f3yourmind

Over the next few months or so, I will be quite active in the conference space.  Here’s what’s coming up soon …

• SD Times’ Leaders of Agile Webinar: This is the fourth or fifth in this series hosted by Kent Beck.  It’s always very engaging for me, and Kent normally asks far too many difficult questions without warning me in advance.  It’s also the third time that I will be working with Henrik Kniberg.  This time we will be talking about Kanban, and should be another really fun 3 hours.  What I enjoy the most is the balance between practical experience, challenging the norm, and always the realisation that I know far too little.  It’s free and you can register at SD Times.
• Oredev 2011:  I’ve been invited back to Oredev in Malmo, Sweden.  This is always a fun conference and I get some face time with my factor10 colleagues in Sweden again.  On this occassion, I will be giving two talks.  In the first I will explore the messes we make over and over again, yet we are missing some old teachings and learnings consistently.  The second is on the Java track and I will share my experiences on experimenting with Scala and Clojure, more from design and mental mindshifts, instead of the usual language and syntax changes.  Check it out at Oredev 2011.
• rubyfuza 2012: This is the second edition of the only South African Ruby conference that I know of.  The 2011 edition was well put together with great local and overseas speakers.  Although the program is not finalised, I will be talking about using JavaScript and CoffeeScript to build parsers and grammars.  This is something that I’ve spent a lot of time on recently and it’s changed a lot of my thinking on domain driven design implementation options.  Check out the details at rubyfuza.
• AgileIndia2012:  This is my first trip to India, and one that I am absolutely excited about.  I will be running two sessions.  One on product ownership which is a slight improvement on the sessions held for SD Times and the S.African Scrum Safari.  The other is a culmination of years of introspection on cultural differences that I face.  I explored this quite emotionally at Oredev last year and will run a more in-depth session for AgileIndia.  Check out the abstracts for my sessions Practical Product Ownership: balancing strategy and development and Collaboration lessons from the Rainbow Nation the early bird program.

I will be hosting a 3 hour session at the South African Scrum Gathering titled “Live your principles or stay in bed”.  You can read the abstract here.  In my opinion, there is far too little focus on software development itself in Scrum.  So, this is unashamedly a developer session.  I will be present various snippets of code, and we will “live our principles” to transform the code into something that is less messy.

I often hear developers, and managers too, saying “It’s so much easier without, so why bother?”.  Well, design is hard.  Applying principles for life is harder.  But if you are professional developer and have a conscience about your design, your code, and your product then “an easy life without principles” is not an option.

If you are planning to come along, bring your laptop with your development environment.  I will likely have code samples in Java, C#, Ruby, Javascript, and even, yup, Basic (well, maybe).  All the samples should be very readable and you could easily translate them to something equivalent in your language pretty easily.  Better still, bring some of your own code along, that you want to share.

In reality, this is stuff that Scrum does not teach you, but need to know to avoid Scrum burnout.  Looking back, I should have done something like this sooner.

I’ve got a busy few weeks of preparation to get through for a few talks that I will be giving.  In September I will be speaking at the South African Scrum Gathering.  The one talk for Johannesburg is on product ownership and it is a combination of the content that I presented earlier for the SD Times webinars.  The other I hope to keep quite code centric and is aimed squarely at developers and architects.

Then in November, I’ve been kindly invited to speak at Oredev in Malmo, Sweden.  I will be talking on the Java track and Architecture track.  Being in Sweden, I get a chance to get some face time with my Scandinavian colleagues, and lots of offshore geek friends.  If you are a South African looking for a decent developer conference, then consider Oredev.  It has a good vibe and some very good content, and is generally good value for money.

I will be joining Kent Beck and Henrik Kniberg on July 20, 2011 for an SD Times webinar on Lean Software Development.  As usual, Kent has put up a great abstract for the event.  I’m absolutely certain that Kent will set the scene with his usual deep insights, and Henrik  has some amazing “from the trenches” experiential material to share.  Overall, we will explore this concept of waste vs value and how lean influences application development.

Personally, I want to cover what flow and waste mean to me, and examples of the huge piles of waste that I ended up manufacturing or walking into blindly and then struggling to dig myself out at great expense.  If the time allows, I want to weave in some models of flow that work for me and those that contributed to waste.  All of this fits into my rather weak thoughts on designing feedback loops.

On 12 May 2011 I will be joining Kent Beck and Henrik Kniberg in a free webinar hosted by SD Times to take a deeper look at product ownership as described by the Scrum methodology.  I think we all have a lot of questions, especially Kent, but I will also put forward some things that I have tried and some opinions of what I think should be tried. As usual, I welcome critical comment.

For a long time I have been wary of the way product ownership is “taught” in CSPO courses, and the way it is implemented in Scrum teams. I think the fundamental tension of product ownership is not being addressed.  So, at the heart of my talk, I want to explore the tension that a product owner needs to resolve and, maybe, some ways of resolving that tension.

Regardless of whether we offer workable solutions, I think the webinar will raise questions that are well worth discussing in larger groups.