Tag: lean

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XP2010

So last week I was lucky enough to attend XP2010 in Trondheim. It was an intense week with great people and great content. It’s kind of hard to process all this content, but it’s time to try.

After listening to the excellent advice of Ole Christian I attended the workshop of Chris Matts on Feature Injection . It was absolutely one of my best sessions at XP2010 and it turned out to be really relevant to what I’m doing at my current client. I think I’ll be able to use a lot of this when it comes to working with the requirements and really understanding what matters.

After an intense workshop it’s always good to listen to Mary Poppendieck talk about Lean in a nutshell . I’ve heard or read a lot of her stuff before, but she has a really unique way of explaining and selling her point of view. I always learn a lot from listening to her.

Ole Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund rounded off the day in a nice way with Mikado refactoring . It’s an interesting and structured way of doing large refactorings. I’ve done something similar with rolling back changes when I get stuck, but this is a nice structured way to approach it. Now if only my computer hadn’t been acting up I would actually be able to practice it a bit more.

The second day started out with a bang, first with a keynote by Scott Page, then listening to Cory Foy talk about craftsmanship. Head over to the program page of XP2010 to see the videos. It’s really worth the time. While you’re there also check out the talks by Mary Poppendieck and Marcus Ahnve.

Now I must admit that most of thursday was lost to my nerves, as I was holding two lightning talks that day. Of the ones I saw and really liked was the talk of Jonas Follesø about the Blackbox Recorder . This sparked quite an interest in the Java crowd, so some started the Java version: Jackbox Recorder . Sadly one of my talks was at the same time as the My Agile Suitcase Pecha Kucha, so I didn’t get to see it. I heard great things about it. Luckily there’s video out.

On the last day, conference fatigue were setting in. But I got a great session of Coding Katas. Interesting to both see other languages and other people code. I really also liked the workshop Cory Foy gave on innovation games. It opened my eyes on how to do facilitation around requirements and features, and tied quite nicely into the stuff from the first day with Feature Injection.

Well, this is just a try at writing down what I remember and process some of the information. I know it’s summary, just let me know if there’s something I should expand ont.

It was really a great conference, like none I’ve attended before. Thank you to all the brilliant people that I met and the organizers.

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Development

Toyotaism

Toyota is the ever recurring example of lean success. It is the basis of most things lean, and deserves all the credit. We should however find new examples and stories, grinding the Toyota story to convince people can get a bit old.

Having said that, I ran across the points called Toyotaism on Mike Wroblewski’s blog. Interesting foundation for a company. It was originally defined in 1935 and revised to current form in 1989. For a agile and lean believer like me it of course leads to a warm and fuzzy feeling. 😉 Here they are:

Always think of the customer first; considering the basics of manufacturing, always making products that are outstanding for their high quality, low cost and technical excellence.

With a foundation of mutual trust between labor and management, cheerfully make progress as a company highly valuing creativity.

Stimulate Toyota activities everywhere, inside and outside the company, while cooperating to expand business.

Contribute to expanding our economy and building up a better living environment for our society by doing business actively all over the world.

Strive to improve yourself through self enlightenment, constantly on the alert for any new social or market trends.

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Development

JavaZone 2008 is over

So JavaZone 2008 is over. Had a blast, and saw lots of cool stuff. It was a bit crowded some times, and a bit too many talks was full, but all in all good. Just a short summary for on the good stuff:

  • Heidi Arnesen Austlid on Open Source in the public sector – The government in Norway has a strong preference for Open Source. The motivation for this is to reduce costs, enable exchange of information through open standards and take back control of their it-systems.
  • Rickard Öberg on Qi4J – A good introduction to the component oriented stuff Qi4J is built upon. Everything i compiled by the Java compiler, and everything is refactorable. Really nice stuff, that will be extremely interesting once it matures.
  • Mary Poppendieck on the Double Paradox of Lean Software Development – Mary is always interesting. Utilisation is not the thing to strive for, throughput is. In fact if you maximise utilisation for the expected you have no capacity to handle the unexpected and performance will suffer severely when the unexpected occurs.
  • Robert C. Martin on functions for Clean Code – Uncle Bob is also one of those really good speakers that are always entertaining. A good talk on the basics of function design and how to make this readable and maintainable. Most of us has a lot to learn about pretty basic things, and that a lot of this basic training in good programming (often good OO) is ignored in our education.

Reviewing the program I now see that I have missed more good talks than I really wanted. A mix of bad planning, beer and walking around meeting people will have to take the blame. 😉 I hope they publish most talks as videos later on.

Great conference, see you next year. 🙂