Facilitated Planning Session

Christian described a recent meeting, facilitated by Alistair Cockburn, where they were able to bring together several disparate company divisions, create, and organize over 100 use case story names in half a day. Alistair led the group through facilitated brainstorming, affinity grouping, and dot voting.

Ethics

There was a great question about the apparent lack of specific literature on Agile ethics. The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct was discussed. The best comment from the discussion was something like, if a methodology forces me to question or change my ethics, I don’t want it.

It doesn’t seem like there is anything in the ACM Code of Ethics that conflicts with Agile values and principles, but there are pieces that can be construed to conflict.

Specifically, section 3.4 is called “Ensure that users and those who will be affected by a system have their needs clearly articulated during the assessment and design of requirements; later the system must be validated to meet requirements.”

I could certainly read this as a it not being ethical if big up front requirements document are not created. But, it doesn’t specify what form the requirements come in. Agile methodologies describe many great methods for documenting and validating requirements.

Remote/Distributed Agile

The essence of the discussion was, there is no us and them, the is only us. The suggestions centered around thickening the communication channels; video conferencing, chat, always on phone lines, full group daily stand-ups, and pair programming via remote desktop.

Agile testing

Kay asked the group what they would like in an Agile tester. A flurry of responses were given.

• Don’t devote all of our testing to the GUI.
• Be part of the iteration, not beside it.
• Have the tester check the fix on developer machine before it is checked in.
• Collaboration over tools – many bugs can be fixed in much less time than it would take to document it in the bug tracking tool. Just talk to the developers.

Consistent high-level reporting for multiple teams

The take away from this discussion was that it will be most effective if someone spends the time to inspect all of the team activities and craft a short executive summary by hand.

Other great topics

• UI refactoring war stories
• How to cram 2 years of Test-driven development (TDD) experience in 2 hours for a conference session
• Agile architecture
• Agile Roots Conference

Thanks for facilitating, Jonathan.