IAD 2011 – Lesson Learned: Anti-IF campaign, A3, Lean, Kaizen, Agile Coaching and UX

I’m on train returning to home after a beautiful and really interesting day at the Italian Agile Day – http://www.agileday.it. The event is self organized and rocks!

The agenda was rich of interesting themes – http://www.agileday.it/front/programma-2011. I’ve made difficult choices (and I missed the keynote 😦 …):

Is Software Evolution really Effective? – Francesco Cirillo – fcgarage.com
Lean, A3 e Kaizen – Claudio Perrone – twitter.com/#!/agilesensei
A soft skill suitcase – Fabio Armani – open-ware.org
UX e sviluppo agile – Renato Mancuso
LEGO Agile prototyping – Alessandro Graps (I missed this last one because the train… but the abstract was promising) – nothingnessit.wordpress.com

All of the speaker were really effective and inspired me for my future personal development:

www.antiifcampaign.com: improve the adoption of Object Oriented techniques removing bad, dangerous and not necessary IFs. This helps to keep code simple and clean and reduce the evolutionary cost of the system. Not all Agile teams keep this attention on code and the fact that the code, at the end of the project, will continue to evolve. If the code is well written the maintenance and evolution cost less than the code base, if the code is bad written (IF code) the evolution of the system will cost more than the project itself!
How much the evolutionary software does it cost? Too much! Francesco Cirillo is collecting historical data and he is observing that the adoption of Agile techniques without keeping always the contact with the real world is increasing the cost of projects, especially in mature Agile teams. He advises to revisit eXtreme Programming techniques and to follow the Anti-IF campaign.
A3 Thinking is a Lean technique used to implement Plan-Do-Check-Act.
5 Whys is a very effective way to do retrospective.
Management on Agile enterprises don’t blame, are not friends (like a big family) and are not absent; they work actively to remove impediments serving agile teams.
Lean is soft on people and hard on processes.
Lean means make money through people development. Claudio Perrone said.
UX (User eXperience) can be combined with an Agile approach. Renato Mancuso advises to run a Sprint #0 where the UI vision is described and shared. During the next sprints define UIs first, together with developers, and after implement them.
Balsamiq is a good sketch tool that helps to create Mockups.
To be a coach you have to study and practice a lot! Fabio Armani indicates several interesting books to read: The Kaizen Way, Growing Agile leaders, Thinker Toys, Getting Things Done, 7 Habits and more (I’ll check the Fabio’s presentation when it will be available).