Lessons from Agile Tour 2015

It has passed more than three years and a half since I moved to Canada. After all this time, I have not gone to a developer’s conference. That changed last week when I went to the Agile Tour 2015. And, it felt good.

First, the conference was well organized, in a great venue and with very good talks. Honestly, I have not noticed any major issue. Congrats to the organizing team.

Second, it was nice that the conference I went was not a technical one. Sometimes in the middle of all the technology, new frameworks, versions, languages, etc., we forget that this is just one side of shipping software. When running software development projects, we have to worry about dates, backlogs, people and a lot of other things, and a conference about Agile Development is a good place to remind us about that.

Third, it was also a good place regain some energy. See what other people are doing to improve, get new ideas and realize that other teams also have issues.

So here are a few notes I took from the sessions I attended.

The disciplined Agile Business: Harmonize Agile and Lean by Scott W. Ambler / L’Entreprise Agile disciplinée: Harmoniser Agilité et Lean

This was the keynote, and honestly was more of a reminder of Agile in general. But here are some key points I took note of:

• There are no best practices in Agile, there are practices that are best for your company and the culture you work with.
• There are no reasons we can’t have an iterative growing database, we have the tools and the knowledge to do it, so the DBA’s can do it.
• It’s always better to attack the major risks of the project in the beginning with code and prototypes, leaving it to the end just won’t help it, on the contrary.
• SCRUM is just one flavor of Agile, we can have agile teams without it.

Treaty of Kaizen and art maintenance mature teams by Hugo Emond / Traité de Kaizen et de l’art de la maintenance des équipes matures

I didn’t know that, but Kaizen means small controlled changes. So the talk was about improving agile teams and companies.

• Rewarding employees just won’t work, at a given moment people just stop caring about the rewards and ideas to get better will diminish.
• The best way to get the better from an agile team is finding a way to exercise the team’s and individuals motivation.
• Motivated people will care to improve themselves and the company they’re in.
• One idea for motivating teams is the use of gamification.

The excellence and talent: the heart of Agility by Félix-Antoine Bourbonnais / L’excellence et le talent: le couer de l’Agilité

For me, this was the highlight of the day. An excellent talk about what makes a successful agile team.

• If we want to be an Agile company we have to focus on having an agile code. Changing the code cannot be what slows down a company wanting to move forward.
• Being excellent is to take responsibility for the code we’re shipping. Testable, clean, and easy to change the code.
• Lately when talking about agile we have been talking about process, management, backlogs and others, we cannot forget that agile is also about technical practices that help us ship good quality code.
• We have to have talent in our teams, it has to start with the hiring process. To hire people only to fill a position won’t cut it. When hiring we have to also look for people that care, that thrive to excel and ship good quality code.
• Excellent teams are composed of a group of excellent people. One person that is not looking to be excellent is a person that is bringing the team down.
• One bad apple among other apples will rot the other apples so you throw the rotten apple way and fix the problem. One bad developer among other developers will slow them down and also will leave bad written code in your products.

Catalyst your Agile transition with the codevelopment by Nicolas Mercier / Catalyser votre transition Agile avec le codéveloppement

I got into this one thinking it was about pair programming. Well, that’s not actually it, it’s about developing your skills and responsibilities with other people that do the same thing as you do.

• It’s a process/meetings/practices where we can expose to our peers issues we’re facing, explore those issues, synthesize a plan of action and put it to practice.
• This should be done regularly so every peer has a chance to expose her issues.

That’s it. I had a great time at the Agile Tour 2015, at Québec. I hope I can go again next year.