• My slides are now up on slideshare. Sorry, there are no notes.
• I talked a lot about The Goal by Eli Goldratt; this book is pure genius, and a must-read for anyone interested in improving the productivity of their organisation.
• We discussed the idea that the flow of value through an organisation is limited by exactly one constraint. A wonderfully simple illustration of this can be found in Kevin Fox’s short Blue Light story. Well worth a read.
• I talked a lot about Kent Beck’s paper Continuous Deployment Immersion, which I mistakenly titled “You’d Have to be Crazy to Try This”. I think this is a really cool idea — not because you need to deploy each line of code separately, but because you need to be good at deploying and good at slicing your market offering thinly.
• I mentioned various practices of eXtreme Programming, including YAGNI, OnsiteCustomer, FrequentReleases and ContinuousIntegration; all of these are needed as you attempt to increase the flow of value by reducing your development batch size.
• I mentioned MMFs — “Minimum Marketable Feature-sets” — as being one way to work with the market to define your smaller batches.
• I mentioned that one of the key difficulties in reducing the software batch size is the acceptance and understanding of emergent design.

I talked about a lot of stuff; please let me know if I’ve missed anything important here.

I’ve also set up an agilenorth2010 tag on del.icio.us to collate the online materials from all the other speakers, as I find them. Please tag anything you find that’s relevant from the day, so it’s all in one place.

This year I’ve dropped out of the organising committee (which will probably help make this event better than ever :). I will be running a session though — a think-tank on the topic of “Do project managers have a role in agile software development?“. If you have an opinion on that, or if you want to know what others think, please do come along!

If it turns out to be on April 26th, perhaps one or more of the attendees could turn up to the naked agilists event that evening and describe the highlights…?

This year’s conference promises to be our best yet, and has attracted an international cast of speakers from leading agile organisations including Thoughtworks and the DSDM Consortium. The programme is packed with sessions on “business” and “technical” aspects of agile software development, together with keynotes, plenary sessions and plenty of opportunities to socialise with like-minded people. The whole event emphasises delegate participation, and is the key networking opportunity for agile newcomers and experts in the Manchester area.

So come on down to the Palace Hotel, Manchester on November 29th and be part of your local agile community!

For full details, and to register, visit http://agilenorth.net.

For this year’s AgileNorth 1-day conference we’re moving to a new venue – the Palace Hotel in the centre of Manchester. We’re putting the finishing touches to the programme this week, and we’ve managed to keep the delegate rate frozen at 95 GBP, an absolute bargain!

This year’s event will feature session tracks on “business” and “technical” aspects of agile software development, together with keynotes, plenary sessions and plenty of networking opportunities. If you’re in the North of England and you’re interested in agile, AgileNorth ’07 is the place to be!

For details of the event visit http://agilenorth.net. And join our mailing list to hear further announcements, including details of the full conference programme as they become available.

Aspects I liked:

• Some sessions provided visuals by means of HTML “slides” hosted by Paul Wilson; this was a good format, easily accessible to all, and helped to overcome the lack of other visual cues.
• The presenters put their photo on their first slide, which really helped me visualise who was speaking.
• Having a number of very short sessions made for a lively and varied evening.
• Leigh Mullin did a great job of chairing the evening’s activities, and sent encouraging chat messages to the presenters during our sessions.
• Everyone put themselves on mute during the presentations; the levels of discipline and courtesy were extremely high.
• During and after each session the group sent questions over Skype chat to the speaker, which the speaker could field as he wished; I kept mine in a queue and answered them at the end, but others did differently, and both approaches worked well.
• Charles Weir opened his session up as a discussion, and that worked surprisingly well too.

Some areas in which we might learn from the experience:

• Some speakers (me in particular) took a lot longer than their advertised time; next time it might be worth trying fixed-size 5-minute slots, plus 5-minutes for discussion, and rigorously enforcing that timetable.
• Two hours is a long time, particularly when one has no non-verbal feedback; perhaps 90 minutes would be long enough.
• It was hard to follow those speakers who hadn’t provided visuals; we should probably make them mandatory.
• During the planning stages we had floated the idea of holding open some kind of chat room, but in the end we relied solely on one-to-one chat messages; in future it might be beneficial to enable all attendees to see the questions being asked.

(You can read other attendees’ comments on our mailing list – NakedAgilists)

Overall this was a very enjoyable evening, and I’m very much looking forward to our next one. Hats off to Clarke, Adrian, Paul and Leigh for brilliant organisation.

Bill Wake, in the Planning Game Simulator chapter of his Refactoring Workbook, has a great answer. Bill suggests that we begin by writing just one test – any test – for every class in the system. The tests can be as simple as you like; their only purpose is to break the ice. Not only do these tests get every class into the test harness, they also prove to me that it’s possible to get every class under test – and that removes the psychological barrier completely. From there it is always a lot easier to continue writing more tests.

I saw this effect for real recently on a client project, and we also experienced it at this month’s AgileNorth coding dojo. We wanted to refactor a smell away from some of the “GUI” code in Wake’s planning game simulator exercise, and someone suggested we needed to make the refactoring safe by writing a test first. But this was GUI code, so the temptation was to shrug and claim it was impossible. Undeterred, Guy wrote a couple of lines that created the window, pushed a button and checked the resulting number of cards in the backlog, and suddenly we were off and running. The refactoring we had in mind was now safe, and the code now seemed like it was ours.

At that point another interesting effect occurred. We looked at the few tests we now had, and we saw smells in the product code – smells we hadn’t seen when we reviewed it at the start of the evening. The test code was revealing usability smells in the class’ interfaces, and our understanding of what to do and where the code wanted to go deepened.

Even a two-line test can have a dramatic impact on the stress of dealing with “untamed” code.

“I am uncovering better ways of delivering valuable software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work I have come to value: applying agile values over following Agile practices
That is, while there is value in the item on the right, I value the item on the left more”

Many of you will know Andy: he was one of the original AgileNorth committee members, and he and I collaborated on our muda workshops a while back. Give him a look, at http://learningtobeagile.blogspot.com/.

And in lieu of comments from me, here are a couple of blog posts by other attendees:

• Andrew Beacock
• Pascal van Cauwenberghe

Please let me know if you’ve blogged about the conference so that I can link to you from the website.

{rdlc My Page Title}

anywhere in a content item, and it replaces itself with a link to the page with that title. No more fiddling and faffing with cumbersome links; no more trying to remember which item ID refers to which page. I’ve been using rdlc so much, in fact, that it almost feels as if I’m working in a wiki. This little macro has caused my productivity to rocket, because now I’m in familiar territory. I work with wikis every day, and so I no longer feel I’m lost in a strange CMS. rdlc is a must.