The document outlines key experiences and insights from the Agile 2008 conference held in Toronto, Canada. It includes various presentations on agile project experiences, technical lessons learned, coaching skills, and prioritizing product backlogs, highlighting the importance of community, quality, and practical applications of Agile methodologies. Additionally, it emphasizes the evolution of Agile practices, the significance of craftsmanship in coding, and the need for effective release planning.

1. Agile 2008 Retrospective & Slide Show
September 2008 Agile Change Program
3rd September 2008

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Overview
In Toronto,
Canada to
represent
Suncorp and
present two
experience
reports

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Three Little Pigs
The first paper –
Agile Project
Experiences –
The Story of the
Three Little Pigs

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Three Little Pigs
Experiences from
EasyDoc,
Guidewire &
Promina
Payments
projects.
People showed
up!

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Dials To Eleven
The second paper –
Technical Lessons
Learnt turning the
agile dials to eleven.
Paul King presented
two other talks also
on Groovy &
performance tests

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Dials To Eleven – Coming Soon to InfoQ
Info Q recorded
the session and
will be way on
their website in
November (only
18 out of 400
were recorded).
http://www.infoq.com/agile2008

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Chasing Waterfalls
Niagra Falls is 90
minutes down the
road.
Powerful waterfall
right next to an
agile
conference??

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Niagra Falls

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AAFTT
Day 1
Agile Alliance Functional
Testing Tools Workshop

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AAFTT
Lightning Talks
• 5 mins
• Video taped
Open Space Sessions 3x3
• Narrative testing
• Tool selection
• Understandability for
users vs the power of
programming
Futurespective
• Positive (green)
• Negative (red)
• Surprises (purple)

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So Many Choices...
• 19 stages – developer, testing,
process, distributed agile,
leadership,...
• More than 30 choices per session

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The Wisdom Of Crowds
Keynote:
“The Wisdom Of Crowds”
James Surowiecki
• The aggregation of information in groups,
results in decisions that are often better than
could have been made by any single member
of the group
• Large organisations set up obstacles to the
flow of information
• Group average is usually very close and
usually a large percentage of the group
• Livestock example – crowd average 1197lb
and actual weight 1198lb
•At Agile 2008, for Visual Studio LOC –
average guess 47 million, real answer 43.2
million, only 2/2000 better than
group collective guess

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Ten Terrific Transition Tips
“Ten Terrific Transition Tips”
Joshua Kerievsky
• Don’t sell pair programming – focus on
risks of solo programming
• Build community – bigger than you think,
retrospectives build community
• Celebrate chaos – you will get there soon
• Empower experimenters – give things a
fair shot
• Start sooner!
• Most people who don’t program don’t
understand technical debt – demonstrate
• Customers are really happier when
focussed on quality and not features

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Code Metrics & Analysis For Agile Projects
“Code Metrics & Analysis
For Agile Projects”
Neal Ford & Ram Singaram
• Hawthorne Effect – Western Electric measured
worker activity based on lighting level
• Use metrics, don’t just collect, apply to codebase
• Byte code analysis - Findbugs – run on Struts,
found copy/paste bug 3 times
• Source analysis – PMD, CPD, Simian
• Coverage – Cobertura, Emma, nCover
• Flog – for Ruby, adds up language values as you
cannot measure static analysis
• Effrent/Affrent coupling – number of classes used
/ use this class – Jdepend
• Crap4J – crap threshold
• Information Radiators - Panopticode

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Build Your Coaching Skills
“Build Your Coaching Skills”
Johanna Rothman
• Don’t confuse coaching with feedback or
teaching – feedback is longer term and about
behaviour, mentoring is about milestones and
achievements
• Always have an end time for coaching – then
re-evaluate
• Coaching under the covers – spouses do it all
the time
• Coaches do not have to be a domain expert
• Most organisations have blind leading the
nearly blind
• Every problem has 3 possible options – then
move to goals
• Exercises in coaching and listening

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Prioritizing Your Product Backlog
“Prioritizing Your Product
Backlog”
Mike Cohn
• Iceberg- well formed with small number of
stories at the top
• Spend 10% of iteration getting ready for
the next
• Kano analysis – exciter/delighter,
mandatory/baseline, linear
• Theme screening, Theme scoring,
Relative weighting – ways to identify
important features for next release
• Break big projects into release horizons

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New Arrows For The Agile Quiver
“New Arrows For The Agile
Quiver”
Jim McCarthy
• Agile is common sense but not very
common
• Take the job offer to manage the dumbest
group – only way is up
• Shared vision works – 4 people on Excel vs
200 on Access!
• Core Commitments for teams – doomed to
be great if you follow them – a number of
protocol checks – eg. “I propose” or “let’s act”
means everybody should listen, promise not
to do anything dumb on purpose, etc...

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Guerilla Agile
“Guerilla Agile”
Johanna Rothman
• Lots of examples - Bring Me A Rock, Queen Of
Denial, We Can’t Say No, etc...
• Want management to think your resources are
scarce – how do you free them up?
• Happy Date – MS Project will tell you the first
possible date you cannot be done
• Releasable product does not mean walking out of
the building
• How little can you do to be successful?
• Measure what is done, not just the milestones
• Normally don’t recommend Monday to Friday
iterations – people will use the weekend
• 90% done – use inch pebbles

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Quintessence
Keynote:
“Quintessence”
Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin
• Political metaphor – Scrum is Obama
and XP is McCain
• Agile Manifesto needs a fifth value –
“Craftmanship Over Crap”
• Later changed this slightly to
“Craftmanship Over Execution” –
because we value craftmanship more
than execution – we don’t value crap at
all!
• Jury is in – TDD works
• Manual testing is criminal
• Green Band – Clean Code – sold out!

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The Wisdom Of Experience
Keynote:
“The Wisdom Of Experience”
Alan Cooper
• The father of Visual Basic
• Agile is a new toy – developers jump
on new toys – but agile is unique
• Mixing big ideas, design, engineering
and construction is the most common
source of failure
• We can know what users need,
interaction designers works with
developers to discover this
• Challenge management
• Demand quality lines not deadlines
• First to market is not better
than best to market

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Dude, Where’s My Release Plan?
“Dude, Where’s My Release
Plan?”
David Hussman
• Product owners are usually slapped in the
role because they know the system
• Suggests use of big fat stories rather than
epics or themes
• Realise that somebody is rolling up your
planning to a budget and converting your
points to days
• Release planning – involve all those who
want a say, give management/sales a plan
• Recharter when you don’t have a vision
• Have a visible release plan / iteration map

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10 Ways To Screw Up With Scrum & XP
“10 Ways To Screw Up With
Scrum & XP”
Henrik Kniberg
• Don’t throw out stuff that works – don’t
need it all at the start, start simple
• Have an agreed definition of done
• Guess velocity to get going
• Do retrospectives well- look for
mechanical, use a timeline to get started
• Use a flashlight, make velocity visible
• Deal with technical debt – stop making it
happen, slow down, add definition of done
• teamwork – can have specialists, ask
team what they need to go faster
• use product backlog
• mergophobia

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After Dark
Microsoft Function & Banquet

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Vendors a.k.a. Free Stuff
Thoughtworks, GreenPepper, Microsoft,
Borland, Version One, Rally, Electric Cloud...

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Explore Toronto

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Explore Toronto

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Key Items of Interest for Agilists
• Strong focus behind quality testing and
approaches to making things better
• Clean code and craftmanship
• Technical debt & legacy code
• Agile practices over theory – Pragmatism has
replaced religion
• Mixed crowd – new to agile and experienced
agile but much less why agile
• Questions about what’s next in agile?
• Enterprise and distributed agile learnings
• Planning, planning poker cards & story points
• Lots of practical learnings from practitioners
• Prioritised backlog

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More Information???
• Check out the Agile 2008 website to see if there
were items of interest – http://www.agile2008.org
• Watch InfoQ for presentations and commentary-
http:///www.infoq.com/agile2008
• Talk to the attendees from Suncorp - Craig Smith,
Paul King, Phil Abernathy, Marina Chiovetti
• Email me for access to slides or presentations –
craig.smith@suncorp.com.au
• Request brown bags on specific areas of interest
from the conference
THANK YOU!