Agile 2007: Day 2
Whew… one thing I learned this morning as I rolled out of bed: maybe it would have been better to take a taxi all over rather than walk all over town last night. Some co-workers and I decided to do some late night sight seeing , walking from our hotel to the Whitehouse, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and everything else in between. Man are my legs sore!
Anyhow, we started the day off with the keynote, some lady that is the VP of some company telling us her story about climbing to the top of Mt. Everest with her husband. I can’t say this really interested me… I drew the connection with her story as a metaphor for software development, but I just had a lack of interest. 
The first session I attended was presented by the fellows from SolutionsIQ titled “Weaving Domain-Specific Language Support into your Automated Testing Tool.” I had negative reaction to it at first, but after some reflection the session really wasn’t that bad… in fact it was rather good… it was just for me with my experience it would be like attending an “Introduction to Agile” session.
What it was really about is their new tool, which is kind of a mashup of Selenium and Fitnesse and an example of making your own DSLs with it. I didn’t think the examples were really representative of the DSLs I would have liked to see (i.e. “User logs in and selects credit card type VISA and clicks submit”), but was rather a more mid-level DSL that would make things easier. In retrospect, it would be a handy tool (and F/OSS to boot!), but from where I’m coming from, where we already have DoFixtures backed by httpUnit and Selenium, there wasn’t much for me to gain (However… don’t count it out… I still plan on downloading STIQ and giving it a hands on spin).
The second session I attended, Programmers are from Mars, Customers are from Venus: A Practical Guide to Working With Customers on Agile Projects with Robert Biddle and Angela Martin, was just what I was looking for. I gained a lot of new insights from the game they had us play in the beginning.
The game was simple really.. our team needed to give a presentation on working with good customers and bad customers, and the team needed to provide the customer with visual aids for the presentation. I got to play the customer in this game, and came up with 6 stories … 3 describing good customers, i.e. “Customer is involved and participates in two way conversation” and bad customers, e.g. “Customer is never available, never answers calls.” Made the stories, had the team size them, and split the work into two iterations. What made things interesting was the “randomness cards,” which were basically their way of introducing the real world into the game, with cards like “Kent Beck visits, insists you are doing everything wrong. Tear everything up and start over, but consult the Big Boss first.”
When “developers” started on the first story, one pair picked up a card and asked me what my favorite toothpaste was, then proceeded to write the name brand of it across the top and bottom of the visual aid. This gave me an interesting perspective on how the customer sees it when we, as developers, add features we think are usefull or snazzy that they didn’t ask for… strange and nonsensical. Heh.
Throughout the exercise they did other things I felt were very representative of “when things go wrong” on an XP project… new people not familiar with the project kept being swapped in, the team let in to management intrusions, and other distractions. It was great because it helped identify some of the problems we face on agile practice, and in the second half of the session they covered some of the recurring traits and practices that were observed on successful agile teams.
Interesting and valuable day. I’ll expand more on this in a future post.
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