XPDay 2008 took place last week and I felt it was a great success. The open space format really excelled and there was very little I saw/took part in that wasn’t interesting or generating new ideas. The general mood seemed to be that the understanding of agile practices and principles was quite mature now and most of people’s problems were around where we are coming up against and conflicting with the business context (5 year plan’s, understanding the need for slack and long term benefits against short-termism).
We were also honoured with a keynote from the inventor of Lean, Jon Daniels and his colleague Marc Baker who gave us a frightening insight in to the state of the NHS and how Lean practices are having dramatic effects, but I want to post separately about them.
Other sessions:
Software Craftsmanship
With Jason Gorman’s software craftsmanship conference coming up in the new year, John Daniels wanted to talk about what craftsmanship meant to us. It was a really interesting discussion and the general feeling was that people were uncomfortable with the idea that we could define what it meant to be a software craftsman as there are far to many skills and too much diversity in the types of these skills. This was summed up well by the following: To explain what a craftsman is, Keith Braithwaite used the example of his uncle(?) who has been a farrier for most of his life with people coming to him to learn the skills, yet he only considers himself a journeyman and we explored the similarities/differences between what he did and what we do. In the end someone came up with the excellent point that we don’t make and fit horseshoes, we build cathedrals and there are so many different skills needed (which change all the time) we could never be expected to “master” them. I’m going to Software Craftsmanship 2009 and I look forward to seeing how it pans out.
Why aren’t they typing more?
Douglas Squirrel asked us how we deal with people asking unanswerable questions like “why aren’t they typing more?” and “you need to focus on productivity rather than agility”. There were lots of interesting ideas, but the most revealing one for me was that we need to be able to deal with people rationalising rather than being rational (e.g. the idea that being busy = productivity). Someone mentioned a book called Predicably Irrational which investigates this phenomenon (and I shall add to my reading list). Most of what we do within an agile context flies in the face of conventional wisdom and is very radical compared to the most of the organisations we work with/within. I think this is a problem as a community we need to spend more time looking into.
December 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Sorry i couldn’t make it to XP day – client commitments won out i the rush before Xmas.
I wanted to quickly add my own thoughts on “software craftsmanship”. I think maybe people like John and Keith might be reading too much into the intent of the conference. there seems to be some unspoken assumption that we’re going to attempt to define a standard set of skills and knowledge (or achievements) that someone must attain to call themselves a “software craftsman”. In actual fact, if you delve into most disciplines – no matter how seemingly innocuous – they can turn out to be huge and mutli-disciplinary.
Jason
January 8th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Jason, I think that you are being a bit disingenuous here.
The conference is called “Software Craftsmanship”, the conference site landing page has a picture of a luthier working on a violin, during the work of the programme committee we were invited by you to classify submissions as suitable for “apprentice”, “journeyman” or “master” attendees.
These are all very powerful borrowings from the source domain. Having presented the metaphor “programming is a guild-style craft” you can’t really complain if folks run with that. If you don’t like where than leads, then maybe it’s a sign that the metaphor is not a good one (for your purposes).