1,2th july Santiago de Compostela
Official site:
http://aos2016.agile-spain.org/
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/aos2k16
Twitter official hastag:
https://twitter.com/hashtag/aos2k16?src=hash
Sessions
Artitz explains the complete process of a “design sprint” created by Google Ventures to initial design of a product, or to understand a startup product.
They use this artifact to put all the team on the same page and answer important questions for the product in 5 days (it can be prototypes to test with real customers).
It can be complementary to agile inceptions or a substitution sometimes.
Seems very useful and can be a good technique to be explored by our product "discovery" team.
References:
This was a very interesting lean workshop for kids (4yr-10yr old)
Using a real example to create paper t-shirts the kids learn about organizing the work around a flow, making continuous improvements and avoid waste… Very funny and interesting… WIP, rework, SILOS avoidance, true collaboration.
For me was a pleasure to be in this session with my 4yr old daughter :)
We make a practical session Improvement Kata, resolving collaboratively a set of puzzles for kids.
All the people was splitted in two teams and each team made 6 interations defining the expected result, the changes/improvements to test, executing the tasks and analyzing the results of the experiment and the difference with the expected results.
Very good exercise to explain the improvement kata to others and to experiment the process.
The same session can be facilitated using the following materials
http://www.katatogrow.com/#!instructor-materials/ctzx
Only 1 of 3 of the product ideas / features are good for the product and even to make this idea successfully normally is need 5 - 6 interactions
The other 2 of 3 product ideas don’t improve the value of the product or even worse, they are counterproductive for the revenue, KPIs or for the customer satisfaction.
To work in this ideas we can use a Product Discovery team that have the goal of identify this 1 of 3 ideas and define the experiments and changes to identify the real features to implement in the product.
Product Discovery Team: Product manager + UX + Tech Lead. This can identify the intersection for ideas that are Useful/Valuable Usable and Factible.
The important metric is the lead time from Idea to Cash. Normally more than the 80% of the time is waiting, so this product discovery process try to minimize this timing using some techniques like design sprint
References:
Interesting but there was at the same time other session more technical that I wanted to see, so I use
the two feet rule.
References:
OOP and Connascense / Coupling (Fran Reyes / Alfredo Casado)
It was an interesting description about the different types of connascence with examples and different approximations to try to avoid this problem of at least to refactor to less problematic types of connascence
References:
This session was an open discussion about practical experience using XP. The format of the session was a
lean coffee and I remember that we talk about:
- Pairing
- Mob programming
- Continuous integration
- How to introduce a XP culture
- ...
Let’s Talk about Values (Pablo Jimeno)
This session was focused on examples about good defined Missions, Visions and Values. We talk about the experiences at
Deiser (
Guillermo Montoya), Magento, Spines and Liferay.
Interesting points:
- Values as simple words (not express to much). Better to have phrases that defines the limits or the default behaviour
- Exercises for definition
- At Magento, each team have his values and they will create a global values proposition in a global retrospective.
- As interesting exercise they will try to define the values trying to answer to the question “If the company/team/office is a person, what kind of person would be? young, expert, humble….
- Use the values as a reference in any meeting/discussion
- The Atlassian Values seems to be a very good example… As Guillermo Montoya comment seems that they really use this values.
- Sometimes the values can be used as limits to all the employees know the constraints or the lines that the company shouldn’t cross.
- To define this kind of constraints sometimes is more easy to define What company we don’t want to be or define which lines we wouldn’t cross.
Final conclusions and Notes
- As always I come back from the AOS full of energy and eager to help, improve and change
- I like a lot the Open Space format. For me is pure "agile" format.
- As usual the number of technical sessions was low. I think we can improve this. It is very important the cultural and management part of agile, but there are too few agile developers available so any improvement of this situation is fundamental. Anyway, whatever happens is the only thing that could have :)
I have an
special thanks to the organization and to agiletorrezno for making this conference a pleasure for going with the family.
Other references and Notes
The next AOS (2017) will be organized by agiletorrezno at Segovia.
