Speaking at See#Party

I will be giving my talk about Behavior Driven Development and SpecFlow on the See#Party in Konstanz-Kreuzlingen next week (August 28th).

I am looking forward to an interesting conference program.

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Self enabling teams: a demonstration.

One of the most impressive memories from my Certified Scrum Master course last year, is the experience of growing a self enabling team.

The exercise was simple:

• Given was a bucket full of tennis balls.
• The team was about 20 people.
• Only one team member could take balls out of the bucket. He could take out as many as he liked at any time throughout the sprint.
• The team would score a point for each tennis ball that was touched by every team member and then touched again by the first team member, he who took the ball out of the bucket.
• The team would do 10 sprints. Each sprint is 2 min. Between two sprints is a break of 2 min for retrospective and optimization.
• Before each sprint the team announces the score it expects to achieve.

Before the exercise I thought that the main challenge would be figuring out the optimal formation of the team members. I expected that after that there will not be much improvement possible.

I was wrong! This was the result (second column: expected, third column: achieved):

I am still amazed how the team was able to optimize and improve in each of the ten sprints. This improvement was rooted entirely in the team itself and is a perfect demonstration for a self enabling team, that was given the chance to inspect and adapt.

Some of the optimization steps included:

• Finding out the optimal formation for the task: a circle.
• Optimizing the formation into two circles of people. The outer facing inward and the inner facing outward, this way we could pass the balls to a person in front of us and not besides us.
• Ignore dropped balls, continue with the flow.
• Not throwing balls to your peer, but dropping them into his cupped hands.
• Passing two balls at a time to your peer.
• Sitting down on the floor reduces the danger/consequences of dropped balls.

Quotes of the Week

Learning from mistakes is overrated!

-Rework

If we could only learn the right lessons from the successes of the past, we would not need to learn from the failures.

- Tony Hoare

Code that runs on first write is an idea from the past that we should forget!

- Keith Braithwaite, Nothing New under The Sun

Retrospective: Rework & The Goal - My vacation books

I read two "non-programming" books during my vacation:

Rework:
This is an easy read. The book consists of a collection of short essays that aim at giving advice for how to make your work more successful, relevant and effective.
The essays aim at being ground-breaking, shaking the existing practices in the business world, often they also have a provoking undertone.
I liked the essays very much and it is certainly a good thing that the authors, which are very successful in their business, show that there are alternatives to predominant existing practices. But in my opinion the essays mostly stay quite superficial and there is not too much substance behind them. I will remember some flashy quotes, the rest will not really stick.
This book is ideal for a read in-between, reading one of the essays is quick and does not require a long attention-span.

The Goal:
This is definitely an interesting read. This is very good introduction into the theory of constraints and the lean mindset in the form of a fascinating story of a manager that is struggling to save his plant.
I liked how the book shows that there is a lot of theory behind lean thinking and complex scientific principles that must be understood. Lean is much more that just stating "limit work in progress ... let's use a task board!".
What amazed me is that the book is originally from 1984 and still is very insightful and facinating. Also it is interesting how a story of a plant manager can really be told so interestingly that you want to keep reading.
The book broadened my horizon in that it shows a concrete example of how continuous improvement should work and how constraints should be seen as an opportunity and are actually a good thing.

Recommendation for jQuery in Action

The quote from my jQuery in Action review found its way to the back cover of the book:

As you can guess from the quote, I can fully recommend the book. It is an interesting read and a well designed coverage of jQuery and its usage.

When is Scrum successful?

@EricMinio asked an interesting question last week in his Scrum in Depth course. It really made me rethink my understanding of Scrum.

 

A company is not able to deliver its software projects, but does not know why. You introduce Scrum. After 3 sprints you have shown up the problems. Does this mean Scrum works?

 

I think this very much summarizes what Scrum is about, however I think management will have a hard time to see this as a success...

By the way this question was @EricMinio's answer to a students question "Does Scrum work?". Again a great demonstration of a ScrumMaster's function not to provide answers but to ask the right questions.

 

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Speaking at /ch/open: Persistent domain models with JPA 2.0 and BeanValidation

As last year Simon and I will give a workshop at the /ch/open Workshop Tage 2010.

This year the topic is “Persistent Domain Models with JPA 2.0 and Bean Validation”.

Our workshop is on Wednesday, September 8th.

Again the program of this years Workshop Tage looks very promising. Check it out, I can really recommend this event!