Agile Development Blog

Last week, Zach and I enjoyed the incredible opportunity of engaging in a video interview with Geoffrey Moore on his new book, Escape Velocity.  First things first, for those of you who didn’t attend live, the archived webinar and slides are now available.

The book really hit home for me because, at its core, its really all about steering the Agile business. It provides both the new portfolio models and the specific stories for executives, as well as Product and Development teams to escape the “pull” of the past successes and set yourself up for the next success.  Specifically for development teams making the transition to a more Agile execution model, Geoffrey describes ways to work the budget/portfolio process to invest in the further development of the companies crown jewels.  With this kind of strategic investment, you can work to create your unmatchable offer power that wins customer market while increasing company power necessary to become a top tier play in your category. Geoffrey really connected the topics from the book with his perspective on the value of Agile development:

“Agile puts you in the problem state with the end user, live in that problem state and drive backwards on how to get there.  If there is an opportunity for a breakthrough, you will find it before anyone else does.” – Geoffrey Moore

Take the next step
I highly recommend buying the book, if you haven’t already.  In addition to standard e-book, hardcover and audible versions of the book, Geoffrey has released a real innovations for his new and 20 year fans. With Escape Velocity, he created an enhanced ebook on Amazon with embedded videos and an enhanced ebook for the Ipad/Ibook with links back into past books and models. There is now one source for everything Moore!
Geoffrey’s book has specific strategies for transforming vision and strategy.  These strategies should be easier for Agile teams that can support fast learning. If  however you are looking to first transform execution power to enable your escape velocity, don’t miss some of our great content to support your Agile adoption:

• If you currently use Agile at the team or multi-team level or are brand-new to these concepts, share one of our online Agile toolkits with your team:
  • Iteration Planning Toolkit
  • User Stories Toolkit
  • Multi-team Release Planning Toolkit
  • Project Managers Toolkit
• If you want more education in this webinar format, sign up for our ongoing Agile Webinar Series. Our next topic is Agile in High Assurance Environments, led by author and methodologist Dean Leffingwell and our own Craig Langenfeld.
• If you want to make the case for Agile development in your organization and learn why it’s becoming the norm, get the Forrester report on Agile development trends and tools.

Please let us know what you thought of the webinar by commenting on this post.

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute and chief promoter of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, you can follow him on Twitter @RallyOn

As larger organizations are diving into using Agile methods, we hear a lot of questions about how teams integrate various specialities and skill distributions. One common question that is frequently asked by traditional UX departments is “How will our work and focus change?” Moving from traditional design practices to agile design practices is a big step and requires a significant shift in both thinking and approach.

Jeff Gothelf is the Director of User Experience at TheLadders.com and is at the fore-front of the Lean UX movement. Jeff is also active in the Lean Startup community and posts frequently to his blog and twitter (@jboogie).

I first ran across Jeff at a talk that he gave at the SXSW conference this past year called “Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business.” Jeff’s talk was excellent, extremely well-received by the audience and heavily discussed across the Lean UX and Lean Startup communities for quite a while after the conference. I frequently send copies of his Smashing Magazine article (written to accompany the SXSW talk) when UX teams enquire about the shift to agile thinking.

In this post, Jeff shares his experience in addressing the top 3 reasons that designers initially object to agile and ways that we can help introduce alternative thinking to traditional practices.

———-

When first introduced to Agile thinking and processes, user experience designers often balk. Years of software projects and interactive agency-driven initiatives have built strong waterfall muscle memory. Successfully integrating these designers into Agile teams and, more importantly, Agile thinking requires allaying their most important concerns. The three objections below are not the only obstacles to Agile and UX integration but they are the biggest ones. I’ve provided ways to overcome these issues that have worked with my team at TheLadders. Succeed here and you’ve taken a significant step towards creating a higher-performing team.

Objection #1: No more BDUF
BDUF stands for Big Design Up Front. It is what’s known in the waterfall world as the “Design Phase” – a period of time that can last anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months where designers can take the project’s requirements and ideate, at length, over how the solution will manifest in interactions and aesthetics. Designers will typically explore various workflow options, data collection tactics alongside aesthetic, layout and typographical treatments. Even with the addition of a Sprint 0, which allows designers one sprint to get “ahead” of the development team, BDUF vanishes. Designers new to Agile will protest that they are not given enough time to think about the solution and that in no way can they turn around a design in the given timeframe. This resistance alone can quickly kill the momentum of an Agile team.

To understand how to resolve this issue, we need to examine its root causes first. BDUF allows designers time to think about the entire experience the team is building. The expectation is that at the end of the design phase, the entire product is designed and spec’ed out. In addition, this is typically the first and last time the designer will get to spend a significant amount of time on the project so everything must also be right as there’s no (significant) going back.

When introducing Agile to designers, it is imperative to stress that they focus on only a sprint’s worth of design work. In fact, they should hesitate to design too far “ahead” of the development team as priorities may shift after each incremental release and that additional work may go unused. Focusing on a sprint’s worth of work dramatically reduces the workload for the designer. All of a sudden, turning around a much smaller amount of design work becomes much more realistic in the given timeframe.

Second, Agile is iterative. There will be another sprint and it will provide another opportunity to refine and build on the work currently being implemented. The waterfall designer’s mindset doesn’t expect that. The expectation is that the work will be launched never to be touched again. By convincing your designer that this is the first iteration of the implementation, that learnings will be collected and that subsequent iterations will give her opportunities to update, improve and resolve the UX you begin to alleviate the concern that a less-than-finished piece of design is released to customers.

Objection #2: Minimum Viable Product
Designers don’t design Minimum Viable Products. They design robust experiences that demonstrate years of training and skill. The idea of putting out an experience that is “good enough” is antithetical to a designer’s mindset. To her, it feels like half-assing the project.

“Yes, I can lay out a simple, grayscale grid that displays the data but with a few more days I can create color-coded representation of that same data complete with hover states and interactive menus.”

This is a variation on a common refrain from designers new to Agile thinking. The idea that each iteration is being used as an experiment to prove a hypothesis runs counter to the on-the-job training many designers receive at companies and agencies they’ve worked with in the past. In those scenarios, there was typically a “big idea” conceived by a high-ranking stakeholder and the team executed that idea to its fullest. There was no opportunity to get a lightweight version of the idea out, validate it’s potential and iterate from there. This is the true power of the MVP.

A good UX designer is well-aware of the benefits of customer research. Couch the MVP as just that – a way to ensure we’re meeting customer needs. What is the least amount of product we can design to prove this approach is valid or not? Using the MVP as a research tool puts it neatly within a familiar UX toolkit, demystifying it and increasing the designer’s level of comfort with the technique.

There’s a second challenge with the MVP – who gets to define what is minimally viable? In many organizations it’s the development team. In others it’s the product owner. As the responsible party for the User Experience, the designer wants a say in this decision. By including the designer in this decision, you, again, increase their comfort level with releasing what they feel is an incomplete product. Because they had a say in it, they can reconcile the experience in their minds as “complete enough” for this iteration.

Objection #3: Collaborating with non-designers
Agile espouses collaboration and conversation. Designers are comfortable with these tactics, as long as their collaborators are other designers. When asked to discuss their unfinished work with their teammates, defense systems are engaged. At the root of the problem is the designer’s sense of uniqueness and value derived from a belief that only designers can design. Hence, why should she consider the opinions of a software engineer regarding the informational hierarchy or layout of the page? This objection is exacerbated by the other two mentioned earlier. The lack of up front design team and a drive to release minimally viable experiences early on leads to what designers perceive as “unfinished” work. It’s one thing to show rough sketches (both literal and digital) to another designer but a non-designer will likely misunderstand it, provide feedback on the wrong elements and critique elements that aren’t fully baked.

To mitigate this, focus these conversations with non-designers more on functionality and feasibility rather than design elements. Review the rough work for the interactions and data requirements and set those expectations up front. Stress to your designer that discussing these directional sketches earlier in the process provides the developers with a better idea of what they’ll need to do, especially on the back-end, to bring this experience to life. If done well, these initial conversations will build a level of trust between designers and others on the team paving the way for more open discussion and the ultimate contribution of everyone to the design.

While there are other reasons designers struggle with Agile adoption, these three are the hairiest ones to overcome. Each one is a challenge and can take many months to get through. The mitigation tactics laid out in this article are techniques that have worked well for TheLadders. They are, by far, not the only way to bridge these gaps and bring teams closer together. What’s worked well for you? What other objections do you think should be on this list?

Ben Carey is an Agile Coach with Rally Software. You can find Ben on Twitter at @bencarey

Rally was founded shortly after the signing of the Agile Manifesto, the document created at a 2001 meeting of leading software developers at Snowbird, Utah, that gave rise to the Agile movement. Since then, Rally has taken what we’ve learned from leading countless enterprise Agile transformations and funneled our collective experience into a formula that includes our Agile ALM platform and products, our expert coaching services, a vast library of educational resources, and a supportive community for asking questions and sharing advice. In celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the signing of the Agile Manifesto, Rally had a special commemorative activity at the Agile2011 conference.

Bryce Widom, chalkboard artist and painter, joined us and literally drew, in real-time, the history of Agile. Rally team members and conference attendees collaborated on the stories that made up this “Road to Agility” starting with the Agile Manifesto, and continuing with important milestones such as Dr. Dobb’s Agile adoption survey, Forrester’s Agile ALM Wave report and the formation of the PMI’s Agile community of practice. Bryce also drew colorful stories that illustrated benefits of agility from companies like Betfair, John Deere and McKesson.

Announcements

The announcements we made at the conference are a culmination of Rally’s experience in helping organizations expand Agile practices to maximize value across the entire organization, along with strengthening support for multi-process development (check out these video interviews on SSQ’s blog to hear more). Our first announcement highlights Rally’s support for multi-process Agile. As Agile moves deeper into new functional areas, Rally’s Agile ALM platform, products and coaching services have been evolving to meet these diverse needs. When Scrum is not the best fit, we include support for other Agile methods such as Kanban and high-assurance methods to ensure that we can be the go-to partner for all enterprise Agile roll-outs. We announced:

• Enhanced Kanban support, including support for Class of Service highlighting and reporting. Read this product blog post for more details.
• Support for new customizable defect reports that support all processes.
• A new Iteration Summary Panel for Scrum teams that provides in-product coaching assistance. The panel guides teams based on their performance and offers coaching-authored best practices.
• Apps that support traceability and documentation in Rally within High Assurance organizations (check out this blog series on High Assurance Software Development).

Our second announcement signifies the bridging of Agile into the Project Management Office (PMO). In its 10th year, Agile’s mainstream appeal has broadened its reach from the technical to the business parts of the organization. We recognize the trend and are helping to ease the transition for all parties. We announced:

• Unmatched integrations with industry-leading Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) vendors like Oracle Primavera, CA Clarity, Daptiv, and Planisware.
• An update to Rally Idea Manager, the leading Agile ALM demand management solution. This release bolsters the integration with Rally and provides a new leaderboard to drive end-user engagement.
• Availability of a new Agile Portfolio Steering services offering. This offering represents the next frontier of Agile and includes an interactive simulation to facilitate collaboration between Agile teams and business stakeholders.

Field Guide

At Agile2010, we provided vuvuzelas in celebration of the World Cup and, while I’m sure that many of you annoyed your families with these, we decided to leave you with a lasting educational giveaway at Agile2011. We assembled a content guide written by our coaches on Agile best practices. We hope you find this field guide useful in your day-to-day activities – download your copy here.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the “Road to Agility” illustration, whether you were at Agile2011 or were following our progress on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. In addition to celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto with the community at Agile2011, Rally also embraced the opportunity to reflect on how much we’ve learned from helping some of the world’s largest organizations apply Agile practices. We look forward to making continued meaningful improvement in our industry, and leading the next 10 years of Agile innovation.

Todd Olson is VP of Product at Rally Software. He is a marathon runner and cake baker. Find Todd on Twitter at @tolson.

Ryan in the cockpit with Tim the ISG System Tester

The Intelligent Solutions Group at John Deere recently confirmed that they have been engaged in a large-scale Agile transformation since 2010. Chad Holdorf, Scaled Agile Coach at John Deere, has been sharing news about agile in his blog, Scaled Agile Delivery, since 2008. Chad’s blog is packed with useful information and fun videos including recent posts about Deere’s tool selection process and teaching Scrum with Legos. Deere’s Agile experience is also included in Dean Leffingwell’s new book Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise Requirements and on Dean’s blog.

At Rally, we are proud to be a part of John Deere’s successful Agile rollout, and I just retuned from a visit to Deere’s facility in Des Moines. I want to give a huge shout out to Chad and thank the entire ISG team for hosting me for two days. I especially want to thank them for letting me see their cool work in action. (see photos of ISG controllers steering the 8 wheeled tractor that I was driving!)  These guys are working hard on solutions that help us build more agile farming and construction solutions to help feed our growing planet.

On the trip, I got to ask Chad a few questions to highlight their blazingly fast rollout efforts.

1. When people think about John Deere, they likely picture big tractors, not software. Why Agile?

The Intelligent Solutions group designs the technology that runs our vehicles. This includes things like displays and receivers, guidance systems, field and crop management, and information and logistics systems. About a year ago, we were faced with a hard deadline for shipping a new display in a very short timeframe. It was a do or die situation. We knew then that what we had been doing wasn’t going to work for this effort. We really had no other choice but to go Agile then, and we’re still reaping the benefits now.

ISG video controllers in the tractor above

2. I know you made the deadline, but tell me more about getting 600 people to go Agile in a year?

We took an “all-in” approach. We wanted to get everyone on the same page right away, immerse them in training and Agile concepts and kick off our effort at once. Sure, it was a lot of heavy-lifting, but it really paid off when we saw the results. We moved a huge project through our pipeline in a third of the amount of time it would have taken otherwise.

3. So did the other shoe drop? How did people react to transformation? What’s different now?

We have smart, talented people. We knew that if could figure out how to get out of their way, we would improve. Since going Agile, we’ve seen huge buy-in and ownership from the teams. They have embraced the collaboration, creating team names, ribbon-cutting ceremonies and even mascots. Physical spaces have also changed. Walls have come down and work spaces are more physically open and collaborative. It’s all part of letting people do the right things. For the first time ever, we didn’t have anyone working over Thanksgiving or Christmas — and that’s even with a big end-of-year deadline. Efficiency has been huge. What would have taken us two months before, now we deliver in two weeks. I figure if John Deere can test working software every two weeks on a tractor in a field, then Agile will work anywhere.

4. You have told me about your “OSM,” can you share more with others about this key event?

After our release planning, we have an “Oh $%it Meeting.” We use that meeting to help give visibility to and cover all the contingencies and gotchas. We’ve found that it helps to refine our next iteration and make sure that we have covered everything and are ready to start the iteration.

5. I look forward to my visit this month, but give me a heads-up; What’s your next mountain to climb?

We have a few. We’re always measuring our success to make sure we’re delivering what the business needs. We’re also working to keep learning and growing our technical understanding and to encourage a culture of innovation by empowering our people to get their ideas on the table. It’s really about continually working to assess our efforts and understand how we can improve. We’ve had a great deal of success, but we’re always looking to get better.

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute and chief promoter of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, you can follow him on Twitter @RallyOn

Six weeks ago, I turned off the the Rally Software hose of work, and turned on a 24 hour by 7 day per week fire-hose called the Unreasonable Institute 2011. Now I am back to tell about the sabbatical that I introduced to this blog back in June.

Fellow on stage at The Unreasonable Climax - George Bernard Shaw looking on

I am NOT leaving Rally to start a social venture, though many people asked me that question over the last six weeks. Instead, I am investing with other Rally employees at creating a social enterprise inside of Rally.

Wow – that was fantastic experience with 26 entrepreneurs from 11 countries who all have the potential to change the lives of 1 million or more people.  There was so much energy at that place, I did not get recharged; I got energized. I was brought into a great family and I feel great about helping on so many levels, but I do not long for the lonely start-up days again. Given the success we have all had at Rally and the culture for give-back and entrepreneurship, I feel like I/we will have a huge impact on the world by intrapreneuring on the Rally Foundation.

What most people do not realize is that the Unreasonable Institute was the perfect place to incubate our new social venture, the Rally Foundation.  The Rally Foundation is our own social venture that we are developing to help social enterprises around the world use agility to amplify their impact. My sabbatical just put more fuel behind that fire and taking time to talk again with Suzanne DiBianca from the Salesforce Foundation and Brian Breckenridge from LinkedIn really stoked the fire with successful social enterprise case studies.

By immersing myself into the world of the Unreasonable Institute, I was able to gain empathy for these social entrepreneurs, engineers and funders. As such, I created an empathy map to help understand and share the pains and true needs of these organizations. With these early hunches articulated, our Foundation team is now running the customer development process to help us make this initial launch of the foundation very successful.

Now I was not just on a research mission to help our Foundation; I was there primarily to mentor the 2011 Fellows and to help them create successful social ventures. I was also a member of “the team” of the Unreasonable Institute as a recitation leader. No matter which these perspectives you look at, the sabbatical was a huge bonfire of success.

Mentoring fellows

As a mentor, I focused my attention on teaching the Steve Blank’s tools of customer development and the Burt Decker techniques of public speaking. On the first Tuesday of the Institute, Ben Carey and I taught a morning session focused on customer development and business model generation. In the afternoon, we did 1:1 sessions with fellows on their models. That satisfied most people’s needs, except for Anne at Afroes.  I had the good fortune to work with Anne for the next four weeks on the shape of her business model and canvas.  The business model canvas and the basic four steps of customer development allowed these fellows to tease apart their businesses and tell a story using very simple business language. As I wrote in the Unreasonable Blog, most of these business models are very complicated by multiple customer segments, value propositions and revenue/impact drivers. Before these models, it was very hard for these entrepreneurs to tell simple stories about their ventures.

The first pass at a business model canvas by one fellow

As the pressure built on the fellows toward their funding trip to San Francisco, I got more and more requests for presentation feedback and coaching.  I turned to my Decker training and grid to help these folks. With the help of another mentor, we focused the grid by locking in the three points on:

1. 50,000 feet to tell the story of problem/solution
2. 30,000 feet to tell the story of product/market fit
3. 3 feet to tell the managerial economics story of why the venture works and scales

As some of the 20 Rallyers who attended community pitches and the Unreasonable Climax, they could see the Decker grids emerging. I used my Ipad to film and review pitches 1:1 with the fellows. It was a powerful and rapid feedback cycle. It was not the 9 video sessions I did at Decker training, but it was fast learning.

Running a recitation

As a member of the 2^nd-year Unreasonable team with Daniel, Teju, Tyler, Ceasar, Megah and Lindsey, I was just a part-timer.  My title was Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR), and I ran a recitation and facilitate the final group retrospective. I did not live next door to the mansion or run the 24X7 full emersion like this team. I lived four miles away with my family, and friends. My role as a member of the team was to run one of the five weekly recitation groups – mine included Maria, Cynthia, Luis, Jamie and Myskin.

The recitation process was new this year and worked well, but not great. Given the fully packed schedule of the Institute, the opportunity to take meetings while in the US, and the fact that most of these entrepreneurs were still running ventures; it was hard to keep the rhythm of Saturday recitations from 3:30 to 6:30 PM. I tried to structure our group around the highly successful Entrepreneur’s Organizations forum groups. These peer-to-peer forums allow young leaders to get coaching and mentoring from their peers. Because we could not hold the meeting times, the forum structure did not hold either.  However, given the 24X7 live-in format of the Unreasonable Institute, there was no shortage of peer support. This group formed into a family very quickly. We saw birthday parties, engagement parties, family picnics, late-night club dancing and some very sad good-byes. I enjoyed our recitation. It got me a closer look at the real lives of these young social entrepreneurs.  As I am not much of an executer, I believe we could have done better and that other groups were more successful in this structure.

Researching problems for our Foundation

Though I stopped my flow of work, I did not stop my flow of non-profit work. As the Institute ran, I continued to run the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and be an active member of the Rally Foundation team. I even had both these teams meet at the Unreasonable Mansion to help experience the place and people up close, including the lack of air conditioning. After Ben and I did the customer development class, I became convinced that our Foundation team needed to follow that model too. As part of my time at the Unreasonable Institute, our team did interviews with the Salesforce.com Foundation, Linked-In Foundation, Unicef, IDEO.org, Engineers without Borders and Engineering for Developing Communities as well as a number of the fellows. It was a target-rich environment and we sized the moment to kick-off our problem/solution discovery process.

I am very happy with the time I gave to the Unreasonable Institute this summer. I would encourage other Rally sabbatical takers to follow a similar approach and get into the context of their future while on sabbatical. I was able to give, learn and grow by jumping in with this very unique situation. As a result, I helped build the wave of momentum behind the launch of the Rally Foundation – our social enterprise.

Finally, I am wrote this on a plane headed toward Tofino BC, Canada for a real vacation.  My sabbatical was not what most people think of as a break. It was a fantastic opportunity afforded me by 7 fun years at Rally; but I did catch Coho salmon and surf Canada on a real vacation.   I hope everyone is having a great time at Agile 2011 with the illustrations and the great announcements this week on Kanban, reporting, idea management and portfolio management partners.

If you want more details on the Unreasonable Institute, the fellows or my blow-by-blow account, you can:

• Enjoy the twitter stream for #unreasonable2011,
• See the chatter on the Unreasonable Facebook site
• Watch the first three Unreasonable.TV episodes for 2011; or
• Read my three blog posts on the Unreasonable Blog.

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute and chief promoter of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, you can follow him on Twitter @RallyOn

It’s Agile 2011!

In my post last week, Agile and Rally – We’ve come a long way, I mentioned that Rally has a special commemorative activity at our booth this year. Now that the conference is here, I wanted to share more about this cool activity and let you know how you can participate with us.

Illustrating Agility

Starting today and throughout the conference, Rally will be illustrating, literally, the past, present and future of Agile’s exponential growth from the Agile Manifesto through mainstream adoption, and beyond. We need your ideas to help shape this illustration! If you are attending the conference, please stop by the Rally booth during exhibit hours and tell us about your Agile adoption, your most important milestones and the trends you think will shape the future of agility. If you’re not at our booth, or not even at the conference this week, you can also tweet your submission #roadtoagility. Then be sure to stick around and see our performance illustrator Bryce Widom drawing submissions in real-time.

We will be sharing photos of the illustration throughout the conference. Join us on Twitter (the #RoadtoAgility hashtag), Flickr, Facebook, and through the comments below to contribute your ideas, share your thoughts and see how the illustration evolves.

Jean Tabaka is a frequent flyer on no particular airline, an author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

In 2001, the Agile Manifesto was created with 17 signatories from around the world. Following on the heels of the first XP conference in Sardinia in 2000, the Manifesto fired its shot of agility across the Waterfall bow. A year later, at XP/Agile Universe 2002, I found myself standing at a folding table with Janet Danforth of Facilitator4Hire. We were selling facilitation services to the members of the Agile community gathered at a Courtyard by Marriott in Lincolnshire, Illinois. Approximately 80-100 people had come together in that steamy summer venue to continue Agile discussions and to define ongoing growth of methodologies, practices and frameworks.

Where we were

At the same time I was at my folding table in Lincolnshire in 2002, Ryan Martens was at a whiteboard in Boulder, Colorado. Ryan was brainstorming ideas about how he could use Agile practices to create a Software as a Service platform in the Agile domain. His goal? To provide zero-waste, low-carbon emissions applications and services for this growing, vibrant community.

In 2003, the Agile community gathered in Salt Lake City for the Agile Development Conference. This was my first time presenting at an Agile conference. Janet Danforth and I conducted a workshop: Collaboration 4 Agile Projects. And, unbeknownst to me, Ryan was also in Salt Lake City for his first Agile conference. As Ryan was busy engaging vendors about how they were supporting the adoption of Agile, I was busy networking with Agile thought leaders and helping to found “The Freaking Flock” (you’ll have to ask me about that in person!) Our paths were set and Agile was on the move.

Fast Forward to 2011

Now, in 2011, we are 10 years on from the Manifesto signing, 9 years on from the first sighting of me at the folding table, and 8 years on from Ryan’s first foray into the conference.

The Agile 2011 conference is an exciting one for both Agile and Rally. We are pleased once again to be a Title Sponsor of the conference. This year, August 8-12, Rally has 11 speaking sessions on the wonderfully vast and diverse program.

• Jean Tabaka and Julie Chickering: Enterprise Agile Visioning and Learning
• Aaron Sanders and Carlton Nettleton: There’s an Agile Game for that
• Karl Scotland: Dr W. Edwards Deming’s Famous Red Bead Experiment – For Software Teams
• Ken Clyne and Eric Willeke: Putting the Fun Back in Your Retrospectives
• Aaron Sanders: Ten Tales of Positive Change
• Ken Clyne and Julie Chickering: Risk Management Game
• Karl Scotland and Eric Willeke: Flow Games
• Jean Tabaka: Tell me Why: The Golden Circle of Agile Transformation
• Steve Adolph and Philippe Kruchten: Reconciling Perspectives: How People Manage the Process of Software Development
• Shane Hastie and Steve Adolph: Agile Thinking for Business Analysis-Going Beyond User Stories
• Karl Scotland: Designing a Kanban System for the Enterprise

We’ve also participated behind the scenes in advance of the conference as producers, co-producers and reviewers for various conference stages. And, once again, we’ll have a booth where you can come to meet our Agile coaches, talk with our technical gurus, and see the latest that is happening with Rally’s Agile ALM platform and services. Plus, you won’t want to miss our special commemorative activity at the booth this year. Stay tuned to the blog and follow our Twitter hashtag #roadtoagility for more details on how you can participate with us!

Going back to my history of Agile and Rally and the conferences

Ryan and I never met at the 2003 conference. But in 2004, as the conference moved into the northern Rockies in Calgary, Alberta, 4 of us stood together at a folding table in a small hallway. Rally’s representation at that Agile conference was Ryan as President of the company, Richard Leavitt as our VP of Marketing and Sales, Brad Norris as our sole sales person, and me as the sole Agile Coach. At that point, none of us were speakers. However, Rally has had one or more speakers at each conference since: Denver in 2005, Minneapolis in 2006, Washington DC in 2007, Toronto in 2008, Chicago in 2009, and the 2010 event in Orlando. Additionally, Ryan served on the Agile Alliance board during the years of the Washington D.C. and Toronto conferences.

From the folding table to now

Some things have changed in Rally’s Agile journey. We’ve grown from a 20-person company in 2004 to over 250 people and counting. Ryan is now the head of the office of the CTO. Richard is now the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. Brad is our Vice President of Field Operations. And I am an Agile Fellow in the Office of the CTO.

From a Manifesto, a whiteboard, folding tables, and a single speaker to title sponsorship with multiple speakers, producers, reviewers, and booth presence in a true exhibit hall at a conference with over 1,600 attendees, we’ve indeed come a long way!

Jean Tabaka is a frequent flyer on no particular airline, an author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

This is a story of how I went from being the poster child for bad posting etiquette on pm.stackexchange.com to becoming their poster child for fast learner! A poignant tale of hubris, struggle, fear, benevolent mentorship, and redemption.

Prequel: The Lure

Some colleagues of mine at Rally Software (Karl Scotland, Ken Clyne, Eric Willeke, Ben Carey, and Ryan Martens) have been telling me about how much they were enjoying their experiences in StackExchange. My CTO colleagues Zach Nies and Mark Gammon have also been enthusiastic about the value of being engaged in the StackExchange community. But I was intimidated. I feared I wouldn’t know how to appropriately engage in either asking a question or answering a question. It turns out my fears were well-founded.

Scene 1: The Leap

I finally decided to jump in. I set-up an account, fairly easy to do. I perused some of the questions already posted by others. I saw the tags and the replies. I saw the voting. Somewhat intimidating. But, I had a topic I was really excited about. I thought it would make a great question. And so I made the leap; I took the plunge. And this is what was wrought:

Scene 2: The Faux Pas

Not a bad question. The problem was that in the text area below the question title, I gave further detail on the question. A lot of detail. I pulled a major faux pas: I waxed poetic on what I thought the answer was. (I’m not going to go into the topic here. Trust me. It was lengthy and unyielding. :-(

Fortunately for me, however, very timely and gentle advice appeared from Mark Phillips and jmort253:

Could they have been any nicer? What a great community!

Scene 3: Meeting with the masters

The good news is that help was on its way. Back in March, we’d spoken with Joel Spolsky (co-founder and CEO of StackExchange.) Ryan’s goal in talking with Joel was to look at how we at Rally could incorporate StackExchange into our upcoming RallyOn conference in May. How could we work together to create community in StackExchange as we were creating community in the conference?

The result? We brought in the great StackExchange masters Anna Lear and Mark Phillips to the RallyOn conference. In his opening remarks at the conference, Ryan introduced our two Zen StackExchange masters and Ryan’s hope for how we could all engage with them to kick start a powerful presence of the Agile community within StackExchange.

Yea! I was going to actually be able to work with Mark and Anna to become more comfortable and more productive in StackExchange!

Scene 4 : Lessons Learned

After Mark held a small session on getting started in StackExchange, I saw him in the hallway. I’d missed the session, but he quickly filled me in. It turned out, he’d used MY question/answer fumble as an example of how NOT to engage in StackExchange. I had become the poster child for bad StackExchange etiquette :-(

But both Anna and Mark quickly took my under their wing. We edited my original question. We commented on one of the answers. We created a new question. And we answered another question. The result was a new exchange of comments:

Close: A Happy Ending

Today, good news abounds. Mark recently wrote a phenomenal blog post: Why StackExchange is Hotter than Twitter

I continue to stay engaged asking and answering questions. I’ve learned to keep my questions short, my comments short, and my answers short. And, I’m gaining reputation points and earning badges, still with gentle guidance from Anna, Mark and “jmort253″.

My Rally colleagues continue to post as well. It is exciting to see the Agile community begin to expand in pm.stackexchange.com. Provocative questions with great answers. And through the tags, we can watch the expansion into other topic areas.

For the happiest ending of all, I’m saving the best for last: my email yesterday from StackExchange!

“Congratulations — you are one of the top new Project Management – Stack Exchange users for the month of May 2011! http://stackexchange.com/leagues/month/pm/2011-05-01 ” There was also the caveat that my name would not appear in the list of users because I still need to earn more reputation points. Okay, June, you are going down!

Help keep the story alive!

To wrap things up: I not only survived jumping into StackExchange; I love it. I’m hooked. So, my story is not over.

Now, I’d love your reply to this post to tell me how you are getting involved in StackExchange.

Jean Tabaka is an intrepid intercontinental traveller, a 6-badge holder in pm.stackexchange.com,  author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

Next week we are running a fun experiment in Boulder, as we host our first users conference: RallyOn 2011. We are experimenting with a number of things as we learn how to engage, connect, and contribute to our growing world-wide customer community.

First, we are trying to leverage social technologies in a number of ways to reach users all around the world. One way we are doing this is by using Stack Exchange, the Internet’s leading community-driven Q&A engine, to meld a community of agile software development and program management experts. Conceivably, this could kick-off a new paradigm in professional conferences, attaining the elusive goal of extending the conference experience of networking, knowledge sharing and community into the online environment with virtual attendees, and living long after the closing session.

We invited representatives from Stack Exchange to join the conference, promoting and shepherding the community experience. As a result, two members from the Programmers and Project Management communities will be in attendance, sponsored by Stack Exchange. Mark and Anna, who have coauthored this post, have already brought guidance and energy to the interactions between communities, and are sure to do so during RallyOn, as these two communities closely align with the goals of the conference and the interests of our attendees.

Cool stuff about Stack Exchange that I bet you did not know:
You may be familiar with Stack Exchange’s most popular site, Stack Overflow, the flagship software programming Q&A site that receives tens of millions of visitors each month. However, the vision far exceeds that single site. Since August 2010, the company has launched 49 new vertical-oriented Q&A sites. By building vibrant communities of experts around specific topics, Stack Exchange is able to facilitate answers to 94% of all questions network-wide.

• Questions generally average 10 answers, giving you different insights and approaches to tackling problems or issues.
• Answers are peer-reviewed by experts within the community, with those answers receiving the most positive votes rising to the top, guaranteeing the most accurate, relevant or acceptable answer to even the most difficult question.
• Optimized for search engines, these answers help hundreds if not thousands of other people who are seeking answers to similar questions on the web.
• The experts forge a community of subject matter enthusiasts, earning reputation and recognition for their contributions through the reputation point system.

At Rally, we have a fantastic marketing department that puts on great regional events and huge webinars, but we have never done a users conference. However, we are not sure what the best model for our users conference should be. So we are bringing a community of experts and Agile enthusiasts together around the RallyOn 2011 conference. With the help of two enthusiastic Stack Exchange members to showcase the power and benefits of a community-driven Q&A network like Stack Exchange, we are excited about adding a whole new group of Agile experts to our current communities.

To help track the success of this endeavor, we’ve created a special RallyOn11 tag on each Stack Exchange site. Please tag your questions with this tag and also include it in your profile. Participation is a snap, and we’ll be there at the conference to give you a hand.

While exploring the Stack Exchange sites, check out the RallyOn11 tag to discover peers with similar questions and interests. We’ll also be streaming live feeds from the sites directly to a monitor at the conference, allowing you to observe the community’s activity in real-time.

What’s in it for you?

• As a director, the sites give your team an existing resource to crowd-source problems and find solutions from a group of subject matter experts.
• As a director, the Project Management community often addresses management level problems including those involving other managers, executives and team members.
• As an Agile coach or internal champion, these sites are a resource your customers can turn to stay on the right track.
• As an Agile coach or internal champion, you can build your reputation and find inspiration for new ways of approaching issues.
• As a developer, you can find answers to programming problems, project management concerns or challenges interacting with management.

Find Me at RallyOn!

Community: Programmers
Programmers attracts software development experts with interests in subject areas such as development methodologies, architecture practices, and algorithm and data structure concepts. It evolved out of the flagship Stack Overflow site when it became apparent that a separate place to ask questions about general software development concepts and programmers’ professional development, rather than specific implementation details, was needed. An example of this type of question can be found here.

Anna Lear (@aalear) is joining us from the programmers community, and is one of the community’s respected moderators.

Find Me at RallyOn!

Community: Project Management
Project Management covers a wide array of topics including: learning and implementing project management, challenges in managing projects and people (as well as challenges with project managers) and specific techniques and best practices from different methodologies. Project management approaches discussed include Agile, Waterfall, the PMBOK Guide, PRINCE2, ITIL and mish-mash of methodology that often gets implemented in the real world.

Mark Phillips (@mpmobile) is joining us from the project management community, having been a member of that community since its earliest days.

Ryan Martens is a member of NRDC’s Environmental Entrepreneurs, founder/CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder/CTO at Rally Software Development.