iPad apps at Agile 2010

August 23, 2010 Leave a comment

Recently I attended Agile 2010 in Orlando, Florida. It was a wonderful conference where I had some wonderful and insightful conversations with people from all over the world. I was able to help connect people and make introductions as well as meeting some interesting people for the first time. One thing that kept sparking new conversations was seeing someone else with an iPad.
The first question, interestingly enough, always seemed to be “How do you like your iPad?” I think people look for reassurance that spending that much money on it was a good thing. The second question seemed to often be “What apps do you use?” Then I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be great to compile a list of apps people at an Agile conference would use!” So for your viewing pleasure, here is the list I came up with along with a few notes.

1. Corkulous – This is a really cool tool that emulates a corkboard. You can add sticky’s to it or check box notes, quickly change font sizes, etc. It is extremely intuitive and after a minute you will be comfortably taking notes in a brand new way.

2. Penultimate – Would you like to take notes the old fashion way but have them saved on your iPad? Or just doodle and sketch diagrams. If so, this is the app for you. The one downside I found was that I didn’t have a stylus of my own. The apple store near me didn’t have any and suggested I order online. Rumor has it that you can build your own styles with some notes from the Internet. I might try this if the online one is too expensive.

3. Connect – Memeo Connect Reader allows you to connect to your Google Docs and have everything local on your iPad. This is great for us 3G only users.

4. Flipboard – Your not really looking for iPad apps if you haven’t heard about this one. Image your twitter account with those links and graphics that people you follow add to their tweets. Now, imagine a glossy magazine in your hand with the content and images from those links in the twitter feed. The result is a fantastic new way to view your social networking.

5. MindMeister – Mind mapping application. You can login to their system and save your mind maps there. Easy to use.

6. Note Taker HD – This might be a better solution for me the Penultimate. You take notes by writing with your finger. It has a couple of view options and writes quite well. I haven’t spent much time with it myself but others seemed to like it.

There is most likely, many more that people were using at the conference but with all the iPads there it would have taken up a lot of my time to ask everyone. Here instead is a small sampler to get you started. If you have some must-have productivity apps that you use then let me know.

Categories: #Agile Tags: ,

Rock and Roll Agile – Part 1

March 29, 2010 Leave a comment

So often I find that life outside of work follows a similar cadence to life at work. Such was the case when I realized my band had been playing together for years and still had not a played any shows (Not counting an annual street party).

One of the reason people are in a band is to play shows. It might be to record music or just to jam (play music often changing songs or making them up as you go). Now my reason for being in a band was to play music live on stage. I love being in front of a crowd, something anyone who has seen me run a presentation or a workshop can attest to. But what were the reasons of the rest of the band. They were still coming out once a week and working on songs with some progress.

Suddenly I saw the parallel, we were very much like a software development team who continued making software but never delivering it. Sure we had recorded a few songs and we had played at those street parties but it was just like almost releasing useful software. It doesn’t count unless you actually complete the tasks.

In the work place, I was a ScrumMaster turned Agile Coach so I began to apply Agile practices to our band. The first thing we did was have a band planning meeting. We talked about what each person wanted to get out of the band. What we hoped to accomplish. Why we were doing this. From this discussion, we put together a product backlog of sorts. We listed that we enjoyed playing music together, we like the original music that we being written, we wanted to play live and that we wanted to finish recording our half done album. This planning meeting focused us on our goals. We decided that we needed more songs to accomplish several of these tasks but instead of working on three new songs we worked on one. From our planning meeting we realized that we didn’t need to create a whole album. We could complete one song at a time and then release it on the Internet.

Like with all good plans change was about get involved.

Over the next few months we worked hard, wrote and completed three new songs and planned to record them when our drummer moved to Toronto (from Ottawa). Currently, our original drummer is rejoining us and we expect a smooth transition when we start up again.

I plan to bring some Agile practices such as adding visual tools of our plans to the band room so we can see the progress. Each practice (an iteration for us) has a purpose and a goal and we are going to work towards releasing more often. Next year I will try to reflect back on how well this has worked.

Categories: #Agile, Uncategorized

Agile Conferences in 2010

March 12, 2010 14 comments

Here is a list of Agile conferences occurring in 2010. Please let me know if you would like to add a conference to the list.
There is a whole pile of Agile Tour conferences that I need to add in. Please check out their site at http://www.agiletour.com/ for the short term

January

February

March

April

May

June

July
August

September

October

November

December

Categories: #Agile, Kanban, Lean, XP

And the dish ran away by itself

January 4, 2010 1 comment

Just coming off the holidays, I experienced what many people do as they visit friends and family.  Dishes.  Lots of dishes.  Plates, gravy boats, knives, forks and spoons of all shapes and sizes (serving spoon, desert spoon, teaspoon, soup spoon, etc).  As I was washing the dishes I decided to apply some lean/agile principles.

To start off let’s have a quick refresher on work in progress/process (WIP). Work in process is work that you have started but is not finished yet.  Easy enough to understand but let’s think about how it applies to accomplishing a task.  If a team (pick a your sport) moves a ball up the field.  It doesn’t mean very much while they are doing it.  It only is meaningful (delivers value) when cross the line with it (or score a goal, etc).  The dish analogy is that dirty dish on the counter or in the sink.  It is only “dealt with” when it is back in the cupboard. If we need to stop for a reason then we have work in process.  In this case, dishes would be sitting in the sink with cold slimy water (you’ve seen it).  In software development and manufacturing this can cause serious problems and huge expense (inventory, outdated code/equipment).

A traditional practice is to wash the dishes and leave them in a dish rack to dry.  I think there is a nice parallel to a QA department here and what seems to also be true in software development, if we redesign our process, we don’t actually need a dish rack/QA.

Another common practice is to designate roles.  I will wash and you can dry, and someone else can even come in and “put away” (deliver or upload).  This final step is the part of the process that moves us to ‘done’ (see definition of done at a Scrum website near you).

Enter the Agile washer!

First, each person on the team is going to wash, dry and put away.  They can probably share the wash cloth if you only have one sink but if you have more, one cloth per sink will work.  They all need to have a cloth to dry the dishes and since most people usually have many more then they need, this shouldn’t be a problem.  The parallel here is giving your team the proper tools to do their job.  Another important note is that we all do everything and not one person wash, even if they are better at washing then you or vice-versa.

Now that we are prepared, the first person washes a dish then moves away from the sink and begins to dry the dish, and the puts it away.  While they are doing this, a second person washes their dish and then repeats the process.  You are soon going to discover some new innovations and new problems.  For example not all dishes take the same time to wash and sometimes you might want to batch small jobs like several knives together.

This is all in fun but it’s also a great way to explain Lean/Agile concepts to your family.  If nothing else it will add some entertainment to the dish washing process.

One last note: For those who think a dishwasher is better then doing the dishes by hand, I challenge you to measure the time.  Remember the dishwasher also takes up space and uses electricity and you still have to put the dishes away.

Ideas to improve the process?  Pro-dishwasher? Let me know!

Categories: #Agile, Lean

Twitter Suggestion – Open to Ideas?

November 23, 2009 2 comments

Two very prominent people in the software development world were having a discussion on twitter.   The one was suggesting/joking that the other one said they promised to keep their political views to another twitter account.  The first replied in twitter that he had made no such promise.

I read these public messages and an idea popped in my head.  What if we could add a filter on our list.  We could add a filter tag such as #political and instead of seeing everything on that topic, it would filter everything out on that topic.  I suggested this seemingly good idea including the two who had given me this idea.

The response I got was unexpected.

@BillyGarnet #political How about using your eyes and mind to filter tweets. Or do we not even want to be exposed to different ideas?

Ironic message indeed since I was proposing a new idea…

Now from another very prominent person in the software development world.

@BillyGarnet What we need are more tools so people don’t have to listen to each other #sarcasmOff :-) ow

I must be missing something here.  People are reacting like I just suggested drowning kittens is a good idea.

For the record, I love hearing all the personal, political, and non software related views I get from some people that I really admire.   But others say that they don’t so maybe we can have a tool that they can use.  Many people have limited time to do things.  They might not want to read about certain tags.

Here’s an example:  Blogger A loves to hear what Blogger B talks about.  However Blogger B is a huge soccer/football/whatever fan.  If blogger B was diligent about using hashtags like #soccer, Blogger A could implement the #soccer filter in his settings.  This would nicely remove all the #soccer posts showing up on his page.  Blogger C meanwhile, a big #soccer fan, could get all the wonderful tweets about #soccer coming from Blogger B.

There it is, my suggestion, with an example.

Please give me some feedback.  I would especially love to gain the understanding of what is so “wrong” with this.

Categories: Uncategorized

Response to Tobias Mayer (IE)

November 9, 2009 Leave a comment

Discussion started on Twitter, moved to http://bit.ly/12BV5Q

My response:

Hi Tobias,

Thank you for getting this discussion going.  I believe discussions help to improve things.
Here are my 2 cents in a larger then 140 char format:
a) A surprise for everyone, I use IE AND Firefox.  Firebug is a great tool.  If you don’t know what it is and your doing any CSS work, your missing out.  IE is integrated better for .Net work.  Yes, I know I can browse with Firefox but I find that IE has less hickups.  So I use both.  I think it raises my quality.
b) The different design models that Microsoft and Mozilla are following ensure that Firefox will be the winner, if not today, if not tomorrow, then the week after, imho, so this problem might go away.
c) As Ian Barber mentioned, many people are inside firewalls and only have IE6 at their disposal.  Two points to emphasize here: 1) IE6 is the real problem.  IE 7 and 8 don’t cause pain or waste “50% of life”.  2) Can / should we help these people.  Should they help themselves and demand an upgrade from their tech departments?
d) I build sites for certain audiences.  If the audience was Mozilla, I probably wouldn’t even test it in IE.  Sometimes my clients have been inside intranets using only IE6.  I have given them value sooner by only making the sites work in IE6.  Not so hard if it doesn’t have to work in Firefox as well.
e) You should be very concerned about accessibility.  Javascript is not so wonderful in this department.  Investigate screen readers and have people who have vision concerns (lots of the population) check your site.  Have someone over 60 look at your website.  Ok, I’m off subject a bit here but good things to know.

Important point is that I build sites for a target audience. I match my designs and compatibility to my target audience.  If there was a movement that caused all browsers to magically work the same, wow, that would save us all some grief, agreed.   But, that’s not reality.  What if I made a new browser that did lots of cool stuff but ignored standards totally.  Would I get some users, yeah if it was cool enough. We’ve seen this with Flash.  For those of you who have flash only please try browsing on a phone.  The thing is, different people (Microsoft, Mozilla, you and me, our clients, W3C and other standard bodies including government and corporate) all have different goals and objectives AND target audiences…so we view browsers differently.

Where does this leave us?  I don’t know.  You can find lots of friends for Microsoft bashing.  I recommend Java, Linux, and Apple forums to get started but I won’t join in.
Maybe you will get a movement started to get everyone to work a certain way.

My view is that this is a perception issue.

You have every right to restrict your site to certain audiences.  They have every right to not go to your site.  That’s it really.  Do you want them to visit?  Are you willing to do the extra work? Is it worth it?  Maybe, maybe not.

Categories: Uncategorized

Lean Halloween

November 5, 2009 Leave a comment

While checking Halloween candy I noticed that a small process was automatically created.  It was fascinating how many real world examples crept into this small five minute activity.  I have tried to highlight lean concepts such as ‘waiting’ with single quotes.

Here are the details:

Two kids, each with different size bags of different types of candy.

Specific checking rules (requirement tests):   No open packages, no gum, no tampering, no unrecognized candies, no unpackaged items.

Stage 1: Starting process:

Taking turns, candy was passed for me to run through my tests.  I would then hand it back to them if approved, otherwise it was put into the pile of doom (to be transferred to the garbage).

Starting observations:

Both kids had a pile of inventory to be sorted through

I seemed to be a ‘constraint’ (bottleneck) in the process since all the checking had to go through me.

My pile of doom was creating a new approved inventory pile.

Each child had to be trusted to put the approved candy in their new inventory pile.

(Note: Obviously we are not getting rid of all our inventory but Just-In-Time (JIT) delievery is a funny concept for Halloween.   Maybe my kids could visit one house a day for candy instead of all in one night. )

Stage 2: Process starts to evolve

Child 1 begins to presort all the candy (put all smarties boxes together), thinking this will help the process.  Great comparison to individual cells optimizing and not ‘seeing the whole’.  This presorting actually had me ‘waiting’ at times.

Child 2 was forced to ‘wait’ as I went through this large batch of candy instead of ‘one piece flow’.

Stage 3: Process Improvement / guided evolution

I begin dropping Child 1′s approved candy directly into his bag since it was right in front of me.  This removed some ‘waste’ since we reduced ‘movement’ in our process.

The rule of taking turns one at a time was dropped.   While waiting for Child 1 to create batches of candy, Child 2 was bringing one item at a time over and over again.  Since I was available to do more checking.

Stage 4: Process End

Child 2 ran out of candy to check.  His ‘inventory’ was less to begin with but he also seemed to have all his candy checked at a quicker rate by keeping to the process.

Child 1 had all his candy checked.

Pile of doom was moved to the garbage.

Stage 5: Lessons learned

The one candy at a time made sense to check since that was a limitation of the candy checking machine (me).  Presorting candy had no beneficial impact on the process except some entertainment value.  Reducing waste had an impact on the process.  It was difficult to speed up the checking process ‘value added activity’ so there was more benefit in removing waste from the process.

Have a look at repetitive activities that you do in your daily life and see if you can make them ‘leaner’.   I’d love to hear some stories on how others have optimized their everyday activities.

Categories: #Agile, Lean

Hello, world!

October 27, 2009 Leave a comment

Hey everyone.  I’m going to keep Hello, world! for my title of this post since I am a programmer at heart.

I keep getting into some great conversations and thought I better start blogging these thoughts to share them with the world.  Hopefully, the world finds them useful.

Most of these blogs will be about Agile (Lean, Scrum, XP, Kanban, etc), ways to solve the worlds large and small problems, and things I just don’t agree with.

I reserve the right to not follow these guidelines since it’s my blog.  Yeah, you read that right, I might just write about anything.  Ah, but will you read it?  That remains to be seen.

Anyway,  I look forward to writing my perspective of the world and hopefully you distill some wisdom from my words.

 

Categories: Uncategorized
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