Jake Scruggs

Agile's Too Slow: Developing a Facebook App for the Obama Campaign - Andy Slocum Andy worked on the Facebook application for the Obama campaign. In two months they build a Facebook app that could assist users in encouraging their friends to register and vote. There where only two people on the project and they came in with the common ideas of XP: continuous integration, weekly iterations, story estimates, developer testing, etc. Except that all of the above was way too heavy for the Obama campaign's pace. They'd have an Iteration planning meeting on Monday and by the Tuesday it was out of date because so much had changed. Also Facebook apps don't really run very well outside of Facebook so they could only write tests around code that was completely isolated from the Facebook stuff. So they basically moved to a lean process with priorities set at the standup meeting every day. They also ditched the idea of continuous integration as there were only two people to int...

This was the first ever Software Craftsmanship conference and it was put on by my company Obtiva and 8th Light (a company I have pretty strong ties to). It was a pretty big day for the Craftsmanship movement and our little companies. Software Craftsmanship Manifesto is: As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value: Not only working software, but also well-crafted software Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable. The idea is to build on the Agile Manifesto toward better software and the community that surrounds it. Swimming Upstream, Sprouting Legs, and Running Free -- Ken Auer This...

"I Come to Bury Agile, Not to Praise It" -- Keynote by Dr. Alistair Cockburn So this is one of those classic keynotes where the title has little to do with the content of the talk. I did enjoy the keynote, very much so, but only the first 10 minutes were devoted to Agile's 'Death.' Alistair came out following a bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace" -- like a funeral. I gotta admit that it was a pretty nice entrance. Then he gave a modified version of "I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him" speech from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (full text here: http://alistair.cockburn.us/I+come+to+bury+Agile%2c+not+to+praise+it ). His point was that Agile started out as something for small, co-located, groups and was pretty rare. It is now very prominent and used in quite large organizations. So it has gone through a bunch of changes despite the fact that we call it by the same name. Not quite a 'death' but "Isn't it weird how we sti...

It's been 5 years since I attended the granddaddy of Agile conferences and I have to say that the first day was damn good. My notes my be a little rough, so I apologize in advance, but if I don't type and post them on the day I pretty much never will. Workflow is Orthogonal to Schedule -- Mary Poppendieck Mary started out with an example of on time development from 1929: The Empire State Building. In September of 1929 they started cleaning the constructions site of previous buildings and by May 1st of 1931 the building was finished and open to the public. It was exactly on time and 18% under budget. Cash flow was king: Every day of construction was another day before they could start getting their money back. How did they do it? They focused on flow. They thought of the project as "A marching band going through the building and out the top." Key success factors: The owner, architect, and builder got along well and worked as a team. They had a deeply experienced ...

My new talk " What's the Right Level of Testing? " got accepted for the Agile 2009 conference happening late August in Chicago. I'm pretty excited to be going -- the last time I was there it was called XPAU (eXtreme Programming Agile Universe).