Monday, August 27, 2007

Next APLN Seattle Meeting Sep 10

Our next meeting will be Monday Sept 10, from 5:30pm - 7:30pm, at the normal location: Avanade Inc., 2211 Elliott Avenue, Seattle.  Come with your topics for an evening of Open Space discussions. Hope to see you there. Please RSVP to dragosd at avanade.com to facilitate our food and beverage order. Technorati tag: APLN

Kanban is Catching On

Since launching the kanban Yahoo! group last week its acquired members 80 members in only a few days. The idea seems to be catching on. Meanwhile, Kenji Hiranabe who attended my CWAC session at Agile 2007 has published a paper on kanban boards in software development. Its great to see other people talking about and writing about how to implement pull systems for software development. If you know of other work or other people doing this stuff please leave a comment. Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Kenji+Hiranabe, David+Anderson

Friday, August 24, 2007

Agile Nuts?

These pictures were taken today on 2nd Ave in Seattle outside the Corbis office. Pictured with me is Erik Arnold, my colleague and Senior Director for IT Services, a group which includes our project managers and process engineering team. Together we are agile nuts…

or maybe we are just nuts about agile?...

I’d like to thank my friends at Version One for the shirt. Have you checked out their new survey of agile practice yet? More respondents than ever. Go check it out. [PS and thanks to all of you, my personal contacts who responded to the call for the survey. I got a special thank you for generating so many referrals. Thanks also to Corbis Director of Photography Carl Gronquist who took the photos.] Technorati tag: Agile, Agile+2007,, David+Anderson, VersionOne

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Agile Model Evolution

Last week’s Agile 2007 conference was a particularly strong one for me professionally. I participated in a very good panel session on Wednesday as part of the Leadership Symposium where we discussed and debated concepts behind agile portfolio management and governance. It was a strong session with a big audience and lots of great questions - none of which we planted to stimulate or direct the conversation. It was great to share a stage with Luke Hohmann whom I first got to know as a reviewer of my book some 5 years ago - though we both worked at Objectspace in the 1990’s but not at the same time. Also on the panel was Niel Nickolaisen of the APLN and another practitioner in the field - though Niel is a CIO so he has some more stripes on his lapels than I do.

On Thursday I used the CWAC (Conference within a Conference) to run two sessions. The first in the morning turned in to a presentation of the history of kanban in development and led directly to the formation of the new Kanbandev group at Yahoo! In the afternoon, I facilitated a discussion to examine what is “Beyond Agile” and to probe in to the notion of whether there ought to be a Post-Agile movement or not. This discussion took a turn I didn’t expect. There had been an earlier CWAC session on Tuesday where a group had looked at extending and rewriting the Agile Manifesto in order to include some newer ideas like Trust and Teams. So we pulled both efforts together and explored what it would take to create a cohesive, inclusive community that embraced innovation and new ideas and avoided the tendency to fracture as new ideas emerged. In other words, what it would take to avoid the need for a Post-Agile movement and create a strong community that could embrace change. [Sound familiar?] I have to thank Jim Shore who was particularly influential in steering the conversation in that direction. The session ended up running almost 1 hour longer than planned.

The outcome was a decision that Joe Arnold, Karl Scotland and I would present a Friday Lightning Talk session (5 mins) to sum up what we had concluded as a group. So on Friday, we pitched the need for Agile Model Evolution. We argued that the Agile Manifesto is really two ideas overloaded. It is a rallying cry, a call to arms for the forces of that seek better ways of building software. As a rallying cry it has been hugely successful and the popularity of the conference is testimony to this. However, the Manifesto also includes the abstract concepts of agile development. Together with the Principles it contains an underlying theory or model of agility. And it is this that we felt was now outmoded.

Over the last 6 years our community has learned more and become better at articulating the ideas originally held in 2001. And so it is time for us to evolve a new model to capture these new ideas - like Lean Thinking - and to use our learning to better articulate what has already been defined. We argued that this is essential for the strength and on-going success of the community. Without it, those with new ideas and innovations will feel excluded and will tend to create their own communities of practice leaving the agile community behind.

This resonated strongly with the audience that included folks such as Diana Larsen, Brian Marick and Alistair Cockburn. Later I would repeat it to Luke Hohmann. The outcome from this was that we - Joe, Karl and I - were asked to run with it as an idea. So in the first instance we have formed a Yahoo! group. We have invited all those who attended the CWAC session and anyone else who expressed an interest, including Diana and Luke. If you’d like to be included then please drop me an email to david dot anderson at corbis dot com.

I’ll be blogging more about Agile Model Evolution and our ideas to embed this deep in the community as an on-going activity but for now we want the leading thinkers in Agile to come forward and participate.

And so I find myself catapulted to the core of the community driving an effort that is fundamental to the on-going success of agile. I never really expected that when I got on the flight to Reagan National from Seattle last Sunday morning. Technorati tag: Agile, Agile+2007, Agile+Manifesto

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

New Kanban Discussion Group

At Agile 2007, I gave a CWAC (Conference within a Conference, aka Open Space) session to cover the history of kanban systems in software development including the Microsoft XIT experience and my experiences with Corbis. The session went so well that there was lots of talk at the conference on Thursday night and Friday. Afterwards, I got enough demand that I’ve decided to form a new Yahoo! group to facilitate further discussion and provide a place for others to share their experiences. If you are interested please join.

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