One of the best Agile Conference of the year as usual,
XP Days Benelux.
What I've learned and I will try to apply ?
I should answer this question and log the answer for every conference I attend.
Overall I met two ideas cross different sessions:
- focus on understanding the problem before rushing to search for a solution
- don't relay only to intuition to find a solution. look at data and do experiments
A War Story of the Rise and Fall of an "Agile" Company
- Focus on understanding the problem
- A criteria to check if the problem is understood: "if I can't draw the problem, I didn't understand it !"
- Another criteria to check if the problem is understood:describe it as you understood it and check that's right
- Create events for voluntary learning, followed by training --> workshops --> individual coaching
Lean Startups: what happens before iteration 0?
- Business Model Canvas
- Startup is a temporary organization with purpose to search for a repeatable and scalable business model - S. Blank
- Problem-solution interview with real customer (i.e. are you willing to pay xxx to have yyy?)
- Hypothesis-Experiments-Pivot or Preserve
- "Fake your product" for fast experiments (UX mock-up is not always enough ...)
Crucial Confrontations
- Helpful tools:
- content / pattern / relationship
- unbundling consequences and intentions
Innovation Needs Waste!
- Useful waste (useful variations, useful redundancy, safe-fail experiments and exploitation of the unknowns)
- Incremental interdisiplinary approach to envision innovative successful products
- 6-5-3 brainstorming technique (6 people, 5 ideas each, 3 minutes each iteration)
- Divergent thinking
Change, Change, Change!
Back to the future, (Re)Learn Smalltalk
- SUnit, the first unit test framework where unit testing was invented, in SmallTalk
- Seaside web framework
- Remembered some syntax that I forgot (assignment, identity comparison, identity comparison, not equal, accessors) and some syntax I need to look again (parametric constructors)
TDD with Mock Objects: Design Principles and Emerging Properties
This is my speech, ideas that I tried to show and hope to make them stick
- All the different meaning and implementations of TDD: from person to person, from team to team
- Concepts that need to be general and abstract like SOLID need something to bridge the gap with the practice
- People do matter when we are talking about coding/engineering practice intended for people
- The relation between design and TDD with mocks
- Learning design from TDD as a co-evolution process
- GOOS testing