The final day

Agile2010 seems like a long time ago, and a long way away now that I am sitting back at my desk in Blighty. But for the purposes of completeness, I thought I should blog about the final day of the conference.

First things first - there were no pancakes for breakfast. I won't pretend that I wasn't disappointed.

The final day was a half day, made up of 3 talks. The first was by Dave West from Forrester; the second by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson and the third - the final keynote - by Mike Cohn.

Dave West spoke about how IT organizations are effectively using Agile + product orientation to deliver long term value. Quoteable quotes "The main difference between a terrorist and a methodologist is that you can reason with a terrorist."

2 key points that Dave raised were:

• He reiterated the fact that UX should form part of the development team, it should not sit separately. This was the sentiment shared by a number of the speakers and conference attendees at Agile2010.
• Software developers should keep in mind that they are delivering an experience to the customer, not a series of screens.

Ron and Chet performed a great double act, again reiterating a number of things that we had already heard throughout the conference:

• Keep things simple. They later went on to say: "Doing it better is not harder, it is easier. Do it better."
• If scrum isn't working, there are probably deeper problems in the organisation.
• You can't become good at anything just by having a certification. The certification is only the start.

The final session of the morning was Mike Cohn's "ADAPTing to Agile for Continued Success".  The focus of Mike's talk was contiunous improvement.  He had a number of quoteable quotes including "Agile is not something you become, it's something you become more of."  Mike is a great speaker, and has a huge amount of software engineering experience.  He ended his talk with the thought that wouldn't it be great, if in 10 years time, we were referring to "Agile software development" as "software development"?  That the "Agile" would be implicit.

Overall, I believe the conference was a great success.  It was organised beautifully, it was full of influential and intelligent individuals and the scope and scale of the sessions was vast and appropriate.  I look forward to sharing my experiences and knowledge gained from the conference with my team at work, and hopefully we'll be able to change some things for the better.

Failure is a requirement

A couple of Agile2010 facts:
1) 1400 attendees at Agile2010
2) Made up of 38 nationalites (I've met USA, Canada, Argentina, India, Isreal, Denmark, Norway, UK)
3) >260 talks, on about 18 stages

How many employees do you think Disney has? I'll let you think about that...

Tonight was the finale party. A grand event inside EPCOT (what, exactly, is EPCOT?). After the 15 minute walk, down Disney Boardwalk, in the sweltering heat, we arrived at International Gateway. You entered into an air conditioned (wow, thank you), dark room. A dark room with food, and a few bars. Phew. I found a table with a few people on it, and just joined them. I'm sure they were glad really.

The food was great (it's been great all week - we have been treated like Royalty and have eaten like Royalty too). The entertainment... well, that was great too. It started off with 2, shall we say 'well carved' men showing off their muscle and strength. I don't really know how to describe them other than that. Then there were the Chinese acrobats. And then, to top it all off, Disney's Celtic band - OFF KILTER. I have never - and I've spent a fair amount of time in Scotland - seen a rock band with bagpipes. It worked well. It was entertaining - even if I didn't get up and boogie, I was clapping my hands and tapping my feet.

Then there were the fireworks, or as Disney refer to them: Illuminations: Reflections of Earth.

But the real point of this is to talk about the Agile2010 conference isn't it?

So... I had a great start to the day with Clement "James" Goebel's "How long would a Stand-Up meeting take with 85 people in it?". James is passionate. He doesn't mince his words. And he strongly believes in what he has to say. Needless to say his talk was engaging and really interesting, as well as instructive. He used a game too, and we were allowed (encouraged in fact) to take copies of his game away.

The next talk was by Jeff Gothelf, Director of User Experience at Theladders.com. His talk was entitled "Beyond Staggered Sprints: Agile user experience design teams in the real world", and was about his experiences of engaging user experience in the Agile framework at Theladders.com. He's currently at trial 4, and things are getting better with each trial. It seems that nobody's perfect first time, and actually this is just what you'd expect. It's ok to fail (I've heard that a few times over the past few days). This reminded me of another Jared Spool article which is definitely worth a read.

After lunch I attended a talk by Jeff Patton & David Hussman on "Products over Process: Successfully Blending Agile Methods and Design Thinking". They spoke about product goals and personas among other things. A nice talk which tied a lot of things together.

The final session of the day was "Prototyping with Junk" by Nancy Frishberg. The easiest way to describe this session was that it did just what it said on the tin. There were 2 tables full of kindergarten-like materials, or junk. We were told to create a prototype to solve the problem of co-located teams, over at least 3 timezones with this junk, in 10 minutes. At first we were all a bit confused, but the 3 teams came up with entirely different ideas, all of which addressed the problem. We involved users in the testing, and were given the opportunity to refine our prototypes. I am not entirely convinced that this exercise will translate to web, but it was instructive none the less.

Tomorrow is the final day, or rather half day, of the conference. There are a few keynotes, and then it's home.

And about Disney's employees. Disney has 0 employees. There are, however, a number of 'Cast members'. Everyone, from Disney character to street sweeper, is a cast member. They are given a role, and they have to play that role. Now, there's a different way of thinking about staff.

P.S. Still no pancakes.

A day of two halves (is there any other kind of day?)

It's more difficult to write this now that I know it's been circulated to my team at work... whether or not anyone's reading it is another matter altogether, but c'est ca.

Breakfast seems like a long time ago now, but since that's how I've started the other posts, I may as well continue with that theme. I'm still hoping for pancakes... but today it was fruit (on every buffet table this time), bagels and that very continental thing of cheese and cold meats. Cheese on the continent beats American cheese effortlessly.

The first session of the day was Hugh Beyer's excellent 'The User Feedback Two-Step'. Here was a talk that excelled on many levels. Hugh is a great speaker, he knows his topic area and the session was interactive and well thought out. And I learnt a lot. A significant element of his session was a game, not unlike Monopoly, where you split into two teams: a UX squad and a software squad. You then worked through a project in the Agile way.

At first I think we slipped into a pattern of competition within our group - UX vs. software, but we quickly realised that actually we need to work together to achieve the end result, not compete against each other. Probably a product of the game rather than anything more real life.

The game highlighted a number of other things, but 2 of the most striking for me were:

1) UX resource tends to be limited. It's not a unique problem.

2) Just as a delay in UX deliverables hinders the software developers, so does a delay in developments hinder UX in that testing can't be executed.

The second portion of the morning was divided into 2 half hour talks. The first was by Jen Padilla from Citrix who described her company's transition to Agile. Jen is a user researcher in a fairly small team, and is required to work with 10 agile teams. Her approach was to make an agile team out of UX people and follow the backlog, sprint etc. agile approach. And this has worked for Citrix. Something to ponder over.

The second talk was by Cindy McCracken and Skye Pazuchanics along a similar theme - how they turned Agile at iContact. Their biggest challenge was fitting usability testing into their agile software development process. They have developed a number of excellent practices including a novel way of recruiting testers from existing customers by integrating this into their customer contact processes.

I felt really inspired, and reassured by the morning sessions. I don't feel like I've learnt anything new about how to do UX, but I have learnt something new about how to fit it into agile developments.

The afternoon didn't have quite the same effect. I attended two sessions - the first was 'Being There Without Being Present: Distributed Teams and UX Design'. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I really don't think I learnt anything new here. The talk focussed around devices you can use to facilitate collaboration where you are not geographically co-located, not around things which don't work and things which could perhaps work better. Or maybe 1.5 hours for a talk straight after lunch is just too long - both for speaker and audience?

The second talk was 'Everything else for the UX Team of One'. I feel that this talk was mis-sold in the program. I felt that this would give insight into how to deal with high workloads, with having to wear multiple 'hats' and insight into how to get your job done. No, it was all about working for yourself, chasing clients down, keeping clients etc. It just wasn't relevant. And this isn't the fault of the speakers, more the fault of the blurb I feel.

Agile2010 is a massive conference. It can be difficult to choose between talks. And some are just better than others. I feel that I have been to more good than bad, and I am certainly learning a lot. The conversations outside the sessions are, of course, often equally as enlightening and interesting.

Really, nobody knows.

Day 2...

Burritos for breakfast anyone? Yes please. My favourite food, and at the start of the day. Perfect. And I sat next to someone from Cooper at breakfast, who described Alan Cooper to me which tickled and intrigued me.

Interesting breakfast observations:
* The longest queue in the house was for the fruit and cereal buffet table
* There appeared to be only one fruit and cereal bar. There were about 3 or 4 burrito (and croissant, and cake) buffet tables

Dave Thomas' keynote: Agile2010 - An Unplugged Retrospective on the Agile Decade - "Mirror Mirror on the wall are we really the most beautiful of all"

I enjoyed Dave Thomas' keynote - it was engaging and entertaining - but I've realised that I don't really know what the key message was. Was it that on paper Agile is a great thing, but in reality there are challenges and difficulties along the way? But then, what's so different about that? That happens everywhere.

Was it that to really make Agile work, it has to be embraced by the entire organisation? And that you have to envision your requirements up front (well at least some of them). And that you have to have to iterate, iterate, iterate? And that really, it's a case of suck it and see. It's a process. There's still more to learn. And Agile in itself isn't a panacea.

I'll move on.

The remainder of the morning was to be split into 2 half hour talks - the first called 'Practices in the Integration of Agile and UCD Processes - A Reality Check', the second 'Mind the Gap'. Sadly, the speakers for the first talk didn't show. It was one of the talks I was most keen to see. I'll just have to try and download their paper and read it separately.

Instead Matt Roadnight filled an entire hour with his talk 'Mind the Gap'. I'd say that it's a good thing we had the whole hour with him, because I didn't feel like I learnt all that much in the first half hour. There was a lot of observation, but very little insight. He described 3 projects - all of different sizes, and with varying UX involvement. I think the conclusion was: don't work too far ahead of development iterations, but it's difficult to do things in parallel as well. However, a member of the audience made an interesting point - shouldn't UX be integrated into the entire process rather than taking the 'them and us' approach of 'here are some designs, now go ahead and develop'. My personal opinion is that there needs to be a bit of a mix - UX does need to be a few steps ahead, but equally they need to be available throughout the project to work together with the developers.

After lunch I attended a great workshop entitled 'Improving Customer Conversations' by Esther Derby. The workshop was about asking the right questions to get the information you need to do product development. I was a little unclear at the start if this meant asking the right questions of your customers (as in internal customers) or end-users. It turned out that it was about end users. Esther is a great speaker, and her exercises were fun, interesting and very instructive.

The second session I attended after lunch was entitled 'Make Stuff People can Use'. I guess, after reading the blurb for this session, I was expecting more of an insight into how you can do this in an Agile environment. In fact there was little reference to the Agile environment per se.

That leads me on nicely to my concluding thought after the first 2 days. I have realised that there isn't necessarily a 'right way' to do things in an Agile environment. It's more that the things you would do in a more 'traditional' waterfall environment apply in an Agile environment as well. Performing these tasks in an Agile environment emphasises the fact that you have to do them early on in the process, and keep iterating through the process. But you may just have to do them more quickly, you may not be able to get huge sample sizes, and you will have lots of opportunities to practice and refine your approach.

Day 1 of Agile2010

Of course the first thing one has to do at the start of the day is eat. So I wandered across to the Dolphin where the entire conference will be held. I was quite surprised at the sheer number of conference attendees - there must have been about 100 round tables, which could each seat about 8, and they were fairly full. In addition, there were a lot of people milling around, registering, chatting etc.

I decided today to attend 2 sessions which form the UX track of the conference:

1) LiveAid Extreme Makeover - Usability in Action

2) Help me see it: Using collaborative sketching to bring product ideas to life.

Sessions were each 3 hours in length. I was surprised at the lack of interest in the 'Usability in Action' session. I think there were about 20 of us there.

The idea behind this session was that we would have the owner of the not-for-profit organisation Mano A Mano website present, and we would spend 3 hours suggesting changes to the site, which would be developed over the duration of the conference. Sadly the owner of the site couldn't be present, but we did have a 'customer proxy' in the form of Mano A Mano's web development agency (who I presume work for them, for nothing).

Whilst I struggled to see how this related to 'UX in Agile' (which I had expected since it was on the UX track of the conference) I think the exercise illustrated some pertinent issues:

1) You can't underestimate the value of having the customer involved in a project - both for the contextual knowledge they bring to a project, but also because of the decision-making power.
2) You can't expect the customer (or customer proxy) to know everything, or to understand everything you talk about. You will think about things that they would never consider, and they need time and support to figure out an answer.
3) People (customers, developers, some user experience designers) love to jump to solutions before thinking about the 'problem' or challenges in sufficient detail.
4) You need to work closely with all involved parties to establish priorities, and to come up with an impact/effort matrix to provide a strategy for change.
5) Multiple heads are better than one. You may come up with broadly similar ideas, but it's the differences and the discussion of these differences which can provide the greatest value.

So this session didn't answer all my questions about UX in Agile, but I did get to meet some really clever and interesting people; and working with these people has given me new ways of thinking about things. Which can only be a good thing.

Lunch was amazing. There was soup, salads, pasta, chicken, fish, cooked veg, puddings galore... I was stuffed. Lunch breaks are fairly long, so I decided to go for a bit of a stroll. I had completely forgotten where I was - whatwith being stuck inside windowless rooms all morning - so it was a bit of a shock to walk out into glaring sunshine and 30+ temperatures. A pleasant shock.

The afternoon session was with Jeff Patton. It was quite well attended - perhaps 50-60 people in all.

Jeff is a great speaker - I, for one, remained engaged all afternoon. I wasn't convinced I would be able to with the aforementioned big lunch, and also with the prospect of jetlag kicking in. The session was also very hands on and interactive which helped.

My big take outs from his session were:

1) Sketch, sketch, sketch. And practice sketching. This ties in well with an article by Jared Spool, which I recently read, where he describes sketching as one of the five key skills any user experience professional should master.
2) Multiple brains are better than one. Sketch separately, then discuss together. Good stuff comes out of this.
3) Test, test, test. And you can do this quickly and cheaply. Paper prototyping is extremely effective. And it's quick. And cheap.

And one big take out from both sessions - post-its are an indispensable tool for collaborative working. In fact they could probably work for lone working as well. Perhaps we should try using old fashioned paper and pen before diving straight into a software package.

Arriving in Orlando

The flight was good, it arrived on time (after possibly the longest taxi in the world), I cleared customs (after handing in an apple and an orange brought in from the UK - I knew I should have eaten them on the flight!), and found my way to the Mears Transportation desk for my transfer to the Walt Disney Swan hotel. It had rained, a lot. But it was still incredibly warm, and rather muggy. I nervously looked at my watch - I was hoping to be at the hotel by 5 at the latest... but time was ticking, and there was no sign of my bus. Eventually I had to accept that I wasn't going to make it to the hotel for the 5:15 'Agile2010 101' session to help make sense of the rather vast conference programme.

The Swan (& Dolphin - but I'm staying in The Swan) is HUGE! But then what else might you expect from a Walt Disney hotel?

I registered for Agile2010 and received a bag full of sponsorship bumpff, and a great big programme. Something to read whilst I dined alone later, I discovered!

Dinner was spanakopita (feta & spinach in filo pastry) and a greek salad at Koussiva (I think). Delicious and not ridiculous portion sizes either!

I was determined to stay up until a decent hour so that I could force my body into a non-jetlagged state - so I strolled around the Boardwalk, and the hotel grounds before hitting the sack at about 10pm.