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.

FitNesse and today's date with .net

I have an acceptance test that says I need to validate the age of majority in each of the different states and provinces.  Here is a simple example:

Given Mary who is born January 5, 1995 and lives in Manitoba

When she asks if she is the age of majority

Then return no

The test above is faily simple and I could write it like this in the wiki as a Column Fixture (using the fitSharp.dll to test C# code)

!|Check Age of Majority|

|Province State|Birth Date|Am I Underage?|

|MB            |5-Jan-1995|Yes           |

The problem of course is that this test will start failing on January 5, 2013 when Mary turns 18.  Also, it does not perform the boundary testing that I would like it to do in order to test someone who is 18 today vs. someone who will turn 18 tomorrow.  In order to improve this test, I investigated some other date functions in FitNesse and a plugin by James Carr that allowed you to add days to the current date.  These work ok for smaller calculations like "Given document ABC, When it is 30 days old, Then archive it".  However, this would be a little more cumbersome for birth dates when adding 18 years (esp. with leap year calculations) and the !today function in FitNesse does not work in ColumnFixture wiki tables.  So, I found a simple way to meet my requirement.

First, I wrote a class in C# that accepts two parameters to Add or Subtract Years and Days to the current date.  The class uses C#'s simple DateTime addition to add or subtract the years/days from today and returns the result.  You could easily extend this to add months or add other functionality required in your tests:

namespace FitNesseTutorial.Tests

{

      public class GetDateBasedOnToday : ColumnFixture

      {

        public int AddYears;

        public int AddDays;

        public DateTime ResultingDate()

            {

            return DateTime.Today.AddYears(AddYears).AddDays(AddDays);

            }

      }

}

Then in FitNesse at the top of my script for this story I call GetDateBasedOnToday and store the resulting values in FitNesse variables.  Finally,  I use the variable names through my script to reference the underage and of age birth dates.  Here is an example:

The FitNesse script:

''Get underage and of age dates for 18 and 19 year olds''

!|Get Date Based On Today          |

|Add Years|Add Days|Resulting Date?|

|-18      |1       |>>UNDERAGE_18  |

|-19      |1       |>>UNDERAGE_19  |

|-18      |0       |>>OFAGE_18     |

|-19      |0       |>>OFAGE_19     |

!|Check Age of Majority|

|Province State|Birth Date   |Am I Underage?|

|MB            |<<OFAGE_18   |Yes           |

|MB            |<<UNDERAGE_18|No            |

|BC            |<<OFAGE_19   |Yes           |

|BC            |<<UNDERAGE_19|No            |

In FitNesse, the final result including the acceptance criteria above looks like this:

 (Note: The example above should probably be written as a unit test because it is fairly straightforward, but it simply illustrates how to use the date logic that I'm using as part of larger acceptance tests.)

Agile readiness assessments at Agile2010

I've posted the images from the session "Look before you leap - Agile readiness assessments done right" at Agile2010.  The images are here http://tinyurl.com/26bwlzw.

Some of the images are blurry in my browser (IE), but if you 'Save As' to your computer then you get more detail (not sure why).  If there are any images you need more detail on, let me know - I still have all the originals.

Agile2010 - My Conference Summary

My user stories for the conference were:
- Learn more about coaching and agile assessments (done)
- Get ideas for promoting and increasing agile adoption (done)
- Find better ways to use FitNesse and Selenium (done)
- Acquire some new tools for expressing user needs (done)
- Meet many of the people I’ve been following over the years (done)
- Meet some of the AA-FTT folks (done)

In addition, I encountered a passionate community that is willing to share their time, skills and ideas with anyone who asks. In addition, I encountered a troubled group of leaders that is legitimately concerned about the lack of technical content at the conference. In addition, I encountered leaders advocating for agile in all its flavours instead of promoting any specific one (hurray!). In addition, I encountered people passionate about taking what they have learned in agile and using that to improve communities outside of the business world. In addition, I encountered a few technical folks who undervalue mastery of the ‘soft’ skills over the technical skills. In addition, I encountered new friends that I hope to see again next year. In addition, I encountered a dedicated and friendly volunteer staff that helped make the conference run smoothly. In addition, I encountered a community willing to volunteer their time and money towards a cause (mano-a-mano).

Finally, I encountered a growing and dedicated community that has a lot of success stories to share, some challenges in the road ahead, and hopefully a commitment to continue the fight together.

Thanks all.

Day 5 at Agile2010

The final day of the conference contained three general sessions.  I found a few people who skipped out on these sessions - too bad for them as the sessions were a great wrap up for the entire week.

Dave West talked about Product-Centric Development and the move away from the separation of business and IT (yes please!).  He asked us to start measuring ourselves and our teams by how much value we deliver and not by on-time, on-budget, # of defects, # of stories, lines of code, etc. We can’t make our teams act as part of the business unless we change our measurements.

Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson provided both comic relief and poignant commentary.  I think Chet's comment sums up their talk: "there’s lots of ideas out there and we need to look at every damn one of them”.

Finally, Mike Cohn's talk was a great ending to the conference as he challenged us with some practical ideas of how to spread what we’ve learned using the ADAPT model.  Create Awareness of the problem by communicating using metrics and stories. Focus on one or two reasons to change. Increase the Desire to change by communicating that there is a better way. Get the team to take agile for a test drive and focus on addressing any fears. Develop the Ability to work in an agile manner by providing coaching and training. Promote agile by publicizing success stories or holding agile safaris where people can drop in to agile teams for a short time to see how it works. Transfer agile to all non development teams, departments, divisions, etc. Align promotions, raises, HR, and Marketing. Finally, don’t expect an agile transition to happen all at once. Create an improvement backlog and improvement communities and work on a few stories that are important to your community before tackling the next ones.

A final call to action from Mike: “Now we’ve upped our skills, up yours!”  Well said.