When Agile Works

When I started consulting on an "agile" team back in February, my first thought was, "Hey! You guys lied! This isn't agile."

The working practices were reminiscent of James Shore's recent blog post.

There was Scrum but they lacked visibility, risk mitigation and self management.
There was a morning stand up, but it was a status meeting with over 20 people -- mostly watchers.
There was a single product team, but members were broken up into domain groups with their own managers, politics and definitions of success.

There were bad practices, communication breakdowns, over-commitment, over-time, half finished features, inconsistency and plenty of technical debt.

Team members had all the stress and no power to change.

But, there was hope.

Within the first few months the company reorganized and moved towards product hierarchy eliminating the contention between groups.

=>Consistent goals and priorities.

The BAs, design and product owner worked closely with an agile coach to create a product backlog. They began having sprint reviews and retrospectives.

=>Visibility and reflection.

A few people became scrum masters. A few others scrum product owners. They started going to agile conferences and local meetings.

=>Engagement.

I left at the end of July to have Kaylee. Things were changing, but we were still far from a well functioning agile team.

When I returned in November, I heard that our agile coach said this was the best agile team he's been on.

I thought to myself, "I think he's been drinking some kool-aid..."

However, when I came in for sprint review and planning, I was amazed.

So much changed.

Team members were involved.

Practice improvements and innovations were made throughout the day.

Charts and metrics were used, not shown.

People were having the right conversations.

The differences not only showed in the team and interactions, but the product.

They had visible success.

I feel very fortunate to have the unique look into the evolution of this agile team.

When you are on the team, it can seem like things don't change. Our retrospectives are a microscopic view compared to a projects lifespan. If I was working for the past 3 months, I may have not noticed.

Maybe a periodic review of how things were/how things are would be a good motivator and illustration of how cool agile can be when its working.

3 Months Later...

Almost.

Babies are challenging... Giving birth was easier... Forget about the note I was sleeping better after Kaylee was born, that didn't last long!

Ah, but the human condition. We adapt. Disrupted sleep included.

Now that I've adapted, I'm consulting again.

Apparently, I really, really like to code AND its much, much easier than being a mommy! Not quite the same ROI...

Since I do most of my work from home, I get the best of both. I'm quite lucky.

I'm with the same company and working with lots of WPF and TDD. We just started using the Isolator AAA from typemock, which looks nice. I know Roy was very involved with its creation and I usually agree with all his testing methodologies :)

My heart is still with rhinomocks, but hopefully I'll find a place for typemock too!

And being a mom, I have to include some newer pics of my lovely daughter!

My Little Wunda

I'm proud to say I'm a mom to a beautiful daughter born Saturday, August 16th. I'd like to thank my great birthing team of my husband, Vanessa (his sister) and my doula, Amy. Between them and hypnobabies, I was able to have an incredible birthing experience!

To keep up with the academic nature of this blog -- I'd like to share what I've learned so far in my few days of motherhood (note, I never picked up an infant or changed a diaper before Saturday)

1. Giving birth was the most intense, satisfying and romantic experience of my life
2. Its better to let your dog lick your infant than a person kiss their face
3. There's all kinds of great feelings for your own child you could never imagine
4. Wearing your baby is lots of fun and lets you do something while they're sleeping other than watching them sleep
5. Its still early, but so far I've been sleeping better than I have in the past few weeks (my husband however, is learning the joys of interrupted sleep)
6. Every person you talk to will give advice and everyone has different opinions on the same things (that goes for doctors, nurses, grandparents and strangers)
7. Babies like loud noises, cry before they go to the bathroom, fart louder than you could imagine and produce incredible amounts of poop!
8. If all you do is breastfeed, change diapers and sooth an infant, it can take you days to write a single email
9. In a single day, your entire outlook, appreciation and viewpoint changes completely
10. Every coo, cry, movement, poop and breath from your infant is precious

Although I'm sure I'll have my hands full, hopefully, I'll get to write some of the posts I had been putting off for the last few months while I'm away from work -- I've had a lot of adventures in WPF and TDD I'd love to share!

TechEd Pair Programing Session Overview

Since the session environment was different from our usual, and the audience's agile experience varied greatly (mostly none or little) we decided to allow the audience to ask questions during the presentation. The most successful pairing environments leverage a strong agile environment, so much of our content relies on certain knowledge of other agile practices.

Since we didn't limit questions we ended up covering the first 5 slides and lots of questions in the first 45 minutes of the class.

Not exactly the definition of a breakout session.

This made some people very happy and some people, well, not.

If you enjoyed the session, I'm really happy it helped! I hope you gained some insight you can take back to your team and good luck!

If you didn't, I hope you left early and gained interesting knowledge elsewhere you could take that back to your team and also, good luck :)

Joe White has posted a great summary of everything covered -- thanks Joe!

Most of the questions we answered would have been covered during the lecture, so if you are worried you missed out on some important information, no worries, you just got it in a different order.

Followup to Testing with Mocks

Thanks to everyone who came to the Testing with Mocks TLC session at TechEd.

Here are some links of things we touched on during the class. Please leave a comment if I missed something :)

Test Smells:
TDD Anti Patterns -- Be sure to read the comments, there are some valuable smells there too!

Books:
The Art of Unit Testing
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
TDD by Example (Kent Beck's book)

Rhino Mocks:
Ayende (creator of rhino mocks)
Google Group
Reference Guide

Other .NET Testing Frameworks:
nMock
TypeMock
Moq

Test Runners:
nUnit
mbUnit

Tools:
Resharper
TeamCity
CruiseControl.NET
CruiseControl.rb

IoC Containers:
Castle MicroKernel/Windsor
Spring.Net
StructureMap

Community:
Alt.Net

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills..

Today, I was trying out a wpf grid control and couldn't figure out how to style or data bind or do anything with it in xaml.

I sent the sales rep an email asking for some examples and I was told data binding, templates and styles were not currently supported (dependency properties it seemed too).

With that, I thanked them for their time, and said databinding and styling were a priority so we could not consider their grid.

I didn't expect to hear much after that, but I was informed that those "bells and whistles" were not as important as the other features only their grid supports...

While I would argue these "extras" are a foundation of WPF, I don't think that should matter.

Why are my priorities not valuable?

When listening to user feedback on our applications and products, we can get defensive.

We're all human and insecure, so I guess that could explain it.

However, I would rather focus on a different issue -- what is guiding our decisions, priorities and emotional responses?

Why is the response to user feedback a reason instead of thank you?

All feedback is an opportunity to create a better product. It is great service your users provide (usually for free!).

One of the greatest technical challenges in Ript was adding the ability to rip Flash. It took many, many spikes. I think most other companies would have put it aside -- it didn't add much value, wasn't going to make us money, isn't something that will make a person use the application and certainly cost time and money.

So, why did Gerry make it a requirement?

During user testing, we noticed people thought they were doing something wrong when they couldn't rip flash. They don't understand that some images are flash and some are images.

Gerry could have said document how to determine if an image is Flash so users will know why they can't do something.

But, she understood that it didn't matter if the behavior was documented. If a person thinks its broken, begins to lose trust or feels they are doing something wrong, they are alienated. They will not feel confidence in themselves or the usefulness of the program.

Before working with Gerry I didn't understand this concept. I would have put flash aside. However, her decision is what made her a great product owner.

Where I'm going, where I've been

I'll start with the where I've been:

After NBC took over Oxygen, our lovely, little agile group got a bit... lost. We lost our product owners and inspiration and little by little, we found other opportunities and now, there is no more group.

Next, I went on to an agile coaching role. While bad experiences can inspire the best writing, this was not the case. I decided to resign quickly.

That leads me to my next bit of news -- I am 20 weeks pregnant. I want to spend every week before embarking on motherhood on a worthwhile and fun adventure!

So, where am I now?

I am consulting in NYC on a motivated and talented team working on WPF applications. Its great to be back in this space!

Where am I going?

No idea. From what I hear, into sleepless nights! I plan on working after the baby, but nothing is official at the moment and I'm happy that way.

What about the hot agilistas?

No worries! Oksana and I will still be at TechEd in June. Pregnant women are hot too! Seriously, 7 months pregnant in June in Florida! Who plans that?