Marcato

Scott and I are headed to the Chippewa Valley Code Camp tomorrow to present on “Using Agile to Lead Distributed Teams”.  We’re part of a track on “Building Better Software” and there will be another session on Agile as well – it will introduce basic practices and then we’ll cover a couple of case studies of teams using Agile here in Minnesota and around the world.  I’ll post the slides with this entry after we get back – they’re not done yet

Update:

I saw a couple of sessions in addition to the one we presented.  The first was by Jill Tiefel of Innovative Writing and Design – she walked us through 10 myths of usability testing and hit the nail right on the head.  I had a chance to go through this process once at Gearworks – I was skeptical going into it, but our goal was to try to get a more objective view on how to improve the usability of our products as part of a new project called 80/20.  I found that there were two very tangible benefits:

• the preparation of the paper mockups pushed us to think through the details of screen layout and navigation before we started to build the product at a level of detail that was far more complete than I had seen before
• we had hard facts to back our decisions about what was best for layout, screen flow, colors, icons, etc; this helped us deal with the many opinions we would get from senior management and others about what they thought would make for an easier to use or more intuitive design

Jill knew her stuff, and I suspect she could provide a fairly affordable alternative to some of the lab-based studies.

My second session was an introduction to Agile by Tom Steele of Three Rivers Technologies.  He did a good job of covering the basics of the methodology in the 75 minutes he had – he was really compressing a half-day session into a much shorter format.  From this I realized how hard it is to get people from a cold start to some basic understanding of the practices – there is just too much to talk about for people to feel comfortable with what they learned.  I also think there is a tendency to dwell on the philosophies as we try to create converts rather than just focusing on the history, terminology, and most common practices.

Here was our presentation – since it was clear we were addressing an audience that was new to Agile, we started with a Q&A session to try to reinforce some of Tom’s teaching.  From there we covered our own planned content in about 45 minutes – the topic was a bit too esoteric for most there, and we’ll probably start looking for alternative forums or plan to deliver only intro-level material at future code camps.  Here’s our presentation if you are interested:

Using Agile to Manage Distributed Teams

And there will be more posted at:

http://www.chippewavalleycodecamp.com