Satir workshops

Sometimes people around me wonder where I am. Maybe you have too. I used to say, I don’t travel much, but I realized that is because some of my colleagues travel even more… So I added a list of upcoming trips to the sidebar of my blog. You can also subscribe to my trips through dopplr. I hope this makes it a little easier to meet up with other people while I am travelling.

The travel feed does not describe that clearly what I’m up to (only if you click through a couple of times), so I guess I’ll still be posting here about upcoming events every once in a while:

• Paris, next week, will see me and Emmanuel Gaillot co-present an in-house eXperience Refactoring in French - “des excursions dans le Rémaniement continu”. I have been brushing up on my french, and we have been talking French during the preparation. I am looking forward to it. We have been making a number of improvements to the course, e.g. a new exercise and the slides look intriguing in French
• Helsinki, 29 October sees me and Marc Evers co-present the revamped “right-sizing your unit tests” workshop at the Scandinavian Agile Conference. The past years we toured conferences mostly with systems thinking and other people oriented sessions (e.g. cultural patterns), we thought it would be fun to give people a taste of our technical sessions as well.
• Eindhoven, 20 and 21 November - together with Bath, UK one of my home towns -, sees yours truly and Rob Westgeest with a demonstration of story testing with rspec at XP Days Benelux and Responsibility-driven Design with Mocking with Marc Evers and Rob.
• London, 11th & 12th December, I look forward to join Rachel Davies in co-facilitating the large open space at XP day London. It is already their eighth conference, and the XP day London organisers show courage by going with a completely different format - less presentations and more interaction between the participants through Open Space. I think it is fitting. As agile software development progresses, practitioners need a place to push boundaries and work on problems they are (still) getting to grips with. With the high caliber audience that xp day usually draws, this should make for interesting topics and lively discussions.

That’s it for now. I will probably go to London and Bath somewhere in October as well. I don’t know when yet.

Several people have been asking me how we market and sell development projects, consultancy and courses. I don’t know exactly, and I don’t know many people who do…

Marc, Rob and I have been busy for a while, thinking about repositioning what is soon to be formerly known as eXperience Agile. We were feeling that what we are offering is more than ‘just agile’. We also want to reach pragmatists on the other side of the chasm, who don’t respond well to the zeal that seems to rear its’ ugly head around methods every once in a while.

In short, We’d like a new website, so that our regular customers can easily find out which courses are forthcoming. We want new versions of the brochure, so that people can see the new courses, and we want to send out mailings more often, so that we can keep our clients and alumni informed on interesting conferences and new developments. There must be a system to all this, most likely similar to a tale of website traffic. And we’d like a new name and logo, so the brand fits better with our aspirations and activities.

Not that we know much about branding (or are necessarily fond of it - I’ve even said Branding is for cows in the past). But we got to do something

So we spent a day brainstorming new names, and finally found one that we all liked and had an available domain name that was not too long. If I remember correctly, Rob came up with the name and it fits well with the name of Marc’s company (Piecemeal Growth) and mine (Living Software), as it is also inspired by patterns.

Rob and Marc brainstorming on the new name

We also decided to do some experiments. We moved slowly, we were all available at different times and registering the domain name took longer than expected.

One of the experiments we decided to do is sponsoring a conference with money - usually we sponsor conferences with blood, sweat, and tears (and a good portion of laughter of course). And then it took us a couple of months to get moving on it.

We were procrastinating, because not ‘everything was ready’…Sounds like a software development project, doesn’t it ;). We did not have a logo, nor did we have the new website we wanted so badly - the current one is inconvenient to maintain and could look nicer.

This week, I decided to get moving, even though the sponsoring deadline of the conference had already passed. Luckily, one of the organizers mailed me if we were still interested in sponsoring - I had talked to him at the agile2008 conference already. That was excellent timing.

So I decided to go for it, and pay for the sponsoring. Doing that helped us to move forward. The conference organizers helped us by giving us a deadline - the logo had to be in by friday to make the printed programme

We felt we can always iterate over the logo and change it later. We also had to give them a url to the website. Oops. Ok, so we don’t have the flashy new site yet, but we have the domain name, so we point it to the old one for now. Ah. brochures. We should have something to hand out at the conference. Hm. The previous one was quite succesful, but we didn’t get around to making a new one. What changes do we really, really want to make so we can send it to the printer this week? Let’s take out the course schedule so the brochure lasts a bit longer, add a new course and announce the rebranding in the brochure.

By now, I hope you are curious about which conference we are going to sponsor, what our new name is going to be, and what our new offerings are. Be the first to know, and subscribe to our - soon to be revamped - newsletter - leave your e-mail address in the box at www.experienceagile.eu or contact me directly.

Credits: Thanks to Marc Evers for simplifying the text.

Harald Walker shot a little video at Agile Open in June. He edited it, so that it became a nice little explanation of the Open Space “rules” in three minutes.

Enjoy!

With the holiday season almost ending it is time to make plans for the rest of the year. Summer was enjoyable; After Marc and I went to the ESSAP summer school in Varese, we drove to Luzern, Switzerland for the first, and very succesful, in-house run of the Unit Testing Masterclass. Marc, Rob and I learnt a lot about what works (and what doesn’t) in our courses in the first half of this year, and it was very satisfying to see it come together… when we experiment it does’nt always, of course - the price of a little courage. I took two full weeks of holiday - highly recommended to you (yes you!), my fellow workaholics. Then on to agile2008 in Toronto, which I took as a sort of extended holiday, swimming everyday, chatting with people, the occasional session, and my last meetings as a member of the agile alliance board - I want to focus more on my business and travel less between timezones if it’s not business. And then a small roadtrip afterwards.

Now I’m ‘not travelling’ - visiting my girfriend in Bath, while working remotely, and meeting some people in London at the eXtreme Tuesday Club tonight.

I’m busy brainstorming some new training courses, and turning the spike of a customer relationship management system for eXperience Agile (soon to be relaunched under a different name, watch this space ) into something that is tested and ready for production. With Emmanuel Gaillot we’re translating eXperience Refactoring into “des excursions dans le rémaniement continu”, which we’ll do in-house in September, and hope to do an open enrollment one in Paris in October. In the Netherlands we’re planning to do some more open enrollment courses:

• Unit Testing Masterclass in Tilburg, 8 and 9 September
• eXperience Agile in Tilburg, 17-19 September
• Unit Testing Masterclass in Utrecht 29 and 30 September

And 29 October I’ll be presenting “right sizing your unit tests” (a taster session for our Unit Testing Masterclass) with Marc at the Scandinavian Agile Conference. I’ll probably also be running a session (wich one to be decided yet) at Xp Days Benelux November 20 & 21 in my hometown of Eindhoven and then later on enjoying the open space at XpDay London, 11th & 12th December.

And of course I’m planning to make more plans and blogging to make more blogs

When we let participants pair program in courses, it is always difficult to make them stop… Over time we have experimented with various techniques. Marc and I are at the ESSAP summer school this week, and we needed to pull out all the stops - they were that focused

Techniques we used to get people to stop

• Pomodori (kitchen timer set to 25 minutes, with 5 minutes in between), it makes noise, so some people stop.
• Marc’s Horn - this gets some more peoples attention
• and finally this:

I shout “Step away from the keyboard, and put your hands where I can see them!”.

That gets everybody’s attention (and laughs). We are having good fun, and seem to have found a good way to explain refactoring when you are almost having some tests (more about that later, hopefully).

More pictures from this session (including the retrospective stickers)

After running it in-house (Marc and I are travelling to Switzerland in two weeks to do just that ), we are now happilly responding to demand for an open-enrollment Unit Testing Masterclass. In this class we practice more Test- and Behaviour-driven development in small steps, you will experience various mocking techniques as well as how (not) to make tests that you and your colleagues can understand.

First courses planned are 8,99 and 22,23 September in Tilburg, Netherlands. See the course page for a full description and the booking form to reserve your space. We are looking forward to meeting you there!

I just uploaded some more photos from agile open. enjoy!

We have a few open spaces for the eighteenth eXperience Agile course , which we will be running in Rob Westgeests’ new office in Tilburg, the Netherlands on June 25 though 27. Three days of fun learning and experiencing Agile Software Development (and students who kick more ass after they’ve been - more on that later).

One of the few courses that goes in-depth in both Agile planning practices as well as technical practices. See the course page for a full description.

Nicole Belilos and I are hosting a trial run of our ‘labour turnover - should I stay or should I go’ workshop - we’re going to also run it during agile2008. We’re doing a trial run next tuesday (June 17th) at the office of Topic in Best. contact me or Nicole if you want to join. If you want to know more, read the workshop description, or the full trial description in Dutch (below).

Hi,

Tijdens Agile2008 in Toronto faciliteren we de workshop “Agile and labour turnover - Should I stay or should I go?” Op 17 Juni gaan we deze proefdraaien, om met jouw feedback de workshop nog beter te maken

Tijdens deze workshop onderzoeken we samen met de deelnemers welk effect de introductie van een agile methodiek heeft op het verloop van werknemers binnen het bedrijf of de afdeling.

Is het echt, zoals sommigen schrijven, dat 20% vrijwillig of gedwongen vertrekt? Of neemt het verloop juist af, omdat een Agile werkwijze leidt tot een grotere tevredenheid over het werk en de sfeer? En wat doe je met mensen die een hekel hebben aan deze nieuwe manier van werken, maar die, om allerlei andere redenen, toch blijven zitten?

De deelnemers brengen hun eigen verhalen en situaties in kaart met behulp van oorzaak-gevolg diagramman (systeemdenken). Dankzij deze diagrammen worden patronen in kaart gebracht, zodat die een volgende keer doorbroken kunnen worden.

Nieuwsgierig? Lees de volledige beschrijving van de sessie en schrijf je in!
Voordat we naar Toronto afreizen willen we onze sessie graag een keer proefdraaien, zodat we onze sessie met behulp van onze feedback-verslaving nog beter kunnen maken.

De proefsessie is 17 juni op het kantoor van Topic in Best (www.topic.nl).

Het programma ziet er als volgt uit:

17:15 - 18:00 Ontvangst met een broodje
* 18:00 - 19:30 Agile and labour turnover - proefsessie
* 19:30 - 20:00 Evaluatie van de sessie
* 20:00 - 20:30 Napraten met een drankje
*
Wil je ons helpen een goede sessie te maken? En/Of ben je gewoon benieuwd naar wat we in Toronto gaan doen? Stuur dan een mailtje, zodat we rekening kunnen houden met jouw komst.

Hopelijk tot 17 juni!

Nicole Belilos

Willem van den Ende

Agile Open Europe 2008 is over…

This panorama photo of the introduction was made by Harald Walker, who volunteered to be our resident photographer. He’s already posted his impressions :). On thursday it was a bit rainy, so all sessions were inside. Friday was a nice, sunny day, so there were a good number of sessions outside - I spent all day in the garden. The Volksuniversiteit Utrecht has a nice location in the middle of the old centre, with a garden in the back - we always look for a location with nice, green outdoor space and that is easily reached by public transport. Usually these two conflict, not in this case.

impression from the everybody is Refactoring, right? session We decided to cap this conference at just thirty participants. To our surprise, it was sold out in a week and a half, even though we were very late in announcing it (about a month in advance). The reserve list worked well. We had some last-minute cancellations that we were able to fill with participants from the reserve list. We succeeded in simplifying the organisation, and in enrolling some volunteers, so that Marc and I could also participate in sessions I enjoyed (re)newing connections and learning a thing or two from the sessions - maybe more on that later. From the closing round, I learnt that:

• Capping it at thirty might be a good thing, as some participants mentioned that as a feature - because of the small size it is easy to connect with others. Nynke remarked before the conference, that it probably scales best in time (e.g. more times per year) and place (more places in the world, that is already happening).
• Agile Open is also for “structured people”. I like chaos, and add structure if necessary Some participants remarked that they were unsure what to expect, and normally like things to be “structured”. After the opening session that fear disappeared. I must say this years’ opening filled the agenda remarkably fast. We added some extra timeslots to get all of the sessions in (note the post-its on top that were sessions still looking for a slot after the opening)
• If we can figure out a way to make it less work for us (last year we also had to deal with and take the risk for participant’s hotel reservations), we might go for a residential agile open again in the future. Some participants missed the evening games we had last year.

participants mark sessions they want to go to group portrait on friday We used to have a topic incubator on a wiki for the first two agile opens. That helped people convince their boss, but had as a drawback that it was mostly  the ‘usual suspects’ who ran sessions. This year and last year, everything was last-minute, and that gave a wider variety of session organisers - this also seems to be influenced by how we explain what to run sessions on. I’ve learnt to emphasisze that it is perfectly ok to run a session on a problem, it doesn’t have to be some prepared solution. We’re thinking of running a Benelux agile open sooner than this time next year, but are not sure when would be the best time (and what would be the place). Your suggestions are welcome! Credits: photos by Harald Walker