The MSME Chennai Workshop concluded recently and we were really happy to be a part of it. About 70 people came in and attended. There were five talks in all, covering everything from an Introduction to Scrum, Agile Planning, Agile Metrics and Testing in Agile. My talk was on the business case for agile project management. The presentation is embedded below:

The Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (Govt. of India) (MSME) is organising a 1 day seminar series on “Cutting Costs with Agile Software Development Methods” on Friday, 20th of March.

Topics that will be covered:

• Business Case for Agile Software Development
• Introduction to Scrum
• Adapting to changing requirements
• Benefits of self organising teams
• Releasing quality software
• Agile metrics

Plus an open discussion where you can bring up the topics you’re most interested in.

Click the image above for all the details regarding content and registration.

I’ll be in Hyderabad this Saturday (12th Jan) for the Hyderabad Scrum Unconference. I’m looking forward to meeting other Scrum practitioners from around the country. Most of the Scrum and Agile conferences and user groups in India are targeted at people who do not have experience with Agile and the goal is to increase the awareness of Agile.

I’m really itching to meet up with people who have a couple of years of Agile experience under their belt, and I’m hoping that the crowd at this unconference will have some more experience so that we can go beyond the “Intro to agile” type of talks into some more advanced stuff.

I’m thinking of doing a session at the unconference on “Agile in Dysfunctional Environments.” If you’ve been practicing agile for any length of time, you’ll eventually encounter less than ideal situations. For example, what do you do if management won’t let the dev team have direct contact with the customer? Or due to internal politics, you cant have the testing team co-located with the dev team? Maybe the team is distributed?

For each of these situations there is one “prescribed” answer, which is that Scrum exposes the dysfunction in the organisation and you are supposed to eliminate the block. While this is a satisfying explanation on a theoretical level, I’m not convinced that this is always the right answer. There is often something good to be had from eliminating organisational dysfunction, but often it is not immediately possible to do so.

Inter-department politics, for example, may be deeply entrenched and it is no good running the project to the ground while the dysfunction is being sorted out (if it ever will be sorted out). There are many such situations where it might make more sense to work around the problem is a suitable manner than to attempt to recreate the organization from top to bottom.

Distributed Agile is a perfect example of this. Technically, distributed agile is a bit of an oxymoron because Agile teams are supposed to be co-located. Although I am all for co-locating as much as possible, there are situations where you cannot co-locate and rather you have to make the best of the distributed team that you have with you.  Dealing with fixed bid projects is another such situation.

Incidentally, Thoughtworks, which is probably one of the best known Agile companies, has both distributed teams as well as a large share of fixed bid projects (at least in the India offices), which just goes to prove that we should not be highly dogmatic about what is prescribed.

Anyway, that is the rough outline of the session I had in mind. If you are in Hyderabad on Saturday, do drop in and say Hello.

This is the intro to agile presentation from Agile Chennai 2007. It was done jointly by Bala and myself, although Bala did most of it. I just spoke for five minutes at the end of slide 83 about how agile is not a set of techniques.

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Dont worry if you missed Agile Chennai 2007 because Azagappan has a fantastic round up of the event.

Also, the presentations from the event have been made available for download.

I gave a presentation at DCamp on the design of programmer spaces. With Agile processes emphasizing the social aspects of software development, this is a topic that has come into focus once more.

We spend a lot of time on improving productivity through better languages, tools and processes. How often do we look at the environment in which the team works? Cubicles are probably the worst environment for programmers because they are poor when you want peace and quiet to work alone and poor when you want to work collaboratively as a pair or group. In this talk we’ll look at some environmental factors that impact teams and how we can design better programmer spaces.

Resources

• The Ultimate Software Development Office Layout: Tons of good links
• The Psychology of Computer Programming: The first book to look at programming as a social activity. Published in 1971.
• IBM’s Santa Teresa Laboratory: A study on designing spaces for programmers while IBM was planning out the Santa Teresa Lab. This was done in the late 70s.
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams: Another classic book on programming as a human activity. First edition in 1987.
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game: Has a good discussion on programmer spaces, especially with regard to agile processes. Published 2006.

I would love to start a discussion on this. If you have any comments, do add them to the post below.

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Agile Chennai 2007 is a two day introductory conference for agile software development and agile project management. The Agile Software Community of India organises at least one such conference every year and this year it will be held at Anna University in Chennai.

The conference will be held on October 4 (thats next month), so if you are in India and are interested in agile software development, you should try and make it for the conference. Apart from the scheduled program (the keynote will be given by Jeff Patton this time), the conference is also a good way to meet practitioners of agile software development in India.

Registration for the conference has opened, so head over to the site and register.

The Agile Software Community of India is organising a few conferences and workshops in the coming months.

• Agile workshop to be held at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore on 8th Sep 2007
• Agile workshop to be held at Medicaps Institute of Technology & Management, Indore on 22nd Sep 2007
• Agile Chennai 2007 conference to be held at Anna University, Chennai on 4th and 5th Oct 2007

All the workshops and conferences will be introductory sessions for those new to Agile. So, if you are in India, and are interested in Agile, do drop over to one of these conferences.

I’ll be there at the Agile Chennai 2007 conference. It would be cool to meet up at the conference if you are in Chennai on those days.