• AgileBeforeTheyKnowIt

Title

Agile Before They Know It: Tips for Agilists in a Non-Agile World

Presenters

Kay Johansen, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, kay@xputah.org

Zhon Johansen, Oakley Networks, zhon@xputah.org

Format

Workshop.

Length

90 minutes

Topic

"If only my project were more agile!" How many times have we heard, and made, this plea? As Agilists, we long for something better than what we have. We try to influence our projects to be more agile. Sometimes we have great success, but other times it just doesn't seem to click.

This workshop is an opportunity to share simple, practical tips for Agile conversion that work. Imagine a swap meet where tools for Agile adoption are shared, explained, demonstrated and practiced.

We will diversify our toolboxes so that when we go home to our respective projects, we can be a little less frustrated and get a little more done. We may back off the wrecking ball in favor of the surgeon's scalpel. In fact, our coworkers may find that they're Agile Before They Know It!

Audience

• People who are committed to agile but are not on an agile project.
• People who are changing their projects from non agile to agile.
• People who are excited about agility and want to share with their coworkers.

Goals

• Recognize opportunities to drive improvements in your organization based on agile principles.
• Learn appropriate ways to change the organization even if you're not "the one in charge."
• Develop more powerful communication and sharing techniques.

Process

The process includes a fast-moving, process-of-elimination sorting of ideas that very quickly comes up with the group’s hot topics, followed by role playing exercises that involve participants at all levels, and finishes with a challenge that will continue through the entire conference. This process is based on successful workshops that Kay and Zhon have led at previous conferences.

(10 min) 1. Introductions, describe session, pass a roll.

(10 min) 2. Volunteers identify Agile conversion problems.

(5 min) 3. Each person thinks of three stories exhibiting three tools that have helped them influence change, drawn from software project experience, parenting, sports or other life experience. Each person notes the key tools from their stories on cards.

(10 min) 4. Divide into groups of 2. Each person reads and explains the context of their cards to the other. Together they choose the top 3 cards.

(10 min) 5. Groups of 4-8 are formed by combining 2-4 pairs. Participants read and explain the top 3 cards chosen by each pair. They eliminate duplicates and choose their top favorite tool from the collection of cards. They prepare a role play based on an Agile conversion problem to demonstrate their tool of choice. The workshop presenters gather the discarded tools and one presenter takes time to categorize them during the next activity.

(10 min) 6. Each group role plays their top pick for the whole workshop group. The audience tries to "guess" the tool being demonstrated, and writes their guesses on cards.

(15 min) 7. Break into smaller groups again and practice applying the tools by role playing.

(15 min) 8. Participants come up with a goal to accomplish at this conference and establish a measurement indicator. They will need to influence other conference attendees indirectly and may choose to use any of the tools discovered in the workshop.

(5 min) 9. Agile Round Up. Each participant has an opportunity to share his most important takeaway from this workshop.

Deliverables

• Categorized list of tools on the conference wiki.
• Recap at end of conference.

Session leaders qualifications

Kay Johansen has spent the past five years in pursuit of Agile testing. She has helped multiple organizations build Agile software teams, including recruiting, coaching, developing Agile processes and overcoming resistance. She has published two papers on introducing Agility and led workshops "Teaching Agile Testing" and "Roadmap to Agile Testing" at previous Agile conferences. She is currently a Lead Test Engineer for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Zhon Johansen is a Senior Software Engineer at Oakley Networks. He has studied, practiced, taught, and influenced companies to adopt Extreme Programming since early 1999. He helped coach "XP for a Day" at the first XP/Agile Universe. He presented "Extreme Fishbowl" at several conferences including XP/Agile Universe 2002. He presented "Making money with (or without) software" at Agile 2004, and "Stop Interacting with the Customer!" at Agile 2005. Kay and Zhon founded XP Utah in December of 2001 and have run it continuously since then.

Notes

Kay's notes. Parallels with democratization and NGOs.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DEMOC.HTM - Culture of nonviolent conflict resolution.

But also there is the role of culture. Many democratic theorists now accept that democracy requires a political culture of negotiation, compromise, accommodation, and a willingness to lose. Where this culture is absent, democracy, even if created through revolution by the people themselves, cannot succeed. However, as one considers such democracies as Japan, France, Germany, or India, their pre-democratic cultures were most conducive to authoritarian rule of some kind. It is only with the development of democracy that their political cultures gradually became democratic. Whether political democracy or democratic culture came first is clearly a chicken and egg question, but whether it comes before or after democracy is created, it is widely recognized as essential to democratic stability.

But especially important here is the argument that democracy institutionalizes a means of nonviolent conflict resolution- - -the willingness to negotiate, compromise, and debate, rather than fight. Moreover, the ballot rather than the bullet is the very democratic ideal of voting to resolve differences and choose leaders. It is what we mean by democracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization - Factors affecting democratization.

# Wealth. # Economic system. # A large middle class. # Civil society. # Homogeneous population. # Culture. # Previous experience with democracy. # Foreign intervention.

http://www.gdrc.org/ngo/credibility/introduction.html - Credibility.

http://www.gdrc.org/ngo/codesofconduct/ifrc-codeconduct.html - Respect and partnership, not patronize and fix. We shall respect culture and custom We shall attempt to build disaster response on local capacities Ways shall be found to involve programme beneficiaries in the management of relief aid