Ok. I'm off to London and should be in the City around 2pm local time. If you're coming and would like to meet up already before the conference, dial +358 45 670 9770.

Timo over at laughingpanda.org blogs his thoughts on agile methods needing good programmers.

I attended the first Coding Dojo in Finland yesterday at the office. This is my fable attempt to report how it went (the short version: I think it turned out great).

We basically had a full house, which was nice. Some didn't show up, but we got extra audience to fill up the seats anyway. If I remember correctly, most of those present said they're not actively using TDD at work but obviously all were interested in it. And, as someone pointed out, what better way to try it out than with a bunch of other people and a projector!

Before going further, please note that these are just my personal opinions and observations and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the group.

First, the pace. The frequency of switching pairs could've been higher. We spent about 150 minutes coding with approximately 15 people and we only got once around the room, which (on average) makes for an awfully long 10 minutes per seat. I'd personally prefer timeboxing it somehow. After the session, we even joked about writing an Eclipse plugin that would force you to switch after a configured timeout, reverting all changes back to the last "green"... That ought to push for smaller tests and simpler implementations ;)

Markus had picked tennis scoring as the programming challenge. It worked pretty well, I think. The rules were simple enough that everyone understood them (and tennis isn't that rare a sport anyway) and yet complex enough to last for an entire session.

I do believe that the actual challenge isn't all that important anyway, however. The one thing that I value most about a dojo session like we had is the ensuing discussion, seeing and hearing people react to what they see on the projector. Being able to read body language is pretty essential in the kind of situations I tend to spend a lot of time in these days, and it's always a magnitude harder to "read" someone new.

Speaking of reactions, I made a lot of small observations on how different people acted while on the keyboard. Nothing surprising there, though. What was a bit surprising, however, was how the audience often stepped in to suggest solutions and comment on the driving pair's doings. Personally, I don't think that big a volume of commentary from the audience is a good thing. It wasn't a catastrophe in that sense, no, but I think it would've given many participants more "insight" into how others think and program, if they had simply held their comment for a bit longer.

And, yes, I did contribute to that excess commentary at times.

I'm really positive about the session and I hope it will become a regular thing (maybe not every week, though). It'll be interesting to see how it turns out and whether we'll be having regular dojos in Helsinki. The next session is already on Monday--do register if you're into having fun with other geeks!

David Anderson blogs about a team emptying its backlog completely. The part that made me post a link to David's blog entry is in the very end:

When your constraint moves out into the market, look inward for the answer to bring it back inside.

All too often, we achieve something great and stop there. The really smart ones continue their relentless pursuit for yet another notch.

I just spotted answerbus.com from my referral logs and felt the urge to try it. Obviously, I asked how much does an african pigeon weigh?. No answer. Sigh.

I just learned about riya.com via Christian Sepulveda's renewed blog. Looks interesting. I wonder if it works.

I just wanted to share what I consider a somehow "special" photo in Willem's collection from XP Day Benelux. That's Emmanuel Gaillot and Laurent Bossavit playing Go. You can almost touch the moment.

Seen at project.ioni.st, a visualization of Sony's DRM rootkit's reach:

  

Now what do these images tell us about the division of wealth among nations and continents?

Thanks to the guys at project.ioni.st, I found a great service called Wayfaring (now if they'd only add Finland into Google Maps before I die...) and the hilarious Visual Studio song from Microsoft Korea.

This goes out to those who run their blog software with a template that stretches the text to 100% of the browser window.

Please, please consider the reader and change the layout to keep the columns within a reasonable width. I mean, while I like reading certain blogs, I just can't read them from the blog site directly. My eyes literally start hurting after the second paragraph of scanning over 1600 pixels back and forth again and again.

Yes, I could resize my browser window, I could read it through a blog aggregator of my choice, and so forth. That's not the point. The point is that of having a sensible default. I'm pretty darn sure most people prefer reading this kind of a layout rather than this.

(No offense, Len. I like your writing--just not that default layout)

Simon Baker writes:

"Scrum's self-organising team gives individual members an empowered status with the freedom to be creative, the authority to decide the right thing to do and how to do it, and the facilities to learn and adapt to attain improvement. In return, each team member must have the courage to participate proactively in the scrum team, and to be openly expressive and creative. If they don't they will not be doing their best and the team will not advance."

If Scrum was a silver bullet (which it is not, mind you), you'd still need someone to hold the gun and pull the trigger. That someone is you.

Yep. Uh-huh. Right. Cool. The roadmap for IDEA 6 sure looks like I might have to give IDEA another try.

I just read the following paragraph from Mishkin Berteig's blog and remembered a draft I'd written after getting that chilly feeling of seeing agile methods being adopted without the people involved really knowing why their organization is doing it.

"I've seen organizations adopt Agile in some form or another for lots of different reasons. The best reason is because it is recognized as a means to succeed. However, as a means, you don't want Agile to drive change in your organization. Something else should be doing that. Some need, some failing, some gap or some pain. And that need should be measured."

Isn't it ironic how one of agile methods' key ideas, delivering value, is sometimes forgotten by the very people advocating and championing the adoption of agile methods in their organization?

Yes, it is ironic. Or would be if it wasn't so painfully true.

The fact is that people have developed software successfully with methods not too similar to modern day agile methods such as Scrum and Extreme Programming. Those people, when embarking on their first agile projects, are likely confronted with a pretty big slope in terms of productivity, project success even, as they learn a new way of doing things--even if they'd eventually recover to a whole new level of quality and productivity.

Organizational change is about people. People need to commit to the change in order to make it last. In order to truly commit, people need to understand the rationale for that change. Do not for one second think that what is blatantly obvious to you is obvious for everyone. Take care in making sure everyone involved and affected really understand why the change is important for the organization. Most of all, make sure you know the answer.

Is this for real? I mean, the guy writing the bileblog in the JCP? That's, like, voting Bush for yet another term!

Seriously, good luck to Hani if this thing isn't a spoof. And don't give in to the system trying to tell you "asshat" isn't a word! :)

(via Cedric)

eWeek recently published an article about Microsoft's use of Scrum for developing some of their major products. The fact that Microsoft was using agile methods was well known by the agile community but not so well known by the industry in general. And this is probably still the case, even though this kind of articles are an excellent way of spreading the awareness of what the likes of Google, Yahoo!, CapitalOne, Siemens Medical, etc. are doing.

Interestingly enough (or not), the story was picked up by Slashdot. The commentary at Slashdot seems to be what it's always been--rather clueless. Apparently, the Slashdot folks' behavior reminds Dave Rooney of blood-letting, that fine art of healing people (or not), and I kind of agree.

In summary, it's good to see agile methods getting the press they deserve. I haven't yet talked to a single software project that wouldn't have considered the adoption of agile methods a clear improvement. I'm not trying to say anything specific with that remark. I'm just saying.

Via F-Secure:

Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
- Thomas Hesse, President, Global digital business, Sony BMG

It sure is sad when these global corporations try to wipe their asses on the people with their DRM schemes.

Following the apparent success of a small group of pioneers in Paris, France, we're about to have our first Coding Dojo in Helsinki, Finland.

I recently installed a wiki at wiki.agilefinland.com and the Coding Dojo is now the first community event to make use of it. The first session's registration page seems to now have 2 early birds registered (plus Markus who's organizing the whole event).

Oh, and if this is the first time you hear of the Helsinki dojo and you're interested in the local activities, you really should subscribe to the agilefinland Yahoo! group (which is where all the good stuff gets announced).

Conchango has put Ken Schwaber in front of a video camera at scrum-master.com. He does have a way of explaining Scrum clearly and concisely. And he should, all things considered...

(via someone else's blog--unfortunately I forgot whose blog it was)

Mauricio Fernandez has written up a very nice, compact and comprehensive list of the changes that are coming in the 1.9 release of Ruby.

While an excellent contribution to those of us who are trying to keep up with the fast pace of development around Ruby, I can't help but feel small in the face of change. There's features going into the Ruby language faster than I can learn them (not that I'd have to use all those features). And that's just Ruby. Then there's this thing called Java with its own set of essential tools and frameworks one simply must grok in order to call himself a professional (yes, I'm talking about Spring and Hibernate;).

Plus, there's the book I should be writing.

And work, of course.

I'll be traveling again for the next couple of weeks, more or less, which means I won't have the time and energy to do much extracurricular stuff like parsing serialized Java objects with Ruby. Or blogging.

On the positive side, there's so much to do these days that I think I'll have to buy some more computing power ;)