Image via Wikipedia
Keynotes
Why Care About Positive Emotions?
- Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, University of North Carolina
- Description
- author of
Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life
- see YouTube video where she describes aspects of Positivity
- talk focused on importance and impact of positive emotions, including:
- increased focus on community
- the ability to see more possiblities and solve harder problems
- physiological effects such as building of new neural pathways
- also see Positivity Ratio
Code
- co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing, On Patterns and Pattern Languages
- editor and contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know; see also 97 Things website
- described multiple levels for interpreting
code- systems of words; instructions for a computer
- system of rules and principles; a set of conventions
- a collection of writings
- a expression, representation, and collection of knowledge
- lots of great anecdotes about how code and software affects our society, from day-to-day functioning through broader themes such as craftsmanship and manifestos
The Power of an Agile Mindset
- co-author of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
- talk drew heavily from work of Carol Dweck, particularly Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
- Fixed Mindset: people who believe that intelligence and talent are fixed qualities
- Growth or Agile Mindset: people who believe abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work
- the most significant takeaway from this talk is the pattern
in society that reinforces fixed mindsets in young girls and encourages
growth mindsets in young boys (greatly simplified below)
- girls are often praised at a young age for doing good work and for being smart, reinforcing the concept fo intelligence as a fixed attribute
- boys are often more exploratory and unfocused, thereby getting more attention and explanation to help them discover solutions
- instead of praising results, we should explore the paths that arrive at the results and focus on aspects of that journey
- the original Malcolm Gladwell article, which is still the most-read article on his site
- misc notes:
- this woman is perhaps more attuned to her own mortality than anyone I've ever met
- book: Self-theories
- this woman is perhaps more attuned to her own mortality than anyone I've ever met
Sessions
Fluency over Proficiency: Accelerating Agile Learning and 'Hunting Fluency'
- interesting session about accelerated learning techniques that are used to help preserve dying languages
- instead of attempting to understand languages, Willem
attempts to gain fluency via games using American Sign Language as an
intermediate form
- seeking fluency is faster for spreading the language
- seeking fluency preserves the essence and culture of language; e.g. Irish does not have words for Yes and No so translation would lose this
- fluency allows a group to possess more knowledge collectively very quickly
- interesting takeaways
- fluency can be the initial goal when bringing someone into the team; deeper understanding can follow with time
- capability for a large number of things can be broken into 4 levels: novice, intermediate, expert, superior
- it is only possible to extend yourself one level above your current level; e.g. you cannot answer an expert-level question that is posed by a novice
- you need to have people at all levels in order to pull people through to higher levels
- misc. notes
- define: nested compentency
- define: fluent fool
- lookup: risk-adjusted burndown
- lookup: learning out of order
- read: Proficiencies of Planning blog post by James Shore and Diane Larsen
- when presenting a session again, always have an experiment to try; you already know how to do what you did yesterday
- an excellent blog post about being language hunted at Agile 2011
Applying the Lean Startup Model to the Enterprise
-
Jez Humble, Thoughtworks
- Description Slides
- author of Continuous Delivery
- discussed ways to apply lean startup concepts of minimal viable product and rapid learning to the enterprise
- lots of overlap with dev-ops movement where agility is
extended from engineering into operations so that solutions are deployed
and operated more smoothly
- do less
- build quality in
- deliver continuously
- measure value delivered
- misc. notes
- book: Release It!
- book: The Principles of Product Development Flow
- book: The Lean Startup
- book:
Design Thinking
- definitely related to lean startup movement and emphasis learning loops
- once you've implemented a solution, you may need to redesign to handle information you discovered when building
- once you've implemented a solution, you may find that you didn't understand the original problem and need to go back to the customer to learn
- discussed three approaches to design, any one of which may be valid in your situation
- lots of examples of design thinking in organizations, with discussion on ideal team size (150 people per factory at Gore, two pizzas at Amazon)
- misc. notes
- book: The Design of Design
- concept: Wicked Problems
- book: What Customers Want
- website: Hipmunk (cool travel planning site)
- book: Specification by Example
- book:
Continuous Delivery
- discussed concepts on continous delivery and benefits that it provides
- shorter time to feedback
- value delivered faster to customer
- reduced risk of release
- releases tied to business needs, not technical needs
- misc. notes
- flickr publishes statistics on their continuous deployment; see bottom of page
- tools for automated deployment:
Puppet Chef Puppet v Chef
- use
feature toggles to selectively enable and disable features in deployments (similar to our permission model)
- stories include work to monitor whether they are being used
- Facebook Release Management video
Lightning Talks
- Leading the Agile Release Train Description Slides
- techniques for co-ordinating large numbers of agile teams
- How to Save Your Industry $1.9B Using Agile Methods Description
- applying agile methods to quickly mount a political activism website to block passage of a healthcare bill in Australia
- Agile Management: Creating a Culture to Help Your Team Succeed Description Blog
- excellent lightning talk about core cultural principles that she uses to build a happy and productive team
- Get to CMMI ML3 Using Agile Development Processes for Large Projects Description Slides
- The PO Role - Can You Hear Me Now? Description Slides
- testimonials about how product owners are able to better do their jobs and help build the right products
- Making the Most of Testing in a Quality Focused Agile Team Description Slides
- discussed QA at Atlassian where developments build many automated tests; key takeaway: QA = Quality Assistance
- 5 Key Numbers to Gauge Your Agile Engineering Efforts Slides
- how long until you see feedback from a test after writing or changing a line of code?
- how many one-line changes can you commit and push to test in an hour?
- how many people on your team can explain the details of any particular section of code?
- what percentage of your team members did you pair with in the last two days?
- how many manual steps does it take to get a build into production?
Lean Startup: How Development Looks Different When You're Changing the World
- very well attended talk on lean startups and how they are agile development at lightspeed
- purpose is to learn as fast as possible in order to arrive at a viable business model and product
- scaling only occurs after ideas have been validated
- something has only been delivered if its value has been verified with the customer
- learn -> build -> measure: repeat as fast as possible
- customer discovery - > customer validation -> customer creation -> scale company
- cycle at every step along the way to learn
- the unit of progress for entrepreneurs is learning
- quote of the day on initiating change: "show lean startup ideas to your enterprise and it will frighten them into accepting agile development as a compromise"
- misc. notes
- company: Pivotal Labs
- book: Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development (read first)
- book: The Four Steps to Epiphany
- Google Group: Lean Startup Circle
- videos: Evangelizing for the Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
Beyond Planning Poker - The Planning Poker Party
- one big takeaway is Affinity Grouping, which is a technique to quickly places stories into groups of similar size and then estimate what each group represents (e.g. all stories in this group are 5 points)
Telling Better Stories Using User Story Mapping
- extremely well attended workshop on using story maps to show how stories in a release relate to each other, to determine dependencies, and to determine if everything flows correctly
- the excellent blog article explains the core concepts
- I was unable to participate fully in this one as I arrived late from an excellent lunch at Pakistani restaurant across the road from the Grand America
Leave a comment