Dear Subscriber:

Boy, lot's of stuff has been happening this year and it's only February 2. My last email went out while almost all our crew was taking David Anderson's Kanban coaching course. I believe this will be the year of Kanban and Scrumban as more and more people try to move agile beyond the team or are trying to overcome other challenges they are experiencing that these solve. I just came back from coaching 6 teams in Kanban/Scrumban and have updated our Scrum Clinic to help you all improve your Scrum practices (more below). If you are interested in Kanban, Scrumban, or improved Scrum training, please contact me - we've extended our offerings here at Net Objectives significantly.

Here are the highlights of this newsletter:

Webinar Series. Learn how to achieve enterprise agility This Wednesday.
Bellevue Seminar on Management Agility. This Thursday
Additions to the Scrum Clinic.
Blog - Smart People, XP and Scrum - Is There a Pattern.
Podcast Reflections on a New Year, Part 1.
More information on the Lean SSC Conference in April in Atlanta.

Read on to see more details.

Business & Management Related
I've lumped these together since our webinar series on how to achieve Business Agility, starting February 3, 2010, deals with both. Trying to replicate Agile team success at the enterprise level is failing broadly. We have found that one can achieve enterprise agility, however, by combining lean and agile methods right from the beginning. This series will talk about how business, management and teams must work together to be effective in an organizational wide agile transition. This first session will be an overview and introduce flow, the business case for agility and value stream mapping. The entire series is based on our highly rated book Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility.

For those of you in the Seattle area, our next seminar is on Management Agility on February 4, 2010. This seminar will answer the following questions (click on link above for full detail): What is your goal for software development? How will Lean-Agile benefit and impact my organization? What is management's role and responsibilities and how do they participate in the Lean-Agile paradigm? How does management interact with empowered business and development teams?

All of our webinars and seminars are conference style presentations designed to give maximum learning in minimum time. You'll probably also find our podcast Reflections on a New Year, Part 1 to be of interest as well. In it Jim Trott and I talk about some of the things we've learned about transitioning agile to an enterprise.

Team Agility
I continue to see teams struggle with Scrum. In the last couple of months I have seen a pattern that many (most?) teams seem to have: doing estimation poorly, not understanding what it means to finish a story and not understanding the importance of delays. Tragically, learning these things takes less than an hour. I've created a new section in The Scrum Clinic " How To Vastly Improve Your Scrum Team in an Hour to help teams with these issues. There are some other additions to the clinic. Check it out if you are at all frustrated in your Scrum endeavors. I seem to be updating this on a regular basis and will start marking dates of updates for those of you who want to check it regularly.

You'll probably find value in my blog "Smart People, XP and Scrum - Is There a Pattern?" valuable as well.

Technical Agility
Reflecting on my last couple of months coaching teams, I am coming across more and more teams who are not using object-oriented methods and therefore struggle a bit more with agility than those that have more modern languages. And, let's be honest, many of us Java, C# and C++ programmers are still programming in a non-object-oriented manner anyway. Here's an old trick that is still very much useful - Programming by Intention. Been around for decades, but still not used enough.

Conference News
The program for the Lean/Kanban Conference in Atlanta April 21-23 by the Lean Software and Systems Consortium has been finalized and it is remarkable. Here is a partial speaker list: Don Reinertsen, David Anderson, Mary Poppendieck, Joshua Kerievsky, James Sutton, and Karl Scotland. I'll be there, of course, along with our President, Alan Chedalawada and our Senior Fellow, Ken Pugh. I'm also proud to say that two of our clients will be there doing experience reports - our methods do work, as these experience reports will attest to.

There has never been a conference like this one. If you've been wondering how to take agile to the enterprise or how to implement Kanban at your team level, this is the conference to attend.

There is an early bird discount to the first 40 registrations - so act fast! I think this conference is so good that to promote it, I'm willing to give a copy of our CD containing all of the sessions of our Online Lean Software Development course to all registrants that register in response to this newsletter. This is a $99 value, just send me an e-mail within 24 hours of your registration so I'll know and I'll get a copy sent to you.

The Enterprise Software Development Conference in San Mateo, CA, March 1-3, is featuring our own Ken Pugh who will be giving keynotes, a workshop and technical classes. Discounts are available.

You'll find more information on all of these items as well as our public courses after my signature.

As always, let me know if we can be of any assistance to you. Even if you don't expect to be a client in the near future, please take advantage of our free services. While there are lots of webinars and seminars and resource links available now, I believe you'll find ours are the most effective around. Take care and hoping to hear from you.

Alan Shalloway
CEO, Net Objectives
Co-author of Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility

Blog
Smart People, XP and Scrum - Is there a pattern? There is a division in the agile community about whether one should rely on people or focus on people supported by systemic thinking (no one I know of suggests systems alone are enough). This debate is often the people over process vs. people and process. I've been in the agile community for some time and have seen some interesting things that I think shed some light on this debate. This long-time perspective has enabled me to see an interesting pattern. This blog will discuss the pattern of what happens when smart people do not have the proper understanding of what they are doing.

Lean-Agile Straight Talk Podcast
Reflections on a New Year: Part 1 The beginning of the year is a natural time to think about what is coming in the year. I share my thoughts with Jim Trott about some of the areas in which Net Objectives will be investing its energy and thought as we help to serve our partners and customers. In addition to our normal areas of training and coaching in Lean, Agile, acceptance test-driven development, design patterns, and process improvement. But what else? In this podcast, Jim and I talk about two key areas where we are going to be investing our energy: Kanban and what it takes to help enterprises and teams make the transition.

Free events in Bellevue, WA
Seminar: Management Agility. February 4th. What is your goal for software development? How will Lean-Agile benefit and impact my organization? What is management's role and responsibilities and how do they participate in the Lean-Agile paradigm? How does management interact with empowered business and development teams? This seminar is focused on Management Agility, and will provide an overview of answers to these questions.

Seminar: On the Importance of Short Stories. March 4th. In this seminar we'll revisit user stories. We'll overview the user stories and discuss the importance of unfolding requirements into short stories. To help with the story breakdown, we'll offer several approaches to unfolding and discuss their relative merits.

Seminar: Selecting the Right Process. April 15th. While many identify Scrum as the Agile process to use, there are other, often better, alternatives. Ones that many believe are inherently superior to Scrum. This talk introduces two of these other methodologies: Kanban Software Development and Scrumban.

Seminar: Emergent Design. June 3rd. Our industry is at a major turning point; moving away from waterfall-style development methodologies and toward lighter-weight, Lean-Agile development. This brings great promise. However, it also creates interesting questions. What is the role of design in an Agile process? How much design is enough, and how much is over-design? Are patterns still relevant, with TDD and refactoring gaining momentum throughout the industry? Emergent Design is an integration of patterns, testing, and refactoring that enables the strong synergy of these disciplines to empower teams to be more effective in a responsive, agile environment. This seminar will be given by the author of the book Emergent Design, Scott Bain.

Conferences
Enterprise Software Development Conference in March 2010 in San Mateo, CA
This is a conference for any IT professionals involved in the enterprise software development lifecycle. The industry's top faculty will enlighten and inspire you at more than 70 workshops and technical classes.

Net Objectives Fellow Consultant Ken Pugh will be giving a keynote: Snowboarding, Windsurfing, Backpacking, and the Art of Software Development, a workshop Effectively Manage Lean-Agile Development with Testable Stories and two technical classes Quarks, Protons and Molecules: Principles Behind the Patterns and Managing Global and Distributed Teams.

Special Attendee Discount Code Enter Ken's last name, PUGH when registering to get an extra $100 off a full conference pass -- and it's combinable with the other promotional discounts, like Early Bird Specials and so-on.

Lean Software & Systems Conference in April 2010 in Atlanta
Finally, start preparing for the next Lean Software & Systems Consortium conference The last two Lean conferences have proven to be the best conferences of 2009. Lean and Kanban methods are starting to be recognized as essential for virtually all agile transitions. Learn how Lean can be used to improve your enterprise transition and how Kanban is often a more viable method than Scrum. As CEO of a consulting/training company that helps dozens of companies transform themselves, I can tell you that if you are looking at how to achieve business agility and not merely team agility, you will find this conference incredibly valuable.

Early Bird Registration is Open for the 1st 40 attendees

It should be even better than last year's Miami Lean/Kanban Conference which is the best conference I have ever attended.