Barcelona Scrum Gathering 2012 Notes
I used to attend Agile and quality related conferences years ago and have saved notes from many of them. While some topics have become overtaken by events since then, there still seem to be some useful ideas that I’d like to pass along.
Keynote — Michael Feathers
What lives for a long time in your organization and how do you (pan to) deal with it/them?
Impact of not sharing the same “world view”?
“Goals” of “the system,” of parts of the organization, of individuals — seeing the rest through just one set of these — communication impact of these and (sub) optimization
Software success through modularity and indirection; opposite for people in the organization.
“Systems break at the weakest point under stress” which is often the connections between parts of the system.
Impact of exceptions on abstractions, i.e., how the details, when they do not perform, can invalidate the abstraction as a way to understand the system.
Features are a “leaky abstraction” — technical debt’s impact on future work — refactoring sprints vs doing it iteratively
“The project view of software is a lie.”
Conway’s Law: organizational structure’s impact on product design AND whether this is done deliberately (or not) and what that means to ongoing decisions.
[Many interesting ideas, but hard to see overall coherency as great as Feathers may have.]
Observation — Jukka Lindstrom
Coaching is about increasing awareness and responsibility through observation as opposed to interpretation of what is observed which can lead to judgment/value.
Sharing interpretations disempowers people and may cause them to disconnect and step back from responsibility. [If they follow your lead rather than come to their own decision, any failure in execution can be brought back to you, i.e., “we did what you said and it didn’t work.”]
Coaching involves back-tracking from feelings and interpretations to stimuli and actions. Share observations [not interpretations] to increase awareness [and stimulate thinking].
People identify themselves with their thoughts, but often cannot control them. However, we can control what we observe, but often not without judgment or evaluation. Interpretations are about needs/expectations of the observer which are not being met.
Mindfulness [includes the] ability to “observe” our own thoughts
Coaching — help reduce the “noise” and help them focus
O (bjective) facts, sensations
R (eflective) emotions, observing own mind
I (nterpretive) what conclusions from 1st two
D (ecisional) what to do based on all this
Cultural Impacts on Scrum Implementation — Bas Vodde
Hofstede’s work on cultural studies — initial data, though updates have occurred, still affects results.
Power Distance does not, by default, means command & control [though it can have a lot to do with it].
Consider trying to have a SM from a different culture.
Closing Keynote on Scrum used in automotive part design — Heinz Erretkamps and Gregory Yon (Johnson Controls)
They create the designs (CAD diagrams) for automobile seat parts which are then sent to vendors to make the parts and sent back to be assembled into the seats.
The design use Scrum with two daily meetings per day (AM and PM) over a three-day Sprint.
[Ask teams what represents “energy” on your team? Collaboration? Progress? Satisfaction? Can you be an effective team without energy? Can you be an effective SM/coach if the team does not have energy?]
Difference between being “ready” and being “done” - between getting things done and being busy.
Very hard to maintain quality of team process with lots of teams. Colocation was critical to increase productivity and become cheaper in the long run.
They were inspired to “Transform the world of work” and tried their approach in a software development context with 600 people. They could not get it to work.
