David J. Anderson

I’m thrilled to announce that David Anderson will be in Cape Town from 4-12 February 2010 to conduct a series of events focussed on  Kanban Software Development.

David is credited with the first implementation of a kanban process for software development in 2005. David was a founder of the agile movement through his involvement in the creation of Feature Driven Development and continues to be a thought leader in the Agile space. The full programme, which will be run at the BMW Pavilion Conference Centre in the Waterfront, comprises:

2-day class: A Kanban System for Software Engineering (1 & 2 Feb)

If you want to learn how to implement a Kanban system in your organisation, this course is for you. It is full of case studies and practical exercises that will help you to get started when you return to work. There is no pre-requisite Agile knowledge for this course. The cost is R8000 (excluding VAT). Only 30 places are available.

1- Day Seminar: Management Success with Common Sense Application of Agile and Lean (3 Feb)

If you are a function manager in a technology organization, director, vice president, head of department or senior executive seeking to understand where to leverage more from your technology investment then this seminar is for you. If you are mystified by Lean and Agile jargon but wonder that there might be value to be found if only you could unlock it then this seminar is also for you. The cost is R2000 (excluding VAT). Only 100 places are available.

3-day Kanban Coaching Workshop (5-7 Feb)

This workshop is an opportunity to learn and share knowledge about coaching the introduction of Kanban in an organization. This workshop is restricted to practising Agile coaches who have at least three years’ experience working with Agile methods such as XP, Scrum, Lean and Kanban. Participants will join the community of coaching practitioners that David J. Anderson and Associates can recommend. The cost is R12000 (excluding VAT). Only 12 places are available.

For more information visit our events page. You can also book online.

David will also give a short talk about Kanban at the next Scrum User Group South Africa meeting on 4 February 2010.

This exciting programme is presented by Scrum Sense.

Last night’s 4th meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Scrum User Group of South Africa was addressed by Hilton Giesenow on the topic of Continuous Integration in Scrum. Hilton is an MVP (C#) and Development Manager at Cape Town-based 3Fifteen. Intec kindly sponsored the venue and food, and Scrum Sense the drinks.

There is a summary of his talk on the SUGSA site. If you want to get more serious, buy the book.

My message is: it’s not necessary to implement good software development practices like CI, unless you’d like to have a high-performing team!

Scott Ambler talking in Cape Town. For free! One of the Agile thought leaders, now working at IBM Rational. Also a notorious Scrum maligner. I had to go. If only to be equipped to do damage control. So I pitched up with as open a mind as any Scrum Coach and Trainer could…

After coffee and muffins, nearly 200 people filled the small Sports Science auditorium. Scott gave a discursive and entertaining three-hour talk that spanned a number of threads. His blunt style evoked laughter as the audience identified with many of his observations. Here are some of the things I heard him say – I think.

Myths and Facts

• Software development is an art rather than science with people rather than technology at its core.
• IT organisations all over the world are messed up in more-or-less the same ways; all making the same mistakes, due to all basing their way of working on the same set of false premises.
• They discover a problem, put a band-aid over it, discover another problem, fit another band aid and so on. Nothing actually gets fixed.
• Traditional project management is based on lying, and stakeholders know this.
• Earned value management is another lie – there is no value until the software is delivered. It is just not the right metric.
• The US has a $600 billion data quality problem. And it’s not getting smaller.
• We (IT) are not professionals – we don’t get respect from anybody.
• Most organisations choose to fail – it’s more comfortable to fail in familiar ways than to succeed in unfamiliar ways.
• Project retrospectives don’t work – the lessons ‘learned’ are not put into practice, because the project has ended and there is no longer motivation to do so.
• Doing things against natural human behaviour will always fail.
• Every hand-off is a risk and a point at which defects are introduced.
• Media richness theory tells us that the best way to communicate is face-to-face and the worst is via written documents.
• Change management is a euphemism for change prevention and is unethical.
• Logged defects older than a year are waste and should be deleted.
• The most valuable artefact to Agile developers is working software; the least valuable is Gantt charts.
• There is no statistical difference between the success of projects in organisations who implement the CMMI and those who don’t, whether Agile or not. There is a significant difference in success between Agile and not.
• Collocated Agile teams report a 79% project success rate compared with 73% who are “near located” and only 55% who are “far located” (requires air travel).
• Collocation results in increased job satisfaction.
• Near location often needs only a “decorating decision” to save 6% and payback is achieved in one week!
• Regarding distributed teams: (1) don’t; (2) observe Conway’s Law – distribute in relation to your architecture; and (3) use appropriate tools and techniques.
• Most distributed development is based on a lack of trust.
• Beware of off-shoring: if you’re failing now to manage your own people locally, there is no chance you will succeed in managing people off-shore.
• Fire the evil bastards who hang art on the wall in your IT department! Fill all walls with white boards or whote board wallpaper.
• A repeatable process in software development is nonsense. In every instance there will be changes for scaling, distribution, domain, people, …
• The bureaucrats are out of control…and so are the HR people!
• You can change your organisation [fix it] or you can change your organisation [move to another]!
• Lean (“optimise the whole”) helps explain why Agile works
• Two-thirds of software features built are rarely or never used (Standish report) – so don’t build them! The product backlog addresses the risk of building the wrong things.
• Business wants estimates in order to manage financial risk. Agile makes this unnecessary – we only have to fund one iteration (at a time).
• The iron triangle – one of scope, schedule and cost has to be variable; if you fix all three vertices, quality becomes the undesired variable.
• Traditional development is gambling! We need to remind management that they got burned in the past and there is (now) a better way.
• Fixed price work is unethical. As wannabe professionals we need to stand up to the bureaucratic treadmill.
• Every developer should attend a two-day “introduction to usability” course. And an “introduction to security” course.
• There are simple ways to refactor databases – to learn how, buy Scott’s book!

Call to Action

Scott made a clear call to action amongst IT and business managers in organisations:

1. Start experimenting with Agile. This is the easiest decision in decades for management to make! There is a very big upside with very little downside.
2. Train your people.
3. Get some help (coaching).

Despite his sniping at Scrum, I was pleasantly surprised at the sense he made. And I hope local organisations heed his call – my phone should ring off the hook on Monday…

I was fortunate to attend the Scrum gathering last week. It was held at the impressive Gaylord Palms resort in Kissimmee, Orlando. I arrived early and spent Sunday visiting Disney’s nearby Epcot theme park.

Space Shuttle Discovery launch 2009.03.15 19:45

Planet Earth at Epcot

Our evening cocktail party, hosted by the PMI, was interrupted to observe the launch of the space shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Centre, some 50 km East of Orlando. Just before the 7:43 pm launch time we gathered on an East-facing balcony to watch. This was to be the last night-time launch of the shuttle as we know it. We weren’t disappointed.

Ball Points game at CITI

Sounds a bit like S*x and the City, but no!

I was invited by Martin Wright of Cape Venture Partners to talk to members of the CITI My Mentor programme about Scrum. As we frequently experience, most of these IT entreprenuers knew nothing about Scrum…other than the game of rugby kind. After a short intro we ran Boris Gloger’s Ball Points game to illustrate the value of empirical over defined process models.

The key learnings were (and this is always the case):

• Wow, we really improved the process a lot over the 5 iterations by applying our learning!
• Our estimates were quite close to actuals from the 3rd sprint on.

It’s always exciting to see the cogs click as people – in this case entrepreneurs – start to visualise the potential for applying Scrum principles in their businesses.

Now they need to decide whether to do something about it or just go about business as usual.