Golden Nuggets from the Innovation Games Summit

My friend Chad Holdorf describes golden nuggets as those practical things you learned from a conference that you can use on Monday at work. After attending the Innovation Games Summit this week in Santa Clara here are six golden nuggets I'd like to share with you:

1. Many of the attendees at my Silence of Agile talk were trained and experienced facilitators and during our discussions offered two specific tips that I plan on trying at one of our team's next retrospectives.

• The first tip was to change the voting so that people vote not only for their top 3 ideas but also their bottom 3. When tallying the results use the net votes (top minus bottom) as your top items to work on for that period. 
• The second tip involves changing the silent writing portion of the retrospective. Instead of writing each individual idea on one post-it, ask each team member to write all their ideas on one paper in a list format. Once everyone has written their list, pass it to the person on your left. Each person then reads their neighbour's list and adds to it. Keep passing the lists to the left until everyone has read and contributed to all the lists. Finally, put the individual items on your board and prioritize them as usual.

2. Innovation Games help you have better conversations and make better decisions. I had already experienced this myself when using these games for retrospectives. However it became even more explicit as we facilitated and observed the San Jose 2013 Budget Games. We had a diverse group of community members at our table who had honest conversations and made tough decisions about topics that are important for San Jose. I can imagine that a great facilitator could also have achieved the same results, but the game did this without much need for facilitation. I'll be looking for more places to try out these games.

3. As a facilitator, it is important to trust the Innovation Game and let the group create their own process and flow within the context of the game. Gerry Kirk was my facilitation partner for the Budget Games and I watched (sometimes in trepidation) as he deftly used good questions to nudge the group along rather than directing the flow. Their process was sometimes a little scary as they tried to work within the game to come to decisions. However, in the end it was their process and their results. The game did its job to provide structure and Gerry's gentle questioning prodded them to a good result much more effectively than a directive approach would have.

4. A new podcast source! Look for Jack Dorsey and others on Standford University's Entrepreneurship Corner.

5. A new book that was highly recommended by Mr. Holdorf: The Radical Leap Re-Energized by Steve Farber.

6. Two 'S's. These aren't agile tips, but useful nonetheless

• Have sinus trouble when flying? A client of mine recommended Sinusalia by Boiron. Take two pills before you get on the plane and then every two hours during your flight - they are magical.
• Need music for your training sessions, workout sessions, relaxing at home, etc? Try the Songza app. It has lots of curated music based on themes and also comes with a pretty neat UX experience that suggests musical themes based on the time of day.

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My top 12 agile podcast episodes

When I mentioned at SDEC10 that much of what I know about agile I learned from podcasts, several people expressed interest in my favourites.  Here are my top 12 (now 13) podcast episodes in random order:

1. Hanselminutes 119. What is Done? A conversation with Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber. An excellent conversation that answered some of my initial questions about Agile like - how do logging, security and other infrastructure tasks fit in the back log, and of course - what is done?

2. AgileToolkit - Allistair Cockburn interview at Agile2006. Allistair talks about his evolution as a Methodologist from a hardware guy, the Crystal family of agile methodologies, his writing and much more.   Crystal recognizes that one agile methodology cannot be used in all companies and tries to identify the core principles and practices that are important for all agile projects.

3. Hanselminutes 145. An overview of the SOLID principles with Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob").  Excellent overview with examples.

4. LeanAgileTalk 20070118. Part 1 of a great conversation with Alan Shalloway on how to apply lean principles to agile development.  A good start on how to implement practices - the 'how'.  Some excellent sound bites in here.

5. AgileToolkit - Uncle Bob interview at Agile2005. A brief discussion with Bob Martin on the essential principles of Agile

6. Hanselminutes 23. A short introduction to scrum.

7. Hanselminutes 31.  A good introduction on Test Driven Development and the benefits.  Includes discussion of the pros/cons.

8. AgileToolkit - APLN Panel discussion. Long (2 hours), but good.  Here are some of the highlights:
- Worst agile transition failures? - What is required for transition? Leadership, don't do partial agile, must integrate testers on the team, need to form teams that work effectively together - Self organizing teams - is this possible? The original XP team was full of architects, but our teams may not be - how can we do this? The original backlash against architecture was that architects were responsible to standards, not to the business problem. Also - it is important to move our experts out of the corner office and off the pedestal and on to the teams as active members producing code. - Level of up front architecture required? Depends on problem/project. With a new domain, or a junior team, more architecture guidance is required. With a known domain and an experienced team, less architecture guidance is required. - Is requirements a dirty word? No - signoff is the dirty word. Requirements are good - but waiting months before implementing is not, not accepting change is not. Don't penalize people from finding errors, omissions, changes at any step. - How to do fixed price projects? One suggestion - share the risk (i.e. cost) for the first 6-8 weeks (2 or 3 iterations) to measure your velocity and gain trust. Then if client is happy, you have enough info to fix the price, and you get your "risk" back. - Why is fixed bad? You give them what they asked for, rather than what they need.  Never used + rarely used features = 64% of the code (Standish report)

9. AgileToolkit - Uncle Bob explains the agile manifesto. Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin answers the
question of "What is Agile?" He goes back to the start, to the Snowbird meeting, the formation of the Agile Alliance and the drafting of the Agile Manifesto. He also looks at the core principles and key practices of Agile software development.

10. Agile Toolkit - Poppendiecks at Agile 2006. Tom and Mary discuss several topics including:
- optimize the whole, not the pieces - don't neglect one of the pillars of lean: respect people - queueing theory.  Examples a defect list is a queue that should not exist.  We should be mistake free after each step.  Don't build on top of bad software.  Also, this helps eliminate interim artifacts like 'test strategy document'. - testing phase - this is testing too late - relating lean to cooking by a master chef
- describing how clothing store Zara implemented lean (very interesting)

11. IT Conversations - Ken Schwaber. Ken talks through many of reasons why agile SW development is such a necessary change in the industry.

12. Hanselminutes 169 - TDD with Roy Osherove. Roy Osherove educates Scott on best practices in Unit Testing techniques and the Art of Unit Testing.

13. DotNetRocks show 750 - While at Prairie Dev Con in Calgary, Carl and Richard chatted with Steve Rogalsky about User Story Mapping. Steve explains how User Story Mapping helps to visual your backlog beyond a serial list of features to allow you to improve your project decisions, priorities, plans, and delivery. (Sorry - had to add this one ;)

Hope you enjoy them. Let me know if you have other favourites - I'd love to listen to them.