OpenSource Connections
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This picture may not tell a thousand stories, but I count at least eight Agile related stories, as well as a few others about OpenSource Connections.
Last week I posted a photo and asked people to comment with how many Agile practices they could count in the picture. There were a couple of very good replies – thanks!
As promised, and long awaited, here is the list I made when posting those photos:
8 Agile Practices
- Burndown chart on wall – Kind of hard to see, but there is a print out of past burndown charts on the wall. Good for seeing the burndown change over time.
- Sprint goals on wall – Prominently displayed to remind us what were really trying to accomplish in the current sprint.
- CI Server on Michaels monitor
- Product owner in meeting – Weve got a great product owner on this project who is highly engaged in the project and participates in all stand up meetings. Ive been on projects where the product owner is not as engaged in the stand ups, and it really takes away a lot of the value.
- Burndown/Task List on Google Docs on Arins monitor – In every stand up, I keep the current burndown displayed on my laptop for us to go over.
- Remote team member in meeting on video chat (Stefan in Finland). While video chat is not strictly agile, having all your team members involved is. In this project, even though one of the clients key developers is in Helsinki, he participates in the daily stand ups via video or audio chat, and we also use TeamViewer to pair program with him.
- Team working on a single table, pairing up as needed
- Scrum poker cards – Nobody guessed this one, but thats my fault. You really cant see them in the picture because theyre white and next to a white roll of paper towels. But there are scrum poker cards there that we used in task estimation.
In addition to those Agile specific parts of the project, heres a few other things to note about the photo that are not necessarily specific to Agile, but you will often see on an OSC project.
- User stories on wall – as was pointed out by James in the comments of my previous post, these are actually color coded to represent stories that relate to different types of users for the website we are working on.
- Large monitors – they just make life so much easier, and are great for pair programming and demos.
- Entity modeling on wall and whiteboard – We went through some great exercises with the clients modeling the entities in their business. We were originally going to be more dependent on a CMS in the project, but the modeling exercise made it clear some of their needs were too unique for the CMS, and so we scaled back (though didnt eliminate) the use of the CMS in the system.
- Mountain Dew in Michaels drink – Michaels trying to be sneaky by putting his Mountain Dew in a travel mug, but I know that he was actually drinking the Dew as a breakfast drink. Very common to see on an OSC project.
- OSC schwag on Arin – The world famous bright red OpenSource Connections logo shirt. Guaranteed to be a collectors item someday.
- Windows and Mac living happily together. Since I dont have a big monitor like Michael and Youssef, I try to compensate by bringing two laptops. Sure, I could just use Parallels on my Mac, but then I dont get to have twice the computing power at my disposal.