First – I realized that I misnamed the days. So, I’ll just call this “Thursday”.
I decided that, because I hadn’t had a chance to hear him speak yet at this conference, I would head over to Bob Martin’s Clean Code talk first thing. And it’s a good thing I did – the room filled up quickly, and it was worth it. He took a sample program he wrote – and argument parser – and showed how an intial clean, well-tested design fell apart when he tried to scale it. He then showed some tips on how to clean it up.
But most interesting was his follow-up to a discussion he and I had earlier in the conference. We were chatting about Ruby, and he told me that Ruby has the ability to be the next big language to dominate the industry, and that no other language currently holds that distinction for him. He followed that up in this session by saying that Ruby and languages like it will be what dominates the industry in the next 10 years. And from what I’ve seen, I believe it (with apologies to Huey Lewis and the News).
After that session, I went to one entitled Project Status: Writing on the Walls where we got introduced to an interesting way of focusing on delivering value and planning for the same. We were given a stack of cards which had a story, a cost (or estimate), and a value (to the business). Our goal was to deliver as much business value as we could per iteration. What was an iteration?
Well, we had some dice. An iteration consisted of 15 rolls of a die. You would put a card up in the In Progress section, and roll the die until you had enough to cover the cost of the card, at which point you could move it over to the completed section. It was interesting in how much it simulated the real world – simply because sometimes there is a lot of uncertainty. Sure, something seems like a simple table change, until you realize you go through 25 triggers before that value is updated.
After lunc, I headed over to Michael Spayd’s talk on organizational change. He had eight concepts that had to be in place for true organizational change to take place, summarized as:
- There must be a burning platform that is driving the organization to change
- The vision must be compelling to all stakeholders
- Sponsorship must exist at the right level
- Put together a change team
- Key stakeholders are engaged and influence the change
- All stakeholders need the power to make change – with dignity
- Organization needs to get aligned around the change
- Magic has the time and space to bring about transformation
One other key phrase was No Pain, No Change which has certainly been my experience in organizations. Unless they are feeling the pain of something, they aren’t really interested in changing.
After the last session, I got the chance to talk with Mary Poppendieck about how our organization works with the teams, bonus structures, etc. She directed me to research done in the 80’s about Self-Directed teams (which she said ended up not working), and is something I’ll be taking a closer look at.
We closed out the conference with the banquet. Shuttle astronaut Greg Harbaugh gave the closing keynote with some fascinating discussions about how much astronauts have to deal with change and being flexible on a daily basis. One of the key quotes that I wrote down was:
Adverse consequences for constructive criticism detracts from a team’s caring about the outcome
By the way, The Corey Haines mentioned to me that the orginal space shuttle was developed iteratively. Now, that’s a keeper.