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PositionPaper31

What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?

My experience coaching teams toward being agile tends to be of the modeling rather than the instructing type, although I spend a lot of time motivating teams to self-organize and defending the practice to those who would repress it. Modeling also includes ensuring that big visible charts capture the program's purpose, direction and progress for all to see.

As a team member, I make suggestions and help implement mechanisms that avoid duplication of effort, particularly by using automated testing to eliminate the need for reporting status, to confirm stakeholder needs, and to allow infrastructure to change beneath the evolving application. This has been particularly effective for me in the design and construction of middleware, where the requirements are often in the form of XSD schemas.

At higher levels of the organization, I have recently developed a set of tools and instructional materials based on the OASIS SOA Blueprint methodology that allow the business to specify its natural joints in such a way that technical architecture can flex with market and organizational forces. Using the same tools at all levels of the organization allows low-level development efforts to aggregate into composites compatible with those that have been designed from the top down.

What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?

At the meeting, I'm interested in exploring how and where agile attitudes, methods, and philosophy are moving into the post-agile world, as well as how proponents of such a world are intending to take the rest of the world with them — particularly those who haven't adopted agile yet.

How do you plan to contribute?

I've been reading a lot about weak links lately. Because they appear to be important in all areas of nature — from the folding of proteins to interactions in social networks — it seems like we in the agile community should be looking at how they affect both our development efforts and our organizational change efforts. In addition to learning whether others see relevance there, I'd like to get some input on motifs (collections of elements that seem to appear in combination from the business level down to the programming episode level) to see if they help explain how and when agile is successful. If they turn out to be useful, maybe people can use them to interpret what their teams are experiencing and develop coping mechanisms.
Created by debhart. Last Modification: Tuesday, 08 of April, 2008 23:07:22 CEST by debhart.