June 9, 2010 by Andrew Shafer
Agile Roots is excited to have BuyStream as a LaunchUp winner. I saw them present at LaunchUp and I’ve poked around on buystream.tv. They are a Utah startup working on an interactive video platform. Looking at the site, it looks like they’ve put a lot time into the platform and services. I don’t know much about their development process or product strategy, but if they are like most of us, there is a lot of low hanging fruit.
Buystream.tv is paving the way for e-commerce to get serious about video. Using Buystream’s unique video platform, business owners can embed products, lead generation forms, coupons, advertisements, and links into their videos. This enables viewers to take action while viewing content online. In addition, Buystream provides professional full-service production for all your video content. Their unique blend of affordable content production and interactive technology provides any business with a competitive advantage.
I know a bit about e-commerce and the internet. I believe video, especially interactive video, is in it’s infancy as a medium for engagement. This year Agile Roots is all about building software that people love to use. Startups need honesty about their products as much as they need help with the development process. Check out what BuyStream has to offer, let them know what you think, and maybe more importantly, what you would use, whether they have that today or not.
I’m looking forward to learning more and sharing the Agile Roots experience with BuyStream.
I met Alan at Agile 2008 in Toronto when we were both volunteers. He’s passionate about most things, definitely passionate about Agile methods and always thought provoking. He’s presenting ‘Tales of oppression: challenging autocratic corporate cultures‘
Alan Cyment loves seeing software development from a human
perspective. He strives for honest, passion-driven,
great-but-not-perfect emergent design. For software for humans, rather
than machines; looking people in the eyes, rather than reading e-mail.
He organized the first open CSM certification in Latin America in
2006, created the largest, most active agile-software related
discussion group in Spanish, and co-organized the first all-agile
Latin American conference, that took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina,
in October 2008.
Alan is currently the only native Spanish-speaking CST in the world,
and is continually aiming at expanding the frontiers of Scrum,
especially in countries where agility is finding it hard to make its
way forward. He holds a Master Degree in Computer Science from the
Universidad de Buenos Aires, where he spent some time as a full-time
researcher.
Alan also worked as a developer for 8 years in a plethora of business
domains and development languages, until he stumbled upon Smalltalk
and the old paradigm simply fell apart. That was his first, real life,
contact with agility. Working with Smalltalk revealed the magic of
devising the simplest thing that could possibly work. And fate took
him somewhere else, where he had to go back to regular development: it
was .NET this time. There was no way he could possible keep being a
developer. Nothing could compare to Smalltalk. So he became a
full-time ScrumMaster. And then a coach. And then a trainer. And there
he is these days: trying to spread as much as possible the idea that
the answer to “how” is “yes”.
I can’t claim I’m following it closely, but I can’t help but notice the growth of software development and Agile practices in South America.
Indeed. With the increased use of agility in the US and Western Europe, customers have realized that awful communication is the main impediment to productive offshore development. Therefore Latin American countries have become a very sexy alternative to the usual players in Asia. Latin American countries are usually very near from the US and Western Europe in terms of time difference and cultural background, which has helped ignite an incredible growth of outsourcing companies using agile methods in the continent in order to cater for dollar/euro-funded projects.
What unique challenges do you see for software development there?
The pitfalls are common to most offshoring projects. Due to different reasons,
US/European customers usually distrust offshore contractors, especially new ones (and most of Latin American offshoring companies are recent players in the market). They do not state that explicitly, but rather try and compensate for that lack of trust by imposing some “really very ultra uber senior” X (architect, tester, BA, you name it) inside the development team. This person is usually put into place in order to exert some kind of (illusion of?) control over the remote team. Problem is customers don’t realize that there’s no such thing as unidirectional trust. Contractors feel this lack of trust and distrust their clients in return. Lack of trust hinders collaboration. Add to this that most projects that I usually find in this area are small to middle-sized, mostly because of this lack of trust. Projects this small usually have low budgets, which evaporates most possibilities of reducing the communication gap by sending ambassadors, getting all the team together for a couple of sprints and other techniques that partially compensate for the icy communication that team members can have using the different variations of IM. In short, there’s a lot of potential for fairly good offshoring (which will always be cumbersome, to say the least, when compared to co-located development) in Latin America. But in order for customers to make the best use of it, they have to embrace the spirit of agility and not just play by the mere rules they read from a book: a bit more trust, short feedback cycles, considering error as an investment, collaboration, pragmatism balanced with idealism and things could begin to flow a lot more smoothly.
Sometimes we get unique insights from the outside. Do you have any advice for mainstream Agile practice based on your experience and observations?
I’ll do my best: assume that some organizational cultures are simply incompatible with agility, caress and spread the spirit rather than the letter behind agile methods and be humbler when trying to help an organization move to agile methods: if too much oppression is in the air you might end up hurting both individuals and the organization as a whole.
Finally, are there any obstacles to growth and maturity of Agile practice in your country that people from outside might help with?
My take on this is that agile communities in developing countries should learn from their peers in similar communities. There’s a huge corpus out there that we try and make sense of, but I see the usual “hope that some expert who speaks English may visit our region this year” as a huge impediment to building a sustainable community. We have to have our own experts, our own story to tell. We need to change from always being the object to sometimes becoming the subject.
June 3, 2010 by Andrew Shafer
Anyone who knows me personally, knows I love start ups.
Most my experience has been with startups and I just love the ideas and energy that comes out when you have a small team of smart people building something they think can change the world. Once you get a taste for that, it’s addicting…
LaunchUp is a labor of love for Jeremy Hanks, entrepreneur extraordinaire and the hardest working man in show business. I originally met Jeremy through the Utah Tech Council. He’s a co-founder and chairman of Doba, quite passionate about startups and genuinely doing everything he can to help young local companies from the goodness of his heart.
Ask me about 'Curve Boulders'
I love me some launchup and I’ve only missed one so far because of a schedule conflict.
Most of these start ups are making software. Agile methods represent the opportunity for accelerating and scaling their efforts. I’ve watched many teams learn these lessons the hard way.
If you are local to Utah, I encourage you to get out and get involved with LaunchUp to help the startups with feedback or maybe even join or start one yourself. Worst case, you’ll catch the bug and want to build something.
If you are there tonight, you’ll also have a chance to win a registration to Agile Roots.
If you make it, say ‘Hi’.
June 1, 2010 by Andrew Shafer
There are really awesome presentations lined up for this years Agile Roots, and I’m looking forward to most of them (although the downside of a multi-track conference is you have to miss many presentations, but life is about choice and I digress…)
Someone asked me to tell them what I wanted to see most on the program… I couldn’t pick one, but I narrowed it down to two. (this, this and this were in the running for the top spot…)
One is a presentation of ideas that Agile needs to get to the next level, and the other is a presentation I always hoped someone would give, based on my experience with the both of these communities.
These two presentations are Jeff Patton’s ‘No One Wants Your Stupid Process‘ and Pat Maddox’s ‘Growing Up Agile‘.
Jeff’s focus is bringing great products to market. All the Agile in the universe can’t help if no one wants the product. He’s extremely thoughtful and thought provoking. I’ve been an admirer of Jeff’s work for a long time and we’re lucky to have him at Agile Roots (even though he lives in Salt Lake City, the man is in demand and constantly on the road).
I’m most familiar with Pat from his code and contribution to Ruby projects. I’ve met Pat in passing, but never had the chance to really have a conversation. Hopefully, we can fix that at the conference. If his talk at Mountain West Ruby Conference was any indication, this will be a great presentation.
As fate would have it, these two had recent conversation that resulted in Pat posting this on his blog: Are you punching your users in the face?
And if you are, who are you really hurting?
Well…
Are you?
(ok, that was probably gratuitous)
Between that post, and the comments (several of whom will also be at the conference), I’m looking forward to seeing these presentations and the conversations resulting from both of them.
May 31, 2010 by Andrew Shafer
Israel Gat is a Senior Consultant with the Cutter Consortium. He specializes in technical debt techniques, large scale Agile implementations and expanding Agile to IT Operations (‘DevOps’).
Israel’s executive career has spanned top technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Digital, BMC, and EMC. He led the development of system management products such as Digital’s NetView, the BMC Performance Manager and Microsoft Operations Manager, enabling the three companies to move on to the next generation of system management technology.
Israel is recognized as the architect of the agile transformation at BMC Software. He holds a PhD in computer sciences from the Israeli Institute of Technology and an MBA from Clark University.
You have been practicing Agile in some form for a while, but I see you are also tracking a lot of new ideas and developments in Agile practice. What are your favorite recent developments in Agile?
I am very excited about three developments:
1. The coming of age of technical debt techniques: The ability to monetize technical debt establishes a clear tie between the output of the software process (the code) and the business outcome (the real value of the code). For example, something is not quite working if a technical debt amounting to $5M has been accrued against a net present value of $10M.
2. The use of Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques in governing software processes: The enormity of the opportunity to apply the full richness of the SPC research that had been accumulating since the 1920’s to software development is breath taking.
3. DevOps: The expansion of Agile to IT Operations amplifies the value of the Agile initiative. To quote you, it is (software) delivery over development.
The mutual interaction between technical debt, SPC and DevOps is most promising. It facilitates progress from enterprises practicing Agile to agile enterprises.
What advice do you have for executives who are contemplating or in the middle of an Agile transition? What would you focus on first?
I would start with a simple software governance framework that the executive team accepts and commits to. Such a framework governs the software process through the outputs it produces and the outcomes it enables. It elevates the playing fields from the nuts and bolts of Agile (or any other software method) to the business of software – investment, risk, return, etc. By so doing, the foci for Agile become very clear: the teams focus on Agile proficiency; the exec on what Agile means in business terms. To succeed you need both: proficiency in Agile as well as effective governance.
From my experience Agile adoptions suffer when there is not alignment from the executives down and from the engineers up. (Frankly any methodology will suffer) You have published a lot of advice for executives in this regard, what advice do you have for the people on the frontline who are trying to get some executive understanding and support?
Identifying the pain(s) one tries to address through the Agile initiative and securing broad agreement about the criticality of this pain is the most important element in aligning the executive team with the folks in the trenches. Any Agile initiative of scale will sooner or later have to report what has been accomplished by the initiative. Accomplishments to themselves are not too meaningful unless the loop all the way back to the driving pain is closed.
Since you were at Agile Roots last year, what was your favorite thing from last year and what would you say to someone who is considering attending this year?
There was something special in the air in Agile Roots 2009. The experience was most gratifying to me and every participant I spoke with. You can certainly get a glimpse of Agile Roots 2010 by reading about it after the conference has been held, but there is no substitute to savoring it in person in Salt Lake City…
Israel’s e-book, ‘The Concise Executive Guide to Agile‘ has just been issued by the IEEE Computer Society. In addition to regularly publishing with the IEEE Computer Society and the Cutter Consortium, he posts frequently at his blog The Agile Executive and tweets as @agile_exec.
Register Now
