Silver Stripe Blog

I’ll be in Hyderabad this Saturday (12th Jan) for the Hyderabad Scrum Unconference. I’m looking forward to meeting other Scrum practitioners from around the country. Most of the Scrum and Agile conferences and user groups in India are targeted at people who do not have experience with Agile and the goal is to increase the awareness of Agile.

I’m really itching to meet up with people who have a couple of years of Agile experience under their belt, and I’m hoping that the crowd at this unconference will have some more experience so that we can go beyond the “Intro to agile” type of talks into some more advanced stuff.

I’m thinking of doing a session at the unconference on “Agile in Dysfunctional Environments.” If you’ve been practicing agile for any length of time, you’ll eventually encounter less than ideal situations. For example, what do you do if management won’t let the dev team have direct contact with the customer? Or due to internal politics, you cant have the testing team co-located with the dev team? Maybe the team is distributed?

For each of these situations there is one “prescribed” answer, which is that Scrum exposes the dysfunction in the organisation and you are supposed to eliminate the block. While this is a satisfying explanation on a theoretical level, I’m not convinced that this is always the right answer. There is often something good to be had from eliminating organisational dysfunction, but often it is not immediately possible to do so.

Inter-department politics, for example, may be deeply entrenched and it is no good running the project to the ground while the dysfunction is being sorted out (if it ever will be sorted out). There are many such situations where it might make more sense to work around the problem is a suitable manner than to attempt to recreate the organization from top to bottom.

Distributed Agile is a perfect example of this. Technically, distributed agile is a bit of an oxymoron because Agile teams are supposed to be co-located. Although I am all for co-locating as much as possible, there are situations where you cannot co-locate and rather you have to make the best of the distributed team that you have with you.  Dealing with fixed bid projects is another such situation.

Incidentally, Thoughtworks, which is probably one of the best known Agile companies, has both distributed teams as well as a large share of fixed bid projects (at least in the India offices), which just goes to prove that we should not be highly dogmatic about what is prescribed.

Anyway, that is the rough outline of the session I had in mind. If you are in Hyderabad on Saturday, do drop in and say Hello.

This is the intro to agile presentation from Agile Chennai 2007. It was done jointly by Bala and myself, although Bala did most of it. I just spoke for five minutes at the end of slide 83 about how agile is not a set of techniques.

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Dont worry if you missed Agile Chennai 2007 because Azagappan has a fantastic round up of the event.

Also, the presentations from the event have been made available for download.

I gave a presentation at DCamp on the design of programmer spaces. With Agile processes emphasizing the social aspects of software development, this is a topic that has come into focus once more.

We spend a lot of time on improving productivity through better languages, tools and processes. How often do we look at the environment in which the team works? Cubicles are probably the worst environment for programmers because they are poor when you want peace and quiet to work alone and poor when you want to work collaboratively as a pair or group. In this talk we’ll look at some environmental factors that impact teams and how we can design better programmer spaces.

Continue reading ‘Design of Programmer Spaces - My DCamp Presentation’ »

Agile Chennai 2007 is a two day introductory conference for agile software development and agile project management. The Agile Software Community of India organises at least one such conference every year and this year it will be held at Anna University in Chennai.

The conference will be held on October 4 (thats next month), so if you are in India and are interested in agile software development, you should try and make it for the conference. Apart from the scheduled program (the keynote will be given by Jeff Patton this time), the conference is also a good way to meet practitioners of agile software development in India.

Registration for the conference has opened, so head over to the site and register.