According to The National Library of Poland research, only 10% of Poles read at least 7 books per year. I know that we are not reading a lot, and it was no surprise for me. Conversely, this fact motivated me to investigate to do some health-check about my reading.
At the beginning of 2019, I thought that I read approximately about 10 books a year, but I wasn’t sure. My regular peace is one book a month, but I didn’t measure it in any way. I’ve decided to change it.
Agile promises to deliver solutions through collaborative effort, cross functional team design, modern programming methods and probably many more things. Because of that, it is hard to distinguish between part and parcel of Agile, and optional techniques that were developed over time. Agile IT Organization Design by Sriram Narayan is a bird’s eye view on Agile topics and tries to organize them.
As the author mentions multiple things that are somehow related to Agile, starting with project estimations, through project finance and software development practices, ending with team room layout, the reader should be ready to jump over the wide variety of topics. Putting so many subjects in one book causes that specific aspects are discussed from time to time without any case-studies or detailed guidance how to kick start those ideas. It is valuable if you want to get a general idea, but mediocre if you want to get in-depth knowledge. There is nothing to worry about, because there are a lot of references to other publications or books, which may help you to explore more.
The good thing is that at the end of each chapter there is a summary, which after short skimming, helped me to create my own book reading order.
Author very often, explain reasons for doing things in a certain fashion. This approach helped me to reflect what and how I did in the past, and hopefully, it will help me make better decisions in the future.
This book is written for people from all walks of life. You can read it if you are a leader, a product owner, a software engineer or a stakeholder. It would be favourable if every person read that book, but it is not possible. If you work in a modern organization and you have the general understanding of bolts and nuts of Agile processes, you will probably not lose much by skipping that book. It is a good book for someone who would like to take a break from technical books and read something without code listings inside. Also, I would recommend this book to reach out for a particular chapter which are in the area of your interest.
I have highlighted over 50 sentences in this book. Some of them to remember, other to think about or to discuss them with colleagues. I have selected 9 that stuck in my mind:
Software Developer on leadership conference? StretchCon Summary
Software developer skill set should not be limited to hard programming skills. Also, important for of our work is communication, problem understanding, self-sufficiency and other soft skills.
It this blog post, I would like to show the positive aspects for software developer who participated in agile like conference. You will also find here a lot of information about Stretch Con, on which my experience is based on.
As a conclusion, I’ll present what outcome Stretch conference had on me.
There are many Agile/Lean/Leadership conferences, Thus, you do not have to choose Stretch. Look around for upcoming events, meetups or trainings. There is always something going on. But in this post I’ll only focus on Stretch.
On my regular basis I am software developer and at least half time of my job I spend on programming. My contribution in a company is not strictly related to any management role.
I wanted to go to Stretch Con, because I’ve belived that:
Stretch was different, unlike any other conference I have attended, mainly because of the topic but also because of the fact that it forced me to think and interact.
Open spaces were great. Topics were shaped dynamically (voted via sli.do). It was a place where you could directly see, that other people, from different companies (different countries) have the same problems!
Those open spaces had a form of brainstorming ideas, where everyone throws an possible solution to the problem. It gave us the possibility to share and discuss ideas.
During the open space time, something unexpected happened. Discussion panel with Joseph Pelrine emerged. It started naturally, and eventually a lot of people accumulated around him. Gathered people asked Joseph questions, a he responded with deep explanation. Discussion was about:
And many more topics, but I was not able note everything. For such moments, it was worth going there.
In my opinion, on average every second talk was worth watching. I think it is a good score for single track conference. Listening to ‘leaders’, was priceless. Wide variety of subjects, helped me realize that this topic is huge.
As usual, I would like to recommend 3 presentations which are worth seeing, but there are many more that migh interest you. Visit Ustream channel to watch them.
After a great introduction, James presented detailed knowledge about the habits. He showed us techniques for shaping habits. Explained habit triggers. Finally, he also presented tricks how to sustain our habits.
You can read more about habits at James Clear Page.
Conference video available here.
It was a presentation, that forced reflection about me. It helped me tu understand who is a leader, what is the team or company and how all of it this fits into our world. Most importantly, how to ‘get’ a goatherd.
Conference video available here.
Joseph started his lecture with explanation of Complex systems. Then, he started discussing social self organization. Among many concepts that he presented, one particularly stuck in my mind. You have to setup for good thing to hapen naturally. Then you have to monitor them, and decide what to do more and what to stop. If you want to know how to setup things, you have to watch video.
Conference video available here.
I’ll remember this event as something positive. Here is my summary.
Pros:
Cons:
I’ve made 464 lines of notes, from the whole conference. There were also official notes, in case I missed something. Great concept and great drawing.
I was there with Wojtek. After the conference we have spend 3 hours talking and discussing Stretch content. We’ve managed only to discuss only about few talks - there were a lot of material presented there.
On my way home, I’ve written down few action points, reflections about myself, that I will try to develop in the upcoming weeks.
In conclusion, I highly recommend attending this kind of event from time to time to every software developer. Surely, you will come out as a different person.
My previous experience with agile books was not so good. For one thing, they’re overfilled with advices and strategies, often without context. Put differently, it always required some additional effort, to imagine newly discovered strategies in my past experience. As a consequence, it may not be properly understand and implemented by my.
Main character of this book is a agile coach. He is hired by a company to help with underperforming team - the Dream Team. The book is sliced into about 250 chapters. In addition, every chapter is a new chance to learn something new. I’ve marked 26 notes, related to:
Most significantly, you can clearly see all these techniques in the same order as in Spock testing framework
You can find it, in a book category on amazon. But it is really a book? I do not think so. It was more like game for me.
Every ~10 chapters you have to made a decision. Every decision you made may lead to fail or success of your mission. At first I was confused about this approach and I came back to previous choices and where they lead me.
After reading a about 50 pages I decided to draw a chapter graph (with decision), and come back to paths that I not chosen when I read the whole book.
As a result, I’ve managed to made only good choices and lead the team to happy ending. The graph was on five A4 pages. It looks like this:
In contrast to good choices, failure paths showed me where the team my end. Learning from someone else mistakes is most important lesson for me.
I would like to thank Wojtek Erbetowski for recommending me this book.
Photo credit: Nightmare
Before I read this book, I was on Impact Mapping workshop by Krzysztof Jelski on Agile By Example. I knew the concept. I practiced it in my company in one internal project. I am going to use it in next project with client.
But now. About the book. The book is very good. The knowledge in this book is very concise. Which was good for me, but may be problematic for person who does not know the topic, because important parts may be missed. Because the book has a lot of condensed knowledge, I’m going to read it again.
I found things not directly related to impact mapping. For example chapter about iterative and incremental software building process. I liked chapters, which were abstracts of other peoples thoughts, for example Tom Gilb about metrics. It is an advantage.
I like the idea that the concept of impact maps has been described without going into unnecessary detail. This book is some kind of guideline, blueprint. And this is good.
And the most important chapter for me was “Typical mapping mistakes”. It allowed me to find a place, where I do something bad (I was unaware of it).
Apart from book. I asked myself, why we do impact maps? One of the main reasons is to create good channel of communication. To create a big picture view for technical and business people. Second reason is to decide, what should be built to achieve our goal, to reduce waste and over-engineered solutions.
I strongly recommend this book and to try this technique.
Agile By Example is over. It was good three days. Organizers do they’s best. There was great organization, good internet acces and good food. Jeff Suterland keynote was average. For me the real keynote was given by Sandro Moncuso “Software craftsmanship”.
In the second day, good speach gave Jurgen Appelo and Tom Gilb. Tom Gilb presentation was challenging. Slides were awful. Tom marked many times that we must deliver value. Remember that value may be delivered without single line of code. One of the tools that Tim presented was “Value Decision Tables” which may look as sophisticated Excel system. But Krzysztof Jelski, on the next day presented “Impact Mapping” tool which was very easy to use.
I’ve meet Agile from a new perspective. It was good for me that I’ve joined this conference.
Thank you SoftwareMill and Touk for this event.
