slides from Pittsburgh Ruby on my software process journey

1. Software Process, the good parts
pgh.rb

2. quis, quid, cur, quomodo, ubi, quando, quibus auxiliis
who?
what?
why?
how?
where?
when?
with what?

3. Andrew Clay Shafer
@littleidea
rouser of rabble

4. Agile
I hated it

6. I hated the dogma
hated that it wasn’t working

7. Beware the ‘Expert’

8. People say ‘Agile’, they really mean ‘Scrum’

9. Salt Lake Agile
Wonders of the Agile World
Roundtable

10. I went there to get
ammunition

11. What I found was more
Smart People Discussing Ideas
interesting

13. Crystal
•Frequent Delivery
•Reflective Improvement
•Close or Osmotic Communication
•Personal Safety
•Focus
•Easy Access to Expert Users
•Automated Tests, Configuration Management and
Frequent Integration.

14. Context Matters
•Criticality
•Size
•Scope
•Schedule
•Contractors
•Distributed

15. MVP
Minimally
Viable
Process

16. XP

17. Lean
waste not

18. kanban
see the flow

19. Recipe for Success
•Focus on Quality
•Reduce Work-in-Progress
•Deliver Often
•Balance Demand against Throughput
•Prioritize
•Attack Sources of Variability to Improve Predictability

20. Visual Pull Signaling + Metrics

21. lean
startup
connect dots

22. programming
zbgureshpxre
do you speak it?

23. where were we?

24. hardest thing to do
Inspect and Adapt

25. Cargo Culting
all ceremony
no substance

26. ARxTA
We believe Agile software development is being
dumbed down, commodified, and is losing its spirit. We
seek to replace the current name with one having two
virtues: first, that it capture more exactly the attitudes
originally behind Agile; second, that it be obscure
enough that no one will assume they already know
what it means and that—amazingly enough!—they are

27. Working software is the primary measure of progress.

28. Duality
Building vs Planning
But what are we building and why?

29. Dude’s Law

30. can I be less meta?

31. No

32. Sorry

33. the hardest thing in software is capturing the vision

34. "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up
people to collect wood and don't assign them
tasks and work, but rather teach them to
long for the endless immensity of the sea."
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

35. Telling the Story

36. "As a <role>, I want
<goal/desire> so that
<benefit>"

37. that’s one way to do it
a user story is a promise to have a conversation...

38. The Backlog is a Ghetto
where stories go to die

39. Story Mapping

40. We design systems, why don’t we design teams?

41. who needs to join the party?

42. different strokes for different folks

43. Consistency, Availability,
Partition Tolerance

44. 6 Laws Of Reliability
says nothing about computers
Isolation
Concurrency
Failure Detection
Fault Identification
Live Upgrade
Stable Storage

45. Not the end...
....only the beginning

46. Advocacy
• I really like kanban
• I really like XP technical practices
• focus on quality
• everything depends on context, but in context make policies explicit
• if something doesn’t feel right, you are doing something wrong, might be that
thing, but might be you
• if you aren’t getting results, change something
• if you are changing too much too often, you won’t get good results
• measure
• process is a competitive advantage, passion is a competitive advantage,
don’t let process kill passion
• smart people solve problems

47. Thanks
Questions?
Comments?
War Stories?
@littleidea