2018 Retrospective - How Could Agile South Coast be Better?

How have we been doing? 

We invited Agile South Coast members to a retrospective on 22nd Jan 2019. We used the list of ASC past events from meetup.com to briefly review each meetup of the last year for learning points. From that we've distilled our (previously unstated) “Goal” for our community as well as a list of ideas to improve our focus on that.*

Agile South Coast in 2018

Significantly, for our volunteer-run community, we ran our full set of 12 regular events over the year, with no cancellations! This was supported by the flexibility of our new hosts at Cogeco Peer1 who took over when we moved away from our previous venue. We've also held an extra one-day hands-event as part of the Global Day of Code, hosted by Networkers Technology and led by Steve Tooke of Cucumber.io, something that we might try to do more of in the future.

In our retrospective, looking at the details of each event, from 20-35 attendees we typically receive 5 to 10 post-session feedback responses. We looked at those for each event and, with our own opinions of the events, we summarised what was helpful and what has been unhelpful or disappointing in recent sessions:

• We probably have different subsets of our membership that prefer different topics, and content presented with different styles 
• Every venue will be inconvenient for some in our community - we are very happy (and grateful) to continue at Peer1 while Emma and her colleagues are able to offer it to us 
• Sometimes people pay unnecessarily for parking because they are unaware of the free parking arrangements 
• Sometimes people have trouble finding the entrance (including the pizza delivery) Some people will come to single events because they are interested in the particular topic in that session and are unlikely to come again 
• Sessions that give an opportunity to practice a new idea are more popular than those that are purely “presented” 
• The Meetup website allows photos to be uploaded for each event, and these have been useful to people after the event, and have even been helpful to people who haven’t been able to get to the event 
• We set our meetups for a maximum of 40 registrations; we typically get 20-30 people in the room 
• We don’t currently need to ask for money to fund the events - if we did need money we have at least two sponsors who could be approached

So...

We propose 

The purpose of Agile South Coast is to support the community of agilists in and around Southampton. We do this by offering: 

- opportunities to talk, share ideas, and build relationships

- a welcoming environment to all, including those new to agile 

- opportunities to learn, at a range of experience levels

Does this make sense for you? Why do you come along to our Agile South Coast events?

We had a range of ideas to do things differently over the next few months. Please look out for (and feedback on) these. They are intended to make each event more helpful to you, and to ease and spread the organisational effort needed to put on each session:

We will be asking for more feedback to help us and our speakers run sessions in a style that you find most helpful

• We will be keeping our list of attendees up to date to understand how many people actually attend each event, so if you registered for an event and didn't make it, we'll be moving you to "Did not attend" on meetup.com
• We'll be bugging you to feedback on events more regularly, and perhaps we'll experiment with questions and surveys outside of meetup.com
• We'll experiment with some extra sessions, intended to be very hands-on workshops. These will be planned and advertised on meetup.com alongside our regular calendar of events
• We will provide notes for our speakers asking them to be mindful of our diverse audience, and whenever possible build in opportunities for practical exploration of new ideas
• We will ask speakers to provide summary notes for their session, perhaps even in advance if they think that could be helpful
• Manage and work with sponsors to ensure our expenses are reclaimed
• Invite members to be “venue helpers” to arrive early and help people find our door
• Produce Agile South Coast signage to help people find the way in
• Provide name tags on arrival
• Review our sessions more frequently to reduce the effort and increase the speed that we react to new ideas!

Do you have any comments on this? What would be most helpful for you?

* So that you know who to thank for this effort, or blame if we have missed what you see as the point of our events, these are the people who were part of this discussion: Mike Williams, Mark Wheeler, Emma Gautrey, Ian Mayo, Josh Tasker, Steven Mackenzie.

Mob Programming at the September Agile South Coast Bournemouth meeting

At September's Agile South Coast Bournemouth meeting we discussed mob programming — think of it as pair programming turned up to 11 where the whole team shares one keyboard.

Woody Zuill discovered the technique with his team — and has been writing about it on mobprogramming.org for for a while. Woody kindly agreed to join us remotely via Skype (sorry — no recording!).

You can watch Woody talk on mobbing from Øredev 2013:

Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.

Along with a time-lapse of a day of mob programming with Woody's team here:

Woody summarised mobbing as:

All the brilliant people
Working on the same problem
At the same time
On the same computer

Some of the points we discussed were:

• How mobbing helped alignment within the team
• How it removed the necessity of some "standard" practices (e.g. you don't need stand ups because everybody already knows what everybody else was doing)
• How mobbing helped foster a sense of safety since everybody was always aware of how decisions came about.

Give the talk a watch — it's worth your time.

Scrum Team Building Across Multiple Continents

Scrum Team Building Across Multiple Continents

I have been recently working with a Scrum team that is spread between 2 continents at first I was doubtful of how successful a team with so many differences could be. During the Southampton meet I had the opportunity to ask for some help.

We came up with the following 5 ideas during a lean coffee session.

Send Ambassadors
 Nothing can replace face to face contact, try to send different members of the team and make sure it’s not just one-sided. The time spent with the other half of the team will be invaluable. They will hopefully go back to their home office understanding the team more and being able to share this with the other team members.

Use video
When face to face contact isn’t possible then always strive to use a video chat over voice only. The market is saturated with video conferencing options so there really isn’t any excuse. For that extra edge try installing a permanent link between the 2 offices so that members of the team can be contacted real-time.


Start the daily stand up with a chat
Just like the initial hello you have with colleagues in your own office it is important to ask the other office how their evening went. It is also nice to do a bit of research on upcoming festivals and perhaps even do a themed day in the office to really get in the spirit.

Team building exercises
Team building is key to any successful scrum team but even more so when the team isn’t collocated. Some nice little games can be found here however my favourite is a game of speed dating. This can be done to cover personal or work related information. A summary of the latter can be found here.

Get others to facilitate some of the meetings
Try mix things up a little get members of the offshore team to be stand in Scrum Master during holidays or run one of the retrospectives or reviews. This can be a good way to get everyone to feel equal and equally involved in the success of the team.

Summary
Working with a Scrum team that is not co-located is always going to add an extra challenge. However through the use of technology it is easier than ever to perform Scrum team building exercises that will help make a success of what most would agree a difficult situation.

Scrum Team Building

Written by John Barratt Director of www.edgeitagile.com

Upcoming Agile South Coast events: July 15 and July 22 2014

Next Southampton Event is 7pm, July 15 at the OS HQ 

There's a change to the normal rolling schedule of the Agile South Coast meetings in Southampton this month, and so we'll meet up on July 15 at 7pm at the OS office (the usual venue). Register with the (one off) Eventbrite registration (replacing the normally rolling event): http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/one-off-agile-south-coast-asc-southampton-meetup-tickets-12089823989

Next Bournemouth Event is 7pm, July 22 at Unicorn Training

In Bournemouth the plan is to meet on the third Tuesday of the month, as usual, at Unicorn Training. Again, register for this via the Eventbrite - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/agile-south-coast-bournemouth-july-2014-tickets-12329424641. Stuart has offered to set up a Google+ Hangout for people who would like to join in remotely (and miss out on the pub chat afterwards!)

The link to use to join the hangout will be
https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/calendar/aTJxNHU1NDhldnA3aDN2Z245bGE1MXNxYzhAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ.5ro7g3427hk4f0muj8af9emjnk
Please test your computer can handle this by clicking the link to join the hangout in advance (try it now!)

Topics

Suggest topics for either event either here in the comments, or over in the LinkedIn discussion group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Agile-South-Coast-1802122

The Future of Agile according to Uncle Bob Martin

The Future of Agile (If Any) - "Uncle" Bob Martin

Thank you to everyone at Skills Matter who put on a really nice free session with "Uncle" Bob Martin at DigitasLBi in London last night. And of course to Bob for giving his time for this!

I've never been up to any Skills Matter events or training before, but after the conversations last night I'll be looking for opportunities. Also the venue was excellent - relaxed, convenient and informal, for a group of (my guess) over 100 attendees to learn and discuss the seemingly "eternal" problems of software development.

This wasn't an event on the Agile South Coast calendar, but there were at least two of us up there. I know that when he's been speaking in London previously the Dev South Coast crew have managed to tempt Uncle Bob as far as Southampton for speaking, and the delights of the Cowherds pub. Maybe we missed a trick in not asking him down on this visit - let's keep an eye on his diary!

Uncle Bob Martin describes the Agile Software Development Process in Rings

Serious Flaimbait?

I guess the title of the talk fits nicely in to the series of recent on-line debates that I've been learning from recently like "Agile is dead, long live agility", and the more contentious "TDD is dead". Last night Bob reminded us that the problems that the original authors of the Agile Manifesto set out to solve are still hurting us in many of our software projects, and that software is invading (or supporting) our lives in more diverse, and more serious, ways.

Bob's first-hand history of the Agile movement and stream of challenging and forceful statements in support of XP practices kept it lively.

RT @Dominichyland "Every *refusal* of an XP practice, like pairing, is because YOU'VE GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE" @unclebobmartin. Always?
— Steven Mackenzie (@busywait) June 24, 2014

My views were challenged from many directions, but walking away I can't find much that I'd argue against. Perhaps just one thing - Bob warned us that Scrum has no interest in technical practices, and is weaker because of that: it is too easy for a software team to claim to be Scrum but not follow important software development practices. I think that Scrum is open and deliberate about this:

Scrum is not a process or a technique for building products; rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and development practices so that you can improve. 

The Scrum Guide, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland

In my experience, when a team starts work towards creating releasable increments at the end of every regular iteration they will need to reach out for the practices to support that.

However, Bob called out an unintended consequence of splitting out the technical practices from Scrum: it has become a tool for project managers. And because Scrum has become synonymous with "Agile" in many peoples' heads, the Agile conferences and discussions are dominated by Project Managers. Perhaps as a reaction to that, developers have re-grouped in to the Software Craftmanship movement. Two groups with the same aim are now divided by discipline.

The original "Lightweight Processes" that banded together under the Agile umbrella have offered us solutions to enable trust and communication between the business and the development teams. Are we building up that divide again? Good practices and effective understanding of business requirements have become more important than ever because software impacts so many aspects of our lives. Will there reach a point where software is implicated in some disaster so horrendous that the whole world will look to software professionals and ask "How could you let that happen?" How would we respond?

Hopefully not with manual test plans that look like this :)

The hands of a QA Manager: "Which half of the plan should I skip?"

I really enjoyed the session, and if you ever get the chance to hear Bob Martin speak I'd grab it - very engaging, just be ready for the pattern interrupt at the beginning ;)

All done

It was great to be able to head out to the session with a diverse range of my NewVoiceMedia work colleagues (2 developers, and  *no* project managers in this case).

@NewVoiceMedia are off to see @unclebobmartin. With @superkully @geekyed @photomoose @busywait @fbonnington pic.twitter.com/B0KdsG6o6o
— Lyndsay Prewer (@lyndsp) June 23, 2014

Agile South Coast's Clive Skipper spotted me at the end of the session and we headed home with a fellow attendee, keeping the agile thinking going on the train. Awesome evening.

I missed the train home but discovered Mi Casa at Waterloo. Every cloud...

Retrospective Game: Turn the Tables

Southampton Games Night - 10/06/2014

As part of the Southampton Games night I hosted a 30 minute session on a retrospective game that i have had some success in the past with called turn the tables.  The retrospective was based on the previous activity 'The User Story Game' to add to the mix the facilitator of that game was also taking part.

The Game is separated into 3 steps:

Step 1 - Write 2 Good points on green post it notes and 2 Bad points on red or in this case pink post it notes. The catch is you can only write a maximum of 2 words on each sticky.

Step 2 - Pass the green post it notes to the left and the red post it notes to the right.













Then comes the twist.  Starting with the green sickies each person has to try and explain what the person who wrote the sticky meant from the two words written down. The original author then marks them out of 5 for how accurate the description was. Once all the green post it notes have been done they can go into the middle of the table and the same activity is done with the red post it notes.

Step 3 - Pass the red post it notes to the right again and this time the person with the post it note has to try come up with ways of  improving the bad point. Once that person has given it a go the rest of the team can help out.

Below is a picture of the list of improvement ideas that came from the game

Why I like the game:

• Its fun to play and your  guaranteed to have at least a  few laughs
• It gives good results (in this example 11 improvements)
• The turn based approach means everyone gets an equal say
• It gives you a measure of how well the team know each other

Special Thanks
Original game

http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2013/february/iteration-retrospective-activity-turn-the-tables

The book that changed how I view retrospectives - Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (Pragmatic Programmers) 

Comments

It would be good to hear what others thought of the game? Have you tried it in your teams yet? How did it go?

Games and Activities Night at Agile South Coast in Southampton

Agile Games and Activities: Planning and Retrospectives

Coming up on Tuesday June 10 2014 at Ordnance Survey HQ in Southampton

Agile teams are big on collaboration, both inside and outside of the delivery teams, and often use "games" to kick start the hard work. A game that most Scrum or XP teams will be familiar with is Planning Poker, which helps team members agree on estimates for the relative complexity of stories in the Product Backlog.

At the next Agile South Coast meet up we're going to take the chance to try out some new games, as well as the usual chance to network and swap insights in our friendly Agile community.

The planned activities include a learning game that illustrates the benefit of conversation over documented specifications, and two activities to help during iteration retrospectives. I've been playing one of them at home with my children and they love it - lets see how it plays with the software delivery professionals of the South Coast as they retrospect on the Agile South Coast meet up next Tuesday :)

As usual for the Southampton events, register via the rolling Eventbrite link:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/agile-south-coast-asc-southampton-meetup-tickets-9358257801

The Ordnance Survey building is easy to get to from the M27 by car, but I've found it's an easy cycle across town through Southampton too.
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/head-office/index.html

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Do you have any games or activities that you find useful in your work? Comment here, or even better, come along and show us (if it can fit inside a 30 minute slot!) See you there?