Øredev 2011 in the rear-view mirror – Part 6
This is the final part of my Øredev 2011 summary. It covers the last three talks I attended and concludes my visit to Øredev.
Jim Benson – Healthy Projects
Acccording to Jim, healthy projects are characterized by being:
- Happy
- Productive
- Stress-free
- Focused
- Nice to the workers
He gave a good example of how things tend to go wrong in this organization structure:
- Company (has many portfolios)
- Portfolios (has many projects)
- Projects (has many tasks)
- Tasks
Imagine someone working at task level being “promoted” to project level, e.g. by becoming a product owner. If this person can’t understand his new role and keep focusing on task level details, it will lead to micro management. The same applies when moving from project to portfolio and portfolio to company.
Jim then talked about how, when you add rules to an organization, you must also introduce processes to handle them. If rules are hard to follow and lack a process, people will fail.
A good technique to visualize how a team is feeling is to mark scrum or kanban notes with an illustration that describe how they feel after completing a task. Simple, yet effective! In hindsight, much is obvious, but I enjoyed the talk in the moment.
Doc List – Development is a game
This talk was all about Doc having an idea and wanted a lot of stuff to happen. He asked, how do we measure how good we are at what we do, and what are the KPIs? Certificates? Level of success? Something entirely different?
He then asked, why can’t life itself be a game? Why can’t we have rewards in our work? Why can’t we have quests? Want to measure a person? Give him or her a quest! Want to measure a team? Give it a group quest!
Doc wants to create a globally applicable system, that ranks people according to what they know. With this, if you need “a level 24 Java developer”, you will have a specification of what a level 24 Java developer knows and a list of persons who are at that level (since it is measurable). Doc wants to build a global community for this and wants…
…well, that’s the depth of it. Doc is a charming man who has been around for a while and has a great rep, but this was just talk. Until Doc gets started, I’ll lay my focus elsewhere.
Dan North – Pattern of effective delivery
With Dan’s keynote being one of the highlights of Øredev (I missed it), I looked forward to this session. So did the rest of the conference. The room was packed.
Dan spoke of some exciting new patterns, like:
- Spike and Stabilize (easy, semi-effective) – Try something, then build it well. Optimize for discovery.
- Ginger Cake (semi-hard, semi-effective) – Break the rules once you go senior, like an experienced baker baking ”a chocolate cake, but with ginger”.
- Short software half-life – Make it easy to replace. Optimize for throwawayability.
I didn’t find this to be an interesting talk, but there were a few amusing analogies.
Conclusion
Øredev 2011 had high mountains and some valleys. Next year, I hope to see more local talents and a better mix of speakers. Being American shouldn’t automatically quality you.
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