engine in the Science Museum) talking about Babbage, and storyteller Terry Saunders.

Nat and I will also be using the opportunity to launch our book in the UK.

Update your WordPress blog before you continue reading this post. That’s how critical this issue is.

I’ve been mostly off-line for a couple of months: no blogs (reading or writing), no twitter, no open source (sorry, users), very little chat. That’s because Nat and I have been finishing up the copy editing of our book. We’re very much looking forward to it being done.

With that out of the way, I can start getting ready for Agile2009 in Chicago. I’ll be presenting two sessions on Wednesday:

• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests a tutorial/workshop based on material from the book. 09:00-12:30 in New Orleans.
• Test-Driven Development: Ten Years Later with Michael Feathers, an unscientific history of some of the things we’ve learned over the last ten years. 14:00-14:45 in Crystal B

Luckily for people with access to London (UK), we have a track at this year’s QCon to address just this point. “Turning on a sixpence — technical skills for Agile development” is targeted at teams that have adopted Agile and are struggling with some of the technical practices. We have a cracking programme full of people who actually know what it takes to deliver and support a system.

I’d like to say that we had great timing on this one because of our special wisdom, but a more likely explanation is that this issue is always relevant because building software really well is just hard.

P.S. On the current QCon London 2009 home page, I find myself cited in the same list as Tony Hoare, Joe Amstrong et. al. This should be treated as an amusing accident.

In the middle of today’s keynote I was suddenly struck by the range of our community. With only about 100 geeks we were talking about subjects such as type systems, coding practices, theories of categorisation, human perception, organisational structure, market analysis, and clinical psychology. And that’s before we dealt with catching up with industry gossip and general horse-trading. Remarkable.

I’ll only be there until mid-afternoon Wednesday, so get in touch early if you want to meet up, and I’ll miss the remarkable ClubZone evening when the conference overflows into downtown Oslo.

Chris Ambler, European QA Director for games company Electronic Arts, tests some of the most complex software in the world

Daniel Jones and Marc Baker, Lean Enterprise Academy, are two of the most established Lean consultants in the world. Jones wrote, with James Womack, wrote “The Machine That Changed the World”, the standard book on the Toyota Production System.

There’s still time to propose your session.

I’ve started a Yahoo Group for people who are interested.

What is going on out there?

A proposal for a Narrative Inquiry project within the Agile Narratives Program

Introduction

How does the Agile Alliance find out what’s important to its members, and highlight interesting new ideas amongst all the noise? The activity of finding out is called Sense Making. This proposal is for an experiment to understand how well one approach to Sense Making works and can be applied to the Agile community.

The Agile world is changing as adoption by individuals and organisations grows rapidly. It used to be possible for individuals more or less to know what was going on, but the community has long been too large for that kind of personal network. How do Agile practitioners, novice and experienced, make sense of current practice in the discipline?

One technique is to use personal stories from the community, managed as semi-structured data, to support quantative analysis and to help understand individuals’ concrete experiences. The Agile Narratives Program has been investigating one approach to this technique. This proposal is to start a complementary project in collaboration with Cognitive Edge using their Cynefin methods and SenseMaker tools.

Proposal

We will set up a programme to gather and index brief stories from members of the community about their experiences of adopting and working with Agile software development practices.

Bootstrap. We will start with a session, run at the London eXtreme Tuesday Club, to gather “indexing” topics, questions that the storytellers themselves will use to categorise the stories that they contribute. Cognitive Edge will then set up an initial data-gathering site based on those questions. We can prompt for contributions within the XtC and various Agile groups on the internet to seed the contents of the database. We might also be able to use some of the content from the existing Agile Narratives database.

Pilot. We will run a pilot event at XP2008, based on this data, to trial techniques for gathering and analysing further stories, in the context of a public event. Dave Snowden (founder of Cognitive Edge) will be a keynote at that conference, which will help to attract participation. This pilot will test our approach and should provide enough initial data to experiment with quantative analysis.

First run. We will run activities at with Agile2008 to raise awareness of the program and to gather stories from the much larger group, based on the experiences from the Pilot. We might have enough data by then to attract attention with some early findings, or be able to show how the results change over the week.

Ongoing. Once the project is established, we intend to keep it active as a place to contribute and find stories about Agile practice “in the field”, about practitioners’ real experiences. From time to time, we can re-analyse the data to report trends and surprises.

Presenting this far from home is still a thrill for me and, providing I can hold up against the jet lag, I’m very interested to see how our material will be received.

Let me know if it doesn’t work on your desktop.

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We weren’t at the ceremony (since we weren’t expecting to win), but we wrote a response for the event:

We are pleased and very honoured to receive one of this year’s Gordon Pask awards. We really didn’t expect it which is why, unfortunately, neither of us is here. The spirit and message of the Agile movement is so important to us because it’s a way for us to practice our trade that is humane and that actually works.

Whatever we have achieved, we have done so because we belong to a fantastic community based around the London eXtreme Tuesday Club, a truly anarchic organisation that has now been going for nearly eight years. There are so many lively, inventive, and committed people there that it’s hard not to do well. So, we accept this award as representatives of our colleagues in the XTC.

I missed a lot of sessions that looked interesting because I had things to do that clashed, but did manage to get to “Dealing with conflict”, run by Matt Bonetti and Dave Leigh-Fellows. They had some nice role play exercises for those occasions when you have to tell someone that you’ve just trashed the production database.

Both keynotes were excellent. Tim Lister, entertaining as always, explained his notion of projects where the Dead Fish of Failure is lying on the table from the first day, but no-one wants to admit it. He’s on a campaign to introduce realism into the software industry so we’re not always scraping by on near-impossible projects. After all, if no projects are ever delivered early then that means the estimation data are severely skewed. As Tim pointed out, it takes a martyr to be a great team mate on a projects that�s going down. He had some great images: a pilot project is not like building a ship, it’s like building a ship in a bottle; and software is Magnificent Gossamer (or should be). Tim stayed around for both days to talk and take part in sessions.

Bill Gaver (who I knew in my EuroPARC days) caused quite a stir. We’re developing a tradition of “off-the-wall” keynotes at XpDay to keep things lively. He showed some very enticing gadgets, such as the Drift Table but they had a deeper point which is to get beyond work/recreation/consumption and address the playful side of people. If you’ve ever seen children play, you’ll know that it’s a serious business that helps us understand the world.

Bill’s point is to recognise that people are first-class participants in a system’s meaning, the designers can never really know how something will be used. Bill’s group are relaxing the designer’s hold on what things are for, or even what they are, which why they are designing objects that have no obvious meaning.

Although this seems obscure (though entertaining), this play is again serious business for us and, I think, a justification for Agile development. If we cannot truly know how a system will be used (ask anyone who works with Enterprise systems), then we’d better be adaptable: try a little, see what happens, adjust for the next cycle. (I’ve just noticed that this maps directly onto the Cynefin approach to chaotic situations: Act, Sense, Respond. Time for another article.)