Daré una charla en el Scrum Bolivia Day 2013!!

Si, estoy muy contento porque a fin de mes tendré la oportunidad de asistir al Scrum Bolivia Day en Santa Cruz de la Sierra, un lugar que hacer mucho tiempo quería ir! Gracias Juan por la invitación y nos vemos pronto!!

Descripción

La revolución ágil introdujo grandes cambios en todas las áreas del desarrollo de software y el area de management no fue una excepcion. Pero cuales fueron estos cambios? Cuales son los desafíos del manager en la era ágil? En esta charla abordaremos estos tópicos con el objetivo de entender mejor las responsabilidades de un manager ágil y brindaremos herramientas que los ayudaran en sus desafíos diarios. Entre los puntos incluidos están: teoría de sistemas adaptativos complejos, como crear equipos motivados y como delegar responsabilidades.

Agile Knowledge Repository

Summary

This area deals with knowledge acquisition and knowledge management in an organization. One of the main points of CMMI is to maintain a process repository (as expressed in the Organization Process Definition Area) that enables the organization to acquire and maintain its knowledge. Agile Organizations should maintain this repository, by creating an Agile Culture (I expressed my doubts about being able to create a documented knowledge repository in an agile software organization, as I think software development is a craft). Therefore, processes and techniques live inside the people's brains of the organization and is acquired and maintained by practicing and teaching those process and techniques. Knowledge is maintained using the model used in the past by guilds.

Goals

- There is a knowledge path that people follow inside the organization, starting from apprentice (someone that is learning, does exercises, pair programs with someone and has a lot of time to educate himself) to Journeyman (which is someone that knows the craft and is able to teach it).
- Knowledge is shared openly and collaboratively inside the organization. Culture is strong. More senior software craftsmen lead and teach the rest of the group on "how we do things inside here". Values float in the air.

Standard Practices

I have taken these practices from 8thlight, a company I visited a few months ago. In 8thlight:

- Employees start as apprentices. Their job at that moment is to learn how to develop software and how the company manages their projects. They do exercises and pair programming with more senior craftsmen.
- Software craftsmen have one or more apprentices in charge. So their responsibility is to teach apprentices the processes and techniques used inside the organization.
- Knowledge is shared and maintained by practicing together. Employees do code retreats or katas together. The philosophy is programmers need to practice their craft and this practice is performed on code that is not business oriented.

Presentation in Agiles 2012

Transforming Cultures on Prezi

Agile Collaboration Area

Summary

The Agile Manifesto says "Business people and developers must work together daily through the project". Everyone, within the organization and beyond it (i.e. clients) must work jointly towards a shared objective, help each other, have good intentions, share all the information and ultimately to do what's best for the everyone involved.

Goals

- Collaboration between the organization and its clients is enabled financially. Contracts should enforce collaboration.
- Collaboration among team members in a project and among different departments of the organization should be enforced. 
- All stakeholders should be involved throughout the duration of a project.

Standard Practices

Clients work with team members to specify the requirements and prioritize them in a backlog that will be used continually during the project. Features are presented to these clients early in the life of the project to be able to receive feedback and change according to it. This change should be enabled in the contract (if the contract penalizes delays, the team won't be willing to accept any changes during the life of the project). Everyone in the team should share the same objectives. Therefore, policies and rewards should be devised with this in mind.

Agile Communication Area

Summary

Communication is key in an Agile organization. Developing software is a communication problem. Communication needs to flow as fast and clear as possible among all members of the organization. An environment that enables and enforces communication should be built.

Goals

- There is an environment that allows interactions among all members in the organization freely.
- All members of the organization can easily  communicate with each other.
- There is complete transparency to everyone about the goals, status, direction of the project/organization.

Standard Practices

- The office is an open space, where all members share the same information. There are visual radiators in many places of the office that allow members of a project and all members in the organization to understand the status and direction of the different projects.
- Team members in a project interact as much as possible to synchronize and make sure there is a shared understanding of what needs to be built. In Scrum, there are different meetings that enable and enforce this communication: 1) Planning meeting at the beginning of each iteration 2) Daily Standup every day 3) Demo and Retrospection at the end of the iteration. Besides this, practices like pair program or code review sessions push the members to interact even more. Understanding the effectiveness of the different types of communication types helps devise a communication strategy. When is possible, face to face communication is the most effective type of communication but there are situations when the team is distributed geographically and therefore other communication methods should be used. Increasing the communication to its highest level should be the direction in these cases.

Self Organization Area

Summary

This area's goal is to create an environment where all members feel empowered to contribute all their knowledge and energy for the organization's benefit. Leaders and more experienced individuals should guide less experienced ones and set constraints and directions.

Goals

- Team members are empowered
- The team self organizes to create the best solution to the specified problems.
- Leaders create and maintain an environment where self-organization can thrive

Standard Practices

- Within a project, a cross functional team self organizes to develop the best solution to the problem.
- Managers are servant leader that teach through example and help other members to grow within the organization and to give the best of them.

Agile Process Development Lifecycle Area

Summary

The process should be an enabler of the objectives the organization needs to fulfill. It should allow the organization to deliver value fast and sustainably. It should be revised and improved continually (Kaizen).

Goals

- The process enables incremental delivery of features. In other words, the process should allow to slice the functionality to be delivered in multiple chunks, that when delivered allow the business to receive the most valuable/important functionality sooner.
- Process should be light and empiric. All artifacts in the process should give value to the product creation process.
- Process should be empiric. The team should continually introspect on the process and change it to function better within the specific context.

Standard Practices

- Common methodologies/frameworks like Scrum and Extreme Programming use iterations to deliver features incrementally and iteratively. Features should be potentially shippable at the end of each iteration. This doesn't mean that they could be shipped, as a feature could be part of a larget minimum viable feature.
- At the end of each iteration, the team can show to all business stakeholders the business functionality that was completed. If requirements are sliced vertically and provide business value, they can be shown.  Stakeholders can provide their feedback, which could be incorporated in the product backlog through the product owner.
- The team should inspect the process (among other things) at the end of each iteration. Usually, the team tries to find what is working with the current process and isn't, devising action items that can improve its performance.