Agile 2011 - Day 3

I was too tired to post last night. So I am in the Coach's Corner doing the write up now.

The Plan:
Who even cares?

Actual:
I started the day in Agile isn't Enough: Jeremy Lightsmith. The key discussions were on:
  • What have you read besides books on agile that has helped your job?
  • A/B Testing
  • Paper Prototyping
  • Getting Things Done
  • Theory of Constraints Current Reality Tree

The item that was new to me was the Current Reality Tree. I am adding that to my queue of things to study.

The second session of the day was Flow Games: Karl Scotland, Eric Willeke. We played a game where we had to toss 20 balls around the group and the WIP and cycle time were tracked by the presenters. We were able to see the affects of our changes to the system and how we could shorten cycle time.

I had lunch at Squatter's with one of my closest friends and that was a great break in the middle of the day.

The first afternoon session was Tests as a Means of Abstraction: Brian Marick, Michael Feathers. This was an interesting talk in that Brian presented and Michael was the respondent. We got to see how Brian uses Midge to write tests in Clojure that don't rely on implementations only on behaviors of the data structures passed around. It was a nice example of TDD to do top down design and the test doubles (meta-constants) were a really interesting concept.

After that, I went to Courageous Curiosity: Agile from the Inside Out: Angela Harms. This was a very powerful and emotionally challenging session. After the crowd left, I was fortunate to get an additional 30 minutes with Angela and GeePawHill. Truly powerful conversations. I am glad that they are both people I trust so that I could really open up and share with them.

I needed to relax and decompress, so I went to Open Jam. There were some people just starting the getKanban game. It was a nice way to relax and also informative about the way that cycle time and WIP relate.

Wandering the expo was a fun way to run into some new friends. After a couple of laps I made my way over to Open Jam again where I was able to watch 3-way, big-screen-projector pairing on Smalltalk between Dave Brady, Pat Maddox and Johnny T. After a few minutes, Johnny split off and started teaching me the basics of Smalltalk. I'm more tempted than ever to go to the Utah Smalltalk User Group.

Dave and I drove home together (we're nearly neighbors) and had an awesome conversation about job satisfaction, business models, etc.

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 14, 2011 at 4:10 PM

    I'm sad I missed the Current Reality Tree. I'm glad you mentioned it, though. I'm downloading jthinker right now.

    ReplyDelete

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