One of the best posts I have seen in a while. Cory Fox on what matters more, people or process:

It’s a good question. I saw good code at places with crappy practices. And I saw crappy code at places with good practices.

But in almost all of the places, I saw code that was on par with the motivation of the teams in place. In other words, teams that were excited about what they were doing, and kept up with trends, etc, often had code they were proud of. Teams that liked their job, but basically were just there had code that worked and had issues, but they didn’t mind. And teams that were just in a crappy place had code that was crappy.

800-CEO-READ has an excerpt from the book Brain Rules by John Medina. What caught my eye was the last paragraph on the page:

What do these studies show, viewed as a whole? Mostly this:

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.

The rest of the excerpt looks interesting too. The book has an associated website here.

Related: Design of Programmer Spaces

One of the more important aspects of general management is facilitating meetings. It’s rather surprising how boring most meetings are. Given the frequency of occurrence you would have thought that people would have gotten pretty good at it. But no, most meetings are dull, boring and go on for far too long.

The ability to have good meetings becomes even more important when doing agile software development, because there is a lot more emphasis on social interaction when compared to traditional processes. Indeed, one of the core skills of being a good Scrum Master, Coach or Project Manager in an agile setting is to be a good facilitator. Almost all agile processes have a meeting to plan the iteration (eg. Sprint Planning meeting in Scrum), a daily standup meeting and a closing iteration retrospective or reflection meeting. Key to the success of agile is the ability to keep these meetings short, interesting and productive and thats where the facilitation skill of the Scrum Master or Project Manager comes into the picture.

As a result, I’m always on the lookout for good, interesting articles and books on meeting facilitation. Here are some ideas, click the link name to go to the original article.

Meeting Facilitation

Meeting Facilitation: This is a nice link on meeting facilitation. Apart from the usual advice like keep an agenda, create action plans and manage the time, this link also has a few interesting snippets.

Pick a large, open spot where everyone can sit down in a big inclusive circle, leaving room for the inevitable straggler or two.

This is a good one. The arrangement of the seats has a big bearing on the type of discussion. A typical conference room arrangement is rectangular or oblong, and the project manager tends to occupy the head of the table. This arrangement will lead to a status report type discussion, where others ‘report’ to the head. On the other hand, a circle tends to lead to a more open discussion.

With the raised hand & speakers list system, it is a challenge to maintain order and efficiency without stifling the flow of discussions. An excellent tool to address this is The Levi Hand Signal Technique (LHST). The LHST allows meeting participants to register their intent to make two distinct kinds of comments: those that are directly in response to someone else’s comment (‘reactive comments’) and those that are separate thoughts (‘unique comments’). Intent to register a reactive comment is signalled by a different hand signal than is intent to register a unique comment. We used an index finger for the former and a full hand for the latter.

An interesting technique for maintaining the flow. In a meeting, it is very easy to go off topic as one point leads to another. Before you know it, you are far away from what you started with. At the same time, you don’t want to inhibit the discussion by repeatedly cutting off people.

Read the full article: Meeting Facilitation

Agile Retrospectives

Agile Retrospectives: This is a book actually. It’s about conducting the end of iteration retrospective meeting (also called reflection meeting). Retrospectives are used to assess the iteration that just ended and how the team can learn from it. Unlike typical meetings that have a fixed agenda, retrospectives are more exploratory and free form. Therefore you need more right-brain activities to bring out the data and analyse it. However, exploratory does not mean unstructured. The book presents a retrospective framework as follows:

1. Set the stage
2. Gather data
3. Generate insights
4. Decide what to do
5. Close the retrospective

The book then goes on to describe a number of activities for each stage of the framework.

Read about the book at Amazon: Agile Retrospectives

Innovation Games

Innovation Games: Yet another excellent blog post by Mike Griffiths. I’ve linked to Mike’s blog before and he has a lot of good stuff on it, so head over and read the rest of his blog as well. Okay, coming back to the topic, this particular blog post deals with innovation games during iteration and release planning. Agile retrospectives laid a framework for the end of the iteration. This one has activities for the start of the iteration. The blog post presents three activities from the book Innovation Games by Luke Hohmann. The three activities are

1. Remember the Future
2. Shape the Product Tree
3. Sailboat

Using these three activities, Mike shows how you can gain a deeper understanding of the project and how to break down features for releases such that they are logical and coherent.

Read the full article: Innovation Games

Patterns of daily stand up meetings

Patterns of daily stand up meetings: We’ve talked about general meetings, iteration retrospectives and iteration and release planning. That leaves the stand-up meeting. The team will be having this meeting every day of the iteration, so it is important to make sure that it is really short and useful. The last thing you want is for everyone to get irritated with a long, boring meeting every single day right? That’s why this article by Jason Yip is so useful. The article mentions several patterns and anti-patterns of the daily stand-up. If you think there is scope for improvement in your stand-up, take a look at this article and see how you can improve it.

Read the full article: Patterns of daily stand up meetings

Summary

Thats four ways to improve your meetings. One for general meetings and one each for the iteration plan meeting, the daily stand up and the retrospective meeting. Apart from these, there is a lot of literature on structured approaches to meetings, decision making, meeting facilitation, creative planning and problem solving. While these are aimed towards general management, they are often just as useful for agile teams as well. So if you see something that you think might be useful, don’t be scared to try it out a few times and then see how it works out.

One of the hardest parts of implementing Agile in an organisation is managing the change that is required for the transition to be successful. It is very easy to start out with Agile, then find some resistance to the change and finally everyone going back to old ways of doing things. Another pattern is when the agile process is adapted so much that it is virtually the same as the old way, only under a new name. For these reasons, organisational change management is an important component in adopting an agile process in a company.

Virginia Satir, a noted family therapist developed a model for how change occurs. Although developed in the context of family therapy, the model has been widely adopted to describe organisational change. One of the key components of the model is that things get worse before they get better. Organisations face a period of resistance, followed by chaos, before they start to improve. By understanding the model, organisations will be better prepared to understand that resistance and chaos are part of the change and will proceed with the change rather than reverting back to old ways of doing things.

For a more detailed discussion of the Satir change model, and what can be done at each stage of the change, check out this excellent article by Steven Smith.