Agile YOW! Night Melbourne - Dave Thomas - Sept 2013

There seem to be more events not running free catering, is this due to a lack of sponsors or a change to methodology? A thought to ponder on…

This was what Dave called an “unplugged event” that contained some home truths from teams and businesses, so with respect for Dave, I will leave them out. I like his rawness. What follows is basically a list of tips I collected throughout the presentation:

How to convince a business to go agile without implying it just means cheaper and faster.
With many large product companies agile is something they’re trying, not a way of life. It’s hard on leaders and hard to sustain.
Identify who can say yes and no to requirements and who can make timely decisions that may be wrong.
Respect remote teams, treat them as part of yours and get to know them.
Have specialists, but not people who think they are special and ruin a group dynamic.
Technical ladders are needed to allow due progression of tech folks without losing them to management.
Encourage staff to come to events and learn.
Have a product culture. Continuous improvement instead of quickly out the door.
Are they up for a true agile, continual integration culture, it’s not just putting teams in scrum.
Put everything in the backlog to feed all other systems.
Let product owners worry about big picture and everyone else worry about their areas.
If there are no acceptance criteria, tear up the story card. How can you measure it?
Envision your projects fully before commencing them.
Reduce the fear of developers giving estimates, but story points will scare people as not being formal enough.
Try planning poker/wide band Delphi.
Try “Extreme design”
Refactoring is nigh on impossible in larger projects, it’s basically rewriting.
Dave doesn’t like dependencies and frameworks. Object oriented programming Introduces complexity.
Feeds can be better and easier than apis. Learn about queries.
Scripting can help getting things done quicker.
Simple loose coupling between components.
It’s ok to use and try different tools and languages.
Think outside the box.

Phew, find out more about Dave Thomas here.