Follow-up to our Dev Brunch April 2010

Last sunday, we held our Dev Brunch for April 2010. It was the start of the open air season, introducing our new office roof garden. We brunched under a clear, sunny sky (no clouds, even no vapor trails from airplanes, as they aren’t allowed to fly because of some distant volcano ash emission) and talked about agile processes and books. A major part of the brunch was graded as “informal chatter”, just as it should be like.

The Dev Brunch

If you want to know more about the meaning of the term “Dev Brunch” or how we implement it, have a look at the follow-up posting of the brunch in October 2009. We continue to allow presence over topics. Our topics for the brunch were:

• Agile life planning – Your software development daily routine is to incrementally build software from a backlog and release it after a fixed timebox. What might happen if you transfer this process to your private life (often called “real life”)? You’ll release a week’s life every week and have a week planning meeting on sunday, filling your week/sprint backlog with the most important items of your life’s backlog. Telling from this first hand experience of about a year, it works exceptionally well, improving the leisure time quality and making “progress” visible even at harder times. The only remaining question is who acts as the product owner.
• Converting to Scrum – First hand experience of a team that, after years of “alarm call”-style development, successfully implemented Scrum as their primary process. The effects were at least less overtime, improved progress tracking, improved code quality (though Scrum is  only a management process!) and less pressure in the project. The customer even adjusted their wording when talking about new features: “next sprint” instead of “immediately, now”. The implemented process isn’t vanilla Scrum, but works nevertheless.
• Defending Continuous Integration – What if, after an initial phase of excitement over the new tool, the continuous integration server really reveals flaws in your project? There seems to be the tendency to kill the messenger: Shut down the CI server and everything’s fine again. This talk was about the reasoning of both sides and some basic insights gained about machine sharing. Tip of the talk: Reserve your CI server exclusively for this task.
• Book recommendations – A random collection of technical books read in the last half year, presented with a short summary and personal rating. Titles included were Coders At Work, Founders At Work, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds and Manage Your Project Portfolio. Yes, there are some patterns visible in the book titles. And it’s a good idea to keep some checklist of read articles for most of these books.
• Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition – The Dreyfus Model differentiates five to six different stages of learning some arbitrary skill. It makes assumptions how the members of the stages work, how they process feedback information and what they need to get better. See the comment section for more information and bonus material.

As usual, the topics ranged from first-hand experiences to literature research. For additional information, check out the comment sections. Comments and resources might be in german language.

Retropection of the brunch

Holding the brunch in the bright morning sun, surrounded by rooftops and birds, really is a huge gain for the ambience factor. We even found a solution to produce fresh coffee up there. This will be a fun summer for the Dev Brunch.