program selection system

Program Guide Description:

At Salesforce.com a waterfall-based process bogged down our first attempt at generating a traditional pattern library. In keeping with our development team’s agile transformation we revisited the process and invented Postcard Patterns – a highly visual, easy to maintain, and easy to produce communication tool.

Attendees will learn how to:
Identify Their Audience:
Who needs the patterns?
De-construct Their Application:
What are the unique building blocks?

Short Abstract [88 words]

Sticky notes (aka Post-it Notes [tm]) are the lingua franca of remembering pesky tasks…yet their real potential lies in effectively and rapidly organizing collaborative group work. Don’t underestimate these simple tools: it’s amazing what powerful results you can get from a $2.00 office supply investment.

Why does Agile adoption fail? Why do projects doing “textbook” Agile sometimes fail. There is of course no one right answer to these questions. But we suggest the answer can often be gleaned by considering the small things. It’s quite common for projects to follow a “textbook” Agile methodology in the large, while undermining basic Agile principles in the small. We don’t suggest that allowing small problems to flourish is willful neglect. Rather, small, easily ignored nuisances or compromises in the quality of the process and product can become debilitating in size and number.

As effective as Agile teams have become, many times it isn’t the team that is the problem. In many cases, the structure within which the team exists is more problematic than the performance of the team itself. The myopic view of agility towards teams has not helped address this problem.

Value Stream Mapping comes from Lean Thinking and provides a way to see the entire chain of events that leads to a product from its inception. It describes the transition from concept to cash. It maps the flow of ideas and actions across the entire organization.

As the popularity of agile development spreads, more and more companies are discovering that simply breaking down projects into small iterations is not sufficient. Agile methods require changes in management, analysis, architecture, design, testing, quality assurance as well as project management. Given the large adjustments required, where can a team or enterprise look for guidance in its transition? The principles of Lean Software Development provide such guidance.

Agile methods like Scrum and XP involve repetitive meetings and actions that can become routine and lose freshness, challenge and novelty. How do we put “heart” into agile processes? How can team members inject variety or even whimsy into what they do every day? What are effective ways to “punctuate” agile routines? And what exactly is “Haiku-Driven Development (HDD)”? In this workshop, we’ll review actual experiences with teams practicing XP and Scrum, and provide examples of how teams avoided having agile processes become more albatross than aid.

The presentation describes how Yahoo! International, and in particular, the Yahoo!

In 2005 Tim Joyce and I published collections of patterns and proto-patterns capturing the common features of every then-current description of successful distributed Agile development we could find, including our own.

In the years since then, many more teams have found their way to a successful accommodation between their desire to be Agile and their business’s need or desire not to co-locate. So, it’s time to update the patterns.

A workshop where experience is reported.