Contents
1. Upcoming courses
2. Essay by Willem on Groupthink in The Gift of Time
3. Agile Holland Conference report
4. What happened at the Scandinavian Agile Conference
5. Dirty Jobs and Lean Software Development at J-Fall
6. Willem facilitates Open Space at XP Day London
7. Agile Workshop at the City of Rotterdam
8. Two new workshops in December
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1. Upcoming courses
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2008:
8-10 December, eXperience Agile in Tilburg (changed)
16 December, Refactoring Legacy Software
17 December, Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects
2009:
9 Januari, Introduction to Lean Software Development
12-14 Januari, eXperience Agile
16 Januari, Workshop Test Driven Development
16 Januari, Workshop Mock Objects
28-29 Januari, Remaniement Continu in Paris, France (changed)
We also deliver our workshops and courses in-house.
Brochure: www.qwan.it/doc/courses_and_workshops_2008_en.pdf
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2. Essay by Willem about Groupthink in The Gift of Time
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“The Gift of Time: Celebrating the Work of Gerald M. Weinberg”
(ISBN 978-0-932633-75-0) is a book published on the occasion of
Gerald Weinberg’s 75th birthday.
This collection of essays sports contributions by well know authors
such as Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, James Bach, Michael Bolton, and
Robert Glass. Willem has written a chapter on the theme of
Groupthink.
Groupthink occurs when members of a group try to minimize conflict and
reach consensus without critical thinking. Groupthink can cause
individuals to unjustly set their doubts aside, for fear of upsetting
the group’s balance. This results in bad decision making by the group.
In this essay, Willem applies systems thinking to make sense of his
own experiences with Groupthink.
You can order this book from QWAN with a 10% discount.
www.qwan.it/gift-of-time
www.dorsethouse.com/books/gift.html
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3. Agile Holland Conference report
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The 24th of October saw Agile Holland’s first conference. The
conference was a success, with more than 50 participants.
www.flickr.com/search/show/?q=agileholland+conference+amsterdam&m=tags
Nicole Belilos and Willem delivered “Pimp my Retrospective”, a
workshop to discover how to keep retrospectives exciting, fun and
effective. The group kicked off with a brainstorm on how to make
retrospectives boring. Some examples:
- meeting with an agenda
- boss is present
- boss is absent
- same actions every time
- Powerpoint presentation
- too long or too short
How to pimp your retrospectives? Some suggestions:
- cake & beer
- use a talking stick
- get an experienced facilitator
- make sure everyone gets their say
www.qwan.it/pimp-my-retrospective
www.agileholland.com
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4. What happened at the Scandinavian Agile Conference
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Willem and Marc facilitated the “Rightsizing Your Unit Tests” workshop
at the Scandinavian Agile Conference in Helsinki. Scan-Agile was
organised for the first time. It showed that Scandanivia has a vibrant
agile community: over 240 participants showed up.
The conference was opened by Gabrielle Benefield. Her keynote
highlighted her experiences with introducing agile in a large
organisation. Another highlight was the thought-provoking presentation
“A Journey Beyond Budgeting – because the future ain’t what it used to
be” by Bjarte Bogsnes. Bjarte works for StatoilHydro (a large
Norwegian oil and energy company) and spoke about Beyond Budgeting, a
more agile way of budgeting, and how StatoilHydro applies this. His
book “Implementing Beyond Budgeting” will be published in December.
“Righsizing Your Unit Tests” is a redevelopment of a workshop Rob
invented in 2005. In this workshop participants review unit tests of
several projects. They use these to brainstorm criteria for good unit
tests. From here participants can determine for themselves what they
believe makes a good or bad unit test. The facilitators also gave
their vision on good unit tests. We have also run this workshop in-
house this summer, where we let participants compare unit tests from
open source projects with their own unit tests. The final verdict is
up to the participants: what is good and what fits better is highly
context dependent.
www.scan-agile.org
www.qwan.it/rightsizing-your-unit-tests
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5. Dirty Jobs and Lean Software Development at JFall
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QWAN was present during the J-Fall conference of the Dutch Java Users
Group, to baptise the brand new workshp “Dirty Jobs – Sometimes it
gets worse before it gets better”. Rob and Willem, aided by Tjakko
Kleinhuis in the preparation, confronted participants with gory legacy
code. Participants had to add a seemingly simple feature in a
responsible way – with unit tests.
The excercise turned out to be quite a challenge. The participants
found the legacy code eerily recognizable. It proved to be a good
excercise in dealing more effectively with legacy code.
Rob and Marc gave a presentation on Lean Software Development. Using a
case study, they explained the seven lean principles. The core of the
story is that lean is not so much a new method or set of practices,
but a collection of principles offering a refreshing perspective on
software development, whereby one looks beyond ‘just’ the software
development department. Lean focuses on the value stream through the
entire organisation, from vague ideas to working features that add
value to customers, or as Mary and Tom Poppendieck have coined it,
“from concept to cash”.
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6. Willem facilitates the Open Space at XP Day Londen
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11 and 12 December will see the 8th XP Day London conference. This
popular conference brings together customers, developers, and testers
with experience in agile software development, so they can grow this
area of practice. The programme is Open Space, with some keynotes,
tutorials, and experience reports.
Willem will facilitate the Open Space with our British colleague
Rachel Davies.
Open Spaces are self-organizing meetings and conferences. Facilitation
takes care of creating a suitable ambiance, explaining the format, and
guiding the creation of the agenda on the day itself. After that it is
up to the participants to make the meeting a success.
Open Space is effective for working on complex problems. The solutions
that emerge have broad support. All participants take responsibility
for their active participation, therefore an Open Space delivers
results that are sustainable and often surprising.
www.xpday.org
www.agileopen.net/on-open-space
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7. Agile Workshop at the City of Rotterdam
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The City of Rotterdam is setting up a new agile development
department. To support the agile way of working, they are setting up
among other things a creative working environment suitable for agile
teams in a newly refurbished bulding in the heart of Rotterdam, close
to Central Station.
For this department, the City is looking for developers at short
notice. Willem and Marc, together with Michael Franken (ZilverLine
BV) and Erik Hooijmeijer (42 BV), are organizing a workshop with a
fun agile mini-project (involving Lego Mindstorms and more) on
Saturday November 29th, so that potential employees can experience
what the City has to offer.
Are you interested to get to know the City and have some fun? There
are still some places available, drop us an email if you’d like to
participate.
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8. Two new workshops in December
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On 16 and 17 December, we will organize two new one-day workshops:
Refactoring Legacy Software and Responsibility Driven Design with Mock
Objects.
Would you like to experience how you can make changes, add unit tests,
and add new features effectively and responsibly to legacy software?
In the “Refactoring Legacy Software” workshop, we will discuss a
number of techniques for doing this and you will have the opportunity
to practise on real, dirty legacy code. You will learn how to make
changes to existing software easier, faster, and in a more predictable
way.
www.qwan.it/refactoring-legacy-software
In the “Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects” workshop, you
will learn how to use the CRC technique (Class-Responsibility-
Collaborator) and mock objects to grow a design in small steps and
achieve a loosely coupled, flexible structure. We will show how these
techniques can be used both in greenfield situations and with existing
components (external systems, 3rd party components, legacy software).
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