Pub Night at Thinking Man Tavern in Decatur

ATL ALT.NET Pub Night at Thinking Man Tavern

We had a great first Pub Night at Thinking Man Tavern in Decatur for the ATL ALT.NET Pragmatic Programmers Meetup Group!

This was very informal, collaborative, and produced a lot of great ideas and topics for future focused sessions. Here is a recap.

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The New New Product Development Game

First, as background, we discussed a little bit about the history of scrum and agile. Learn more about them by reading the following links and watching the following videos:

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland pioneered the formalization of scrum for software development. They based it on a lot of the ideas from lean thinking and lean manufacturing that came out of Japanese companies in the 1980s. Learn more here:

Nativity Scene: How Scrum was Born

Ken Schwaber at Google discussing Scrum:

Jeff Sutherland presenting a retrospective at Google about their AdWords mega-billion dollar software system which is managed by scrum.

In this video he states something like the following at one point:

"The Takeuchi and Nonaka Paper from 1986 still tells you how to set up a team and empower them to perform at hyperproductive levels to knock out the competition. READ THE TAKEUCHI AND NONAKA PAPER!":

The New New Product Development Game (PDF)

The New New Product Development Game (Harvard Business Review)

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Quick Recap

Here's a quick meetup recap:

.NET software community, the 'Writing is On the Wall'! Kaikaku now! Kaizen always! Check out this photo from our event:

http://dotnet.meetup.com/134/photos/402755/

These are the things our members want to achieve, the problems they face, and some of the resources they are finding useful in accomplishing their goals. More on this below.

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Detailed Recap

We discussed a lot of great topics and made comments and/or raised questions about each.

Agile project tracking tools like Version One, Mingle : which is best for local teams, which for distributed teams?
The upcoming Agile Project Leadership Network Leadership Summit : good for managers and team leads to learn from peers.
Test-Driven-Development and building quality in from the start rather than inspecting for bugs later : key principle of lean thinking and XP.
The Wastes of Software Development (Lean Thinking) : eliminate wasteful activities that don't deliver value or help assure quality.
NHibernate and the slogan, "ALT.NET - Porting Java Libraries One by One!" : there are many tools to help us, how can we come up to speed on the best and most appropriate?
Outsourcing and quality : how do American companies compete with offshoring or even local people who say they will charge less, but do no unit testing or automated acceptance testing?
Agile estimation and project planning, fixed-price contracts and time & materials : Mike Cohn's user stories and agile estimation and planning books, breaking down projects into fixed delivery dates and smaller functional packages.
How much FUN agile and scrum are for managers and developers: you get to deliver value constantly, day after day, and you get to sleep because testing is done up front and on a continuous basis. You can test without a database by using mocks and test data stubs.
XP and Pair-programming : It makes programmers work harder and deviver value more quickly because one developer writes the unit and acceptance tests while the other one writes the implementation code sitting at one work space. This keeps them focused and helps them share domain knowledge continuously.

These are the main things I remember. If I'm missing things, please add to this.

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Goals and Tolls Exercise

We played an exercise I call "Goals and Tolls". That is, we all have a lot of goals to achieve, but there are tolls to pay before we can achieve those goals.

The task is:

Write down three goals you want to achieve related to software development and, for each goal, a corresponding barrier, or toll, that you face.
After writing those, write the name of a book, web site, or other resource you find useful that you think will help others here based on the conversation we had tonight.

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Participant 1

Goal: Quicker delivery
Toll: Too many "one offs"

Goal: Better quality
Toll: Resistance to time given to building in quality

Goal: Better user experience
Toll: Lack of user interaction

Helpful Resource: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com - Mike Cohn's web site

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Participant 2

Goal: Master .NET 3.5

Goal: Better estimate software construction duration

Goal: Understand the best ways to do things

Toll: Cutting through the forest of information on the web!

Helpful Resource: Programming the 6502 by Rodney Zaks (BACK TO THE BASICS BABY!) http://www.amazon.com/Programming-6502-Rodnay-Zaks/dp/0895880466

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Participant 3

Goal: I want to deliver great software
Toll: Collecting data that proves it is great

Goal: I want to bring sanity to software
Toll: Finding the companies to help

Goal: I want to spread the word about agile
Toll: Enough venues for talking

Helpful Resource: eXtreme Programming eXplained : Embrace Change by Kent Beck http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Explained-Embrace-Change/dp/0201616416 - Kent Beck's landmark that explains the core of XP

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Participant 4

Goal: Help organizations organize around teams, not projects

Goal: Help PMs understand how to manage people not projects

Goal: Improve understanding of agile roadmapping

Toll: Poor management mentoring -- owners should mentor managers

Helpful Resource: http://www.manager-tools.com - Most popular management podcast for self-improvement

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Participant 5

Goal: Deliver value to customer and ROI to company faster w/ Agile
Toll: Overcoming entrenched ideas and traditional ways of thinking to convince management to "give it a try"

Goal: Implement Automated Unit & Regression Tests to speed development
Toll: Learning the best way in .NET to do this (NUnit, MbUnit, TypeMock, Moq, RhinoMocks, etc)

Goal: Expand knowledge of TDD and other XP practices
Toll: How to do this while attending to the realities of everday tasks still on the backlog

Helpful Resource: http://www.infoq.com/scrum

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Participant 6

Goal: Embrace Red -> Green -> Refactor
Toll: Discipline to writing failing test first

Goal: Use mocking frameworks to help unit testing
Toll: Use my mock on new project

Goal: Community skills enhancement
Toll: Making time to continue attending more events like this!

Helpful Resource: Code Complete, by Steve McConnell, the classic text - http://www.cc2e.com/