11/13/2011

Practice what you preach

I am a false prophet! God is a superstition! I am a false prophet! God is a superstition! I am a false prophet! God is a superstition! Eli Sunday in “There will be blood”

After working as a Scrum Master and blogging about it I took a small break. I felt like telling the same stories other people were telling but in different words. And those other people told it better ;)

But I didn’t have experience in the things I wanted to blog about. I wanted to blog about program management but never have been a program manager. So I couldn’t start blogging about the disconnect between management on strategic level and Agile. I only had a one sided view.

I can relate to some views of Jurgen Appelo’s “Management 3.0” book but this was all in the domain I knew. Building web sites or online applications in environments where clients don’t know what they want, management can’t decide where they want to go.

Now after reading a few months the blog “Herding Cats” I can relate to Glenn B. Alleman where he warns for “the False Agile Prophets”. But in his domain DoD it isn’t just realistic to go “Full Agile”.

I’m not yet a program manager but I accepted to work as project manager in a relatively unknown domain. I need to be ISAE3402 compliant. But more to come in later blog posts.

In the end it’s all about practicing what you’re preaching.

05/03/2011

Cucumber + watir webdriver on macosx

As project manager I also took on the part time role as tester for a new project I’m working on. Together with my customer I have written cucumber test scenario’s. When trying to automate the testing I needed to get watir working on macosx with cucumber.

These instructions will install and run watir webdriver with headless chrome. There are some known issues with watir webdriver.

Make sure you also read the FAQ

There are some waiting issues. But you can circumvent this by adding:

require "watir-webdriver/extensions/wait"

These give you access to following methods:

  • Watir::Wait.until { … }: where you can wait for a block to be true
  • object.when_present.set: where you can do something when it’s present
  • object.wait_until_present:; where you just wait until something is present
  • object.wait_while_present:; where you just wait until something disappears

Instead of installing and configuring my environment to start testing. I just use the work of somebody else to get me started. It does everything for me.

First install de Chrome driver

install it in your PATH

ln -s "/Applications/Google Chrome.app"/ \
        "/Applications/Chromium.app"
ln -s "/Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome" \
        "/Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium"

Clone from git:

git clone https://github.com/alisterscott/EtsyWatirWebDriver.git
cd EtsyWatirWebDriver
./go

I just drop my .feature files in de feature dir accompanied with my step definitions.

03/17/2011

Anecdotal stories in management and the startup world.

Management books are sprinkled with anecdotal recipes for success. Sometimes it’s about someone who had success and tells his story trying to convince other people to follow his footsteps (and buy his book). If you do this you will be successful. Sometimes people dress the message they want to sell with research adding several stories and concoct a pattern. Patterns sound more credible than 1 single story.

When you want to have a recipe for success you need to have empirical research confirming the recipe. A story is not a substitute for empirical research. I don’t think it is possible to empirical research management.

Off course you try to manage your known context but how can you manage the unknown? Well you can’t and the only option you have is using the Agile mantra inspect & adapt.

Management is about people, random events that happen and how those people react on them. You can’t predict the random events and you can’t always predict how people react on events known or unknown.

This takes me to my favorite environment: the startup world. Founders of startups all write blog-posts about how they:

  • got started
  • got funding
  • if they are lucky got their exit or are profitable

But these stories are irrelevant! Have a look at Y-Combinator where Paul Graham has a strong opinion in what/who to invest. One of his main criteria to invest in people.  Passionate, smart people who are resilient will have a big success rate. Getting all the valley contacts through YC and having a dose of luck helps also.

So read these blog-posts or management books as a motivational inspiration but not as a recipe for success.

02/25/2011

How do we plan to grow a community?

Jurgen Appelo doesn’t like it when you call people ‘resources’ on which I agree. But Vasco Duarte posts in a twitter message

Projects are dead. Communities with shared vision/sense are what make work succeed. We need to build and grow communities

I agree on ‘growing’ communities. But how are we going to solve the staffing issue? It’s not like good developers,designers,architects,… are so easy to recruit and ‘gel’ into teams that we can quickly add them.

We need some high level planning so we can see how much investment we need to get enough work done. Do we grow them ad hoc when the need arises? Isn’t that to late to be competitive?

People who invest in companies want to see return on investment. To be honest I have invested money in a company and my only concern is when I invest X amount of money what Y% return do I get over which Z amount of time. When this company reports to me that’s what I want to know.

Maybe my example is not valid because I didn’t invest in a software development company. But I can imagine that most investors don’t care about the sector but in the return yielded from their investment. They all want to know the bottom line.

This means we still need some form of planning and projection ahead. Vasco suggested to stop calling it projects so we can’t call this planning and projection ahead activity project portfolio management. Any suggestions?

02/23/2011

Jurgen Appelo’s obsession with networks: Agile Lean Network

Not an new alliance, consortium or institute. But a flourishing network. Jurgen talks a lot about networks in his presentations and book. He has started a call to action to create one.

Why you ask? Because Europe stayed behind in Agile conferences which span different countries and have a very dispersed Agile landscape. The reason for this is that every country in Europe has their own culture and language and don’t care about anything outside this sphere.

I’m an expert about this kind of behavior due to the fact I live in Belgium. The country without a government for over 250 days and counting.

Actually I live in Flanders the Flemish speaking part. I don’t know anything south of the language border where they speak French: what they watch on TV, which conferences or events they shedule etc. I don’t know a thing. This is a country of only 10 million people and I don’t know about the other half.

So The undertaking of Jurgen is a massive one. Remove all these constraints and join nations, something in which even the EU has problems in succeeding and aligning everyone.

Can the theory about complex systems from Jurgens book succeed in reality. Instead of watching from the sideline join the LinkedIn Group.

02/07/2011

The Drupal community needs more end product builders!

At Drupal Dev Days Brussel Robert Douglass talked about a DroopyAppStore. The presentation was meant to stir some discussions in the Drupal world. I’m not really a developer anymore but very interested in the business side. I have been a partner in a ISV which I have sold successfully. So I have some experience in developing an end product that enterprise customers want to buy.

Let me start with telling that making money is not a dirty deed. It’s what makes the world go round. You can use it for good or for bad. This said and done lets look how we can develop a business model where we can make some money.

This piece is not about whether it is good to have a Drupal store or not, but rather how can we develop an end-product and make money from it.

The reason I haven’t done any business ventures in the Drupal world except guiding a Drupal team developing onlinesupport.telenet.be is that I don’t want to make money selling professional services. Hourly billing of experienced people are in a limited supply. Growth is only possible by finding more people and more consultancy work. The people for whom I do consultancy work are a great place for Drupal developers so on our market it is impossible to compete.

My goal is to build a product. Once it is finished in a 1.0 state I can sell it as many times as I can find customers for it. I have a unlimited stock!

Robert is right we have a lot of developers but the business of selling services does not scale well and only a few can grow really big. So diversification of the Drupal landscape would benefit Drupal.

One of the often mentioned obstacles is the GPL. It’s not that the GPL is a bad thing but you have to get the business model right. Redhat is doing fine selling support licenses. For that money they keep the product updated, you can contact their support when you have issues and you have access to a vast source of documentation, errata, source code, forums, ….

Even with Redhat you can just rip it and use it. In the enterprise world this will never happen.  A business critical application will never be some shady software product or even an illegal one. So if you are building an enterprise products don’t be scared that others will “steal” your product and try to sell it or give it away on the black market (which, under the GPL is completely within their rights).

Now how do you want to do this without being a big corp such as Redhat? This is where Acquia has to step to the plate. What can they do?

  • Acquia’s brand can help your small ISV gain some recognition in the enterprise world.
  • They have an existing marketing & sales network which you can leverage.
  • They can help with your first line of support questions.
  • But what gains my trust is the “Right of first refusal” which means when a customer asks for a customization you as ISV always have first choice.
12/16/2010

Mastering Scrum (Presentation)

On a regular basis I work as consultant for Dataflow. They started to organize Beer&Pizza evenings for which people have to endure a presentation and a discussion about a chosen topic.

They asked me to cover Scrum. There are a million presentations online about the topic. But I wanted to create my own material. Which is probably not highly original and a lot of ideas and metaphors I use are probably from other presentations I have seen.

But this was my first presentation to a public and I see this as a learning experience.



11/09/2010

Stealth disruptive behavior

Sometimes we need to drastically change what we are doing. But we don’t get support from management. For me this is the time to be disruptive. As co-owner of a small ISV we needed to be disruptive all the time. This was our only differentiator to bigger competition.

But in larger companies being disruptive is not that easy. It is not always possible to get management buy in. Even for ideas you think will change and improve the way you are working. This calls for stealth disruptive behavior.

Stealth disruptive behavior has helped people to introduce new successful techniques when upper management doesn’t approve.

Time to use some history to explain my point. Lieutenant Donald Lewis (yes lieutenant, wikipedia is not always correct) was a radio expert. Using morse from an airplane he could spot where the bombshells dropped on the battlefield. This helped the artillery in the correct positioning of their pieces. Off course Donald Lewis did not get approval from the general staff. In stead of complying with policy he did it anyway. It turned out to be a big success and received wide adaptation.

Off course people take tremendous risks if you don’t have buy in from management. It is dangerous to fail. But using lean/agile techniques we can minimize the failure and take small risks. When working in small increments we can see early on if something will fail or not and adjust en route.

10/11/2010

Some higlights from my Agileee trip

I attended following presentations:

Henrik Knikberg – “The essence of Agile” (keynote)

He gave a compelling overview about scrum and kanban. 50% of his presentation was about Kanban. Overall the presentation gave me several great metaphors I will use myself when selling agile to people:

  • The canon vs the guided missile
  • The metro vs the cruise ship

Mary Poppendieck – “It’s not about software” (keynote)

She gave examples from her past producing video casettes. But giving tip for startups and entrepreneurs to show how past solutions can still have any relevance to new projects.

Lot’s of people mistake the few artifacts of Scrum or Kanban as it somethings simple. But to quote Mary Poppendieck:

“it’s not luck, It’s hard work”

Paul Klip – “Selling Agile” (presentation)

I wrote down that you can better improve the process then write project documents to cover your ass. Solving problems instead of pointing blame is key. Was impressed on his 1 page contract even for projects spanning several million euro’s.

He also states that getting the contract is not the end but the start to prove yourself.

“When client signs contract with you it doesn’t mean you’re the best. It means they give you a chance to prove yourself.”

Robin Dymond – “Dude where’s my backlog?! Amplifying Product Owner effectiveness” (presentation)

It was good presentation. Bit dry for my taste but the content showed me that I can improve my skills in the PO departement. If I want to teach people SCRUM I can’t only teach the team and the scrum master howto do their job but also guide the product owner.

Jurgen Appelo – (presentation)

A presentation keynote worthy. He just blew me away and summurizing would do no right. So see his presentation online at: and buy his book when it is released. Only presentation that not only confirmed views I had but actually changed my stance on certification. This was the only presentation that actually changed 1 of my opinions. Just a random quote from him:

“Twitter is the new google, just ask your network if you have a question”.

Vasco Duarte – (presentation)

He had a very eloquent presentation while giving you a big kick in the b*lls. He actually repeated what Mary Poppendieck told in a more direct way. Create value not software the same reasons companies go to Ukraine can mean they go for those reasons to China. Create value!

Gwyn Morfey and Laurie Young – “The sword and other tales” (ending keynote)

This was the ending keynote. They used a humorist approach explaining how they implemented simple solutions to everyday problems when implementing agile methods. Their lively reenactment of these situation showed me a lot of similarities in my day to day experiences working with development teams.

I saw parts of few other presentations but these were the ones that stayed in my mind the day after the end of the conference. Iwas very happy to attend Agileee and I can recommend people to visit Kiev for the next Agileee in 2011.


10/09/2010

Big-Ass view Jurgen Appelo insulting Belgians

Jurgen Appelo had a thought provoking presentation at Agileee. I’m waiting in big anticipation when his book will be released.

At least he changed my view on certification. It is not the piece of paper but what you have learned going through the process and the quality of your trainer.



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