techblog 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was at XPDay 2006 in London last week. These are my notes from the second day.

Keynote: James Noble and Robert Biddle: Love in the age of software

I’m afraid that the notes I actually wrote during this are not fit to be repeated in their entirety. However I think that the phrase keynote panto sums up my thoughts. I’m not sure quite what point they were trying to get across, but unfortunately I found their presentation style intensely irritating. It involved some hit-and-miss (mostly miss) comedy, shouting, talking at the same time and feedback. I left about halfway through so I could be at the front of the queue for coffee. What was particularly ironic was the fact that some of their presentation seemed to be about communication. Surely rule number one of communication is don’t annoy the person you are communicating with?

Chris Matts: Managing Uncertainty and Risk using Real Options

This was the most interesting and useful session of the day for me. The speaker’s background is in proper financial options and so on. In this area, they use the Black-Scholes equation to determine the price of an option. However, he said that people who attempted to use this in areas outside financial mathematics were misguided, because it makes a number of assumptions that aren’t applicable outside that situation. This doesn’t mean that ‘real options‘ (which are just options in the sense of choices) are not valuable. He pointed out that often people would rather have a decision made, even if it is the wrong one, than leave things undecided. That’s just human nature. But of course, if you can delay your decision then you will have more information and therefore will be more likely to make the right choice. The important thing is working out when you actually need to make your decision.

He gave an example from ordinary life to show the value of these real options. He was flying back from holiday in Italy and due to arrive at Stansted Airport at 23:30 on Sunday night. He lives in Surbiton and works in central London. If he took a taxi home or decided to stay at an airport hotel, he’d have to book these in advance. He didn’t want to make this decision beforehand, so he took a suit into work, knowing that there was a shower there. In this way, he could stay anywhere for the night and still be able to get to the office on Monday morning ready for work. In the event he ended up staying at a friend’s house. But he was only able to do this because he didn’t have to make his decision until the plane actually landed. The cost of the option was low (just taking a suit in), but he saved himself booking an expensive taxi ride or hotel room.

A quote I liked, which came up in the questions at the end was:

Making a decision reduces the solution space, not the problem space.

Pascal van Cauwenberghe: The Toyota Way of Managing

This session was about the Toyota Production System and its philosophy. While it was good, I’ve heard much of this before in the context of Lean Software Development. This meant that I didn’t take many notes. I suggest you read my colleague Graeme’s detailed write-up.

Agile Adoption Experiences

This session was split into several mini-sessions given by a variety of different people from different organisations. I’m just going to summarize some of the interesting ideas that came out of these.

Manish Shah and Thomas Granier talked about doing agile away from the usual OO technologies that are agile’s usual area. They mentioned utPLSQL, which is a project I was once the maintainer for. There was a discussion of how to handle the problems of having multiple different customers who want different customizations to a core set of code. The solution put forward was to have a separate source control branch for each customer. This code was looked after by ‘pioneers’ who did the customization work. The core or ‘gold’ code was looked after by ‘guardians’ who made sure that anything integrated into the core did not disrupt the coherence of the system.

Dave Nicollette talked about how agile was introduced into two different companies. In one case (where he worked) it was bottom-up, the other top-down. Interestingly, in the first case the organisation was not in a very competitive market so management were not particularly interested in this area. However it sounded like a bureaucratic nightmare of an organisation, which is why the agile ideas started from the ’shop floor’. The second company was in a much more competitive arena meaning that the management were keen to find ways to make things more efficient.

What I liked from his story was when he described putting together his ‘agile dream team’ in the heart of this heavily process driven company. Somehow he got all the people he asked for, mainly because the people he wanted were those who questioned the bureaucratic processes. This meant that they were perceived as trouble makers which the managers were keen to get rid of.

Courage: How Brave are you?

This final session was a goldfish bowl style discussion facilitated by Giovanni Asproni. I’m not sure quite how much I got out of this, but the following are some interesting tidbits:

• The opposite of courage is paralysis.
• Courage is when you say to your team the thing that no-one wants to say. The elephant in the room, I guess.
• After a life and death situation, such as being lost on a mountain, fears of project failure just vanish, at least for a few weeks.