Don't forget the developers!
Kevin Rutherford, The XP Surgery
This session will be a bit of a rant, aimed change agents, managers and senior technical staff. I will recount my experiences of agile transformations that have forgotten that the full term is ‘agile software development’. I will also discuss approaches that do it right, including references to John Shook’s work helping to create the NUMMI Toyota/GM car plant in the US.
The overall message is that stories, Post-its, stand-ups etc are not enough. The developers need help. Adopting emergent architecture, continuous delivery, pair/mob programming, test-driven development and so on is no walk in the park. It must be supported by mentoring and training, and by management processes including vertical slicing, feedback loops etc.
I will involve participants in exploring some of these topics, and in simulation games that demonstrate the cost to an ‘agile transformation’ when the team’s technical practices are not placed at the centre of everything.
Dr Kevin Rutherford is a highly experienced software development coach, speaker, and extreme programmer working for the XP Surgery. He is the creator of the vastly under-rated Reek code smell detector, and the vastly over-rated book Refactoring in Ruby.
If you have ever used Unix System V or taken out a mortgage in the UK, you have unwittingly used his code. He now spends much of his time coaching and mentoring software development teams throughout the UK. His Erdos number is 3, and he was using vi before you were born.
