Agile 2011

The Agile 2011 conference is over. The content and networking were both amazing. Some take-aways are listed below:

Technologies

1. I need to learn Ruby
2. Learn Cucumber
3. Play with Vagrant (thanks Patrick Debois and Julian Simpson)
4. Git (it's time to move on from subversion Scott!)

Agile Practice

1. Introduce games to help improve retrospectives. I learned the 5 Whys, timeline, and movie conversations games.
2. Develop a "kaizen mind" by creating and sizing kaizen stories with acceptance criteria (based on a lunch conversation with Jeff Sutherland)
3. Assume someone is trying to kill your project everyday. Use the daily scrum's self-organization to perform your evasive maneuvers. Jeff Sutherland compared this to his days as a fighter pilot.
4. Update my coaching material for self-organizing teams and introduce some new games (60 steps in 60 seconds and the single file line)
5. Update my coaching material for ScrumMasters - the ScrumMaster is the friend to the team. How many PMs can say that about themselves?
6. Explore how focusing on positive emotions can enhance sprint planning and backlog preparation, see http://www.unc.edu/peplab. Must counter each negative emotion with three positive emotions to maintain balance.
7. Read up on vagal tone

Observations

1. Jez Humble embodies his name: humble. Cool guy based on my 30 minute conversation with him.
2. Find @ernestmeuller from NI and talk with him about windows devops
3. Waterfall optimizes for utilization, lean optimizes for cycle time (with the slack going to kaizen)
4. "Great teams change people's lives" (Jeff Sutherland)