Agile Angel

Hi everyone!

Starting today (June), I’ll start posting last month’s Agile Angel Newsletter in this blog. If you want to get the all fresh Newsletter, be sure to check the previous link and join it! We send just one issue every month or two, so no Spam or high bandwidth required.

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Ahoy!

Wow, it’s been a long time since I wrote my last post… I don’t want to bother you with the reasons, let’s just say I took something similar to a sabbatical – jealous, right?

Anyway, some interesting things happened in the last months. One of them was I got to make a workshop about reducing estimations at XP2012. I already presented something similar at ALE2011, so it seems like I’m becoming an expert on the issue . Here is the video and the presentation I used:

The Easy Way To Stop Estimating – Workshop at XP2012 from Proyectalis on Vimeo.

I realize I should have tested some of the excercises before, as they became somehow messy but, hey, I’m a Spaniard, we like everything las minute! . I also need to impprove my pronunciation, although it feels like I can make myself better understood than a year before, when I talked even faster and with less care on pronunciation. Anyway, we had lots of fun and it seems that some people liked it so much that they invited me to do talks in their own events… More info on that soon (I hope)!

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from someone from attended my ‘Easy way to stop estimating’ speech at ALE2011 asking how to start building your histograms if, ironically, you are not supposed to do estimations (in which case, you don’t have estimations to build a histogram with ).

Of course, the whole point of (nearly) dropping estimations is to rely on actual, real, measured data instead. On the following explanation, I’ll assume you are not ready to drop the whole thing and still need some minimal estimation (although I can’t imagine why ).

There are several ways to do histograms depending on the nature of your work. If you are solving small ‘ticket-like’ issues you can trace how long they take to solve, maybe doing also a small pre-estimation of “small-medium-large” issue – then build the histogram with the actual data (and maybe dividing it in three histograms for each kind of estimation).

If you are more into user-story like product backlog then (if you wish) you can make a small pre-estimation of “small-medium-large” or directly use story points with a reduced set (“1-5-8-13″ for example). Then there are two ways you can go:

• You can stick to that number. If a “1″ end up being actually a 5, you still count it as a “1″. This way, you would be acknowledging that, in future sprints, other “1″ stories will probably become a 5. So for example, you start with “1, 1, 5, 5, 8″ for a total of 20 estimated points – then the first story takes way longer than you expected, and you end up with 15 delivered points – Great! next time you’ll commit to less capacity.
• You can re-estimate stories later on. Then you will acknowledge that the first “1″ was actually a “5″, and you’ll still go for 20 points of capacity. I DON’T LIKE THAT. It’s not that you are wrong, but it’s kind of a “vanity metric” that will make you think you actually delivered the 20 points you commited, when the truth is that you only delivered 4 out of 5 commited stories.

Of course, you can also do hourly tracing of user stories, meaning that you can tag them as “small-medium-large”, write down a beginning date when you start, an end date when you end and then assigning the difference for histogram building.

Example: User story 35, originally considered of “medium” size, started monday morning, endend wednesday afternoon – 3 DAYS.

You can make more complex calculations, for example including queuing time or focus factor, but my advice would be to keep it as simple as possible.

Once you have histograms, you can start playing with SLA’s and say things like “80% of our medium-rated stories are done in less than four days, and they NEVER take more than two weeks” – That’s a SLA

Please, everyone trying to reduce the estimation process, keep my informed of your progress!! )

Bonus: don’t miss Vasco Duarte’s brilliant post on the topic

A couple of weeks ago I attended ALE2011, the first unconference by Agile Lean Europe, both as an organizer, speaker and sponsor.

I must say I tried too keep up with the organizing team but I couldn’t make it due to my nightmare agenda on the last months and also my extended summer break this year (a really deserved one month and a half). So I decided early to cover this lack of dedication with a humble sponsorship of the event. Hope that counts

I was selected as a speaker from Spain. I must say I’m not really comfortable on speakers being chosen by country and not by merits, but hey, this was the “Europe” part in “Agile Lean Europe”. It gave a lot of opportunities to speakers that, on other circumstances, would have low probabilities of being chosen by the typical program committee (by the way, instead of chairs the organizing team was divided in sofas, how cool is that?). Some of this more unknown speakers were a pleasant surprise, while in other cases some of the presentations were, I must say, a little bit empty, dull and self-promotional. Hey, this is the game: take it or leave it

I definitively take it. My presentation was crowded, and I had a really engaged and passionate public that decided on their own to make an Open Space on the topic:  eliminating waste by dropping the estimation process. On the improvement side, I need to speak slower, as I tend to go really fast and my English is not that good

I had decided not to propose any Open Space because I already had some featured space and I felt like I should leave Open Space for people without presentation slots. I remember being on other conference, proposing an Open Space and seeing how a couple of Agile Super Stars monopolized the Open Space by proposing games, extensions to their talks or other kind of activities, so this time I preferred not to be the monopoly guy. But anyway, the Open Space took place and I participated as everyone else. I must thank the facilitator, Sven Tiffe, and I remember being very close to the opinions by Liz Keogh.

Probably one of the best talks was delivered by Chris Matts, and boy did he deliver. The topic was feature injection, but this was in fact the less important part. His delivery is so good that I’ve been jealous since then and I’ve learned a couple of things I must work on to improve my own style.

Possibly the best part of the event was the networking and the creation of new and solid relationships. I remember having nice conversations with Vasco Duarte, Eric Lundh, Yves Hanoulle, Olaf Lewitz, Olav Maasen, and some Spanish ex-pats from Nokia.

Unfortunately, I was handicapped by the fact that, on thursday, my wallet was stolen by two pickpockets while having lunch outside the hotel and I wasted a lot of time on police stations and the spanish embassy (which is only available from monday to friday, from 9:00 to 13:00!!!), although I must say German police is astonishingly efficient, polite and nice (and I got my money back in 24 hours!!).

I think I need some more time to think on some of the great ideas I got from this event, so please stay tuned next weeks. Oh, you can browse some of my ALE pictures at Flickr.

Hi everyone!

I’m proud to inform that ScrumWeek Barcelona will take place on november 7th to 11th, and we will count with one of the most influential and active members of today’s worldwide Agile community: Jurgen Appelo, author of Management 3.0, a best-selling management book for Agile developers. As the author states, it has a picture of a monster in it, and that has to be something you should also consider when looking at this course. What was the last seminar you took that had a monster in it?

The venue is still to be determined, please stay tuned, but today (Sept. 12th) we already opened registration. Jurgen’s course will take place on monday 7th and tuesday 8th, and the cost for early bird registration (untill Sept. 30th) will be 800,00€, and during early bird we will be offering one free additional ticket to anyone buying four, so you may want to check with your colleagues if they are interested in attending and form a group of five with them (or just sell them the four tickets and get a free one for yourself, hehehe   . From October the 1st to October 31st the cost for regular registration will be 1000,00€. Course fee includes all the materials, the amazing experience and… Oh, what the heck, we’ll buy you lunch also . Please notice that accomodation expenses are not included (we will be offering more information on the venue soon). For registrations, please e-mail me directly.

We will also have place for a Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) and a Scrum course by the Plain Concepts crew, and also for my own seminar on Coaching Agile Teams (altough these will be taught in Spanish, sorry european guys ). Community events will take place all over the week during afternoons, and we are open to any suggesions on how to improve this Agile experience. All the (Spanish) information on Barcelona’s ScrumWeek is available here, and we will probably be updating them as we approach the dates.

Update: the event will take place on Hotel Barceló Sants.

See you there!