A Sample of Practices Interdependencies

More than once, I have got the kind of inquiry as "I'd like to adopt agile(XP) practices, which ones do you think that I should try first. It is always a hard question.

One main reason is that I very much intend to say "every team member should have the XP book by hand, the principle up on the wall, be open-minded and try to adopt the whole practices as a whole". It might sound intimidating but here is the reason:

All These Practices are Related
All these practices are supporting each other. I know it has been spelled out since day one that XP came out, but I still think it is a point that gets forgotten sometimes, especially when the team is under pressure.

In one of the training engagement that I was involved in, after some training sessions of several practices that we think the client needed, in an effort of making sure that the student understand that these practices are much better working together, we created a little dependency diagram using Graphviz.

We did it by creating the graphics file as following (detail omitted):

digraph g {
"Collaboration" [label="Collaboration"];
"Collocation" -> "Time-Boxed Iterations and Releases";
"Collocation" -> "Continuous Improvement";
...
"Test First" -> "Collocation";
"Test First" -> "Collaboration";
"Test First" -> "Automated Testing";
...
"Time-Boxed Iterations and Releases" ->"Collocation";
"Time-Boxed Iterations and Releases" ->"Collaboration";
...
}

The result was pretty staightforward:



Of course, in the presentation that we gave it looks a lot nicer with bi-directional arrows and stuff. But the idea is the same, you cannot pull one out without affecting the whole picture.

On the other hand, if you want to adopt the practices, trying them one by one will probably only make things slower and harder.

A Geek's Version of a Joke

If you have Ruby and Watir installed, here is my "Geek's Version of 'How far do you want to go for a deep joke'". Enjoy

require 'watir'

ie = Watir::IE.start("http://www.sbpoet.com/2006/01/how_far_would_y.html")
while link = ie.link(:text, /(blond)|(joke)|(this one is great)|(>CLICK<)/)
  link.focus
  link.click
end

Personally I don't find it THAT great, but like Steve Boswell always says, "I digress".

Less Leads to More?

Just found out that I never published this...

Sometimes, less does leads to more.

After I came to Xi'an, I started working on a distributed project. The development was splitted between Xi'an China and Bangalore India office.

Based on the observations, I decided to cut the development team in China down as well so that we can be more focused during the communication between India and China teams. So rather than 7-8 developers, we only have 4 developers, including me and Jake to work on the project. It worked out pretty well. We have got to know with each other and built a relationship that is good enough that we are free to use phone/IM/skype/iChat/campfire whenever any one of us needed something.

During the weekend, I had a chance to chat with another ThoughtWorker who is working as PM on another project and he gave me another example (I don't remember the example now...)

Building China Office

Flew in China on Feb. 22nd, I got myself busy right away. The experience is still very exciting and sometimes the tension is killing me.

So these are what we have been doing in China office:

Building the China Website

We were finally able to translate the ThoughtWorks website into Chinese and started hosting it on our China domain (http://www.thoughtworks.com.cn/index.html). Arguing about how to translate a sentence or even just a term has been very much fun and educational at the same time.

On the principle of "Fixing the Windows", we improved the staging environment by reducing the downtime from 30 minutes every hour to 5-6 minutes every hour. Tests were also written for two bugs that we have found during the translation test.

Building the Awareness

ThoughtWorkers in China have been pretty active in getting in touch with the local communities. We have made arrangement with several universities in Xi'an to give the student some exposure of agile software development.

Other ThoughtWorkers working on projects in the other cities are also presenting to the local universities and communities.

As for me, I am going to give presentation to BEA user group meeting this month at Shanghai (http://dev2dev.bea.com.cn/usergroup/20060460.html), titled "Agile in Practice" (originally "XP in Practice").

I think this is an interesting topic to give presentation to. Whenever after someone giving the presentation about agile development, there was always a long session of questions and answers. This presentation can serve as a follow-up by targeting those questions.

With the help from other ThoughtWorkers, I have collected feedback from the projects that we have worked on in China, grouped and categoried them, so that we can show what agile is from yet another perspective. The more I work on it, the more it reminds me of the book "XP Installed".

So I am concentrate more on the photo shots and project samples. It already has over 30 slides and over 10 megabytes in size. Maybe I will have to cut it a bit to fit into the 60 minutes that I have for this presentation.

Distributed Project

Of course, the one and only activity that leads directly to revenue in ThoughtWorks is working on a billable project. Since the first day that I entered Xi'an office, I have been assigned to a distributed project.

The client's headquarter is in UK, and this project involves their offices in Spain and France. So we have two BAs working in Europe gathering requirement. The development team was originally in our Bangalore office. Due to the lack of resource, another small development team was formed in Xi'an office and some of the work has been shifted here.

As you can imagine, the communication has been identified as a risk from day one. We have taken various measures to make sure that the developers understand the code base as well as the requirement, and that everyone is update to date on the project status. This includes Yahoo! IM configuration so that everyone can tell which story each other is working on, daily standup meeting through iChat between Xi'an and Bangalore, and daily BA meeting conference, etc. Of course, Campfire made by 37 signals helped a lot on this issues, gaining more of my already established respect for them.

Just within a month, there has already been a change of direction from the customer, which proved one more time that change is constant and planning is an on-going activity. The expats in the China team left, except me, Jake who knows the code base, and Sagar who knows the business requirements.