Experiences from years of agile coaching

by Jimmy Nilsson

About Jimmy Nilsson

Primarily a developer and architect,

but also a trainer and author

Blog: JimmyNilsson.com/blog/Twitter: twitter.com/JimmyNilsson

Author of ”Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns” and ”.NET Enterprise Design”

Co-founder and CEO of factor10

Agenda

• Some obvious• Some surprising• Some most important

But first, let’s take a step back

My view of the world

$Why?

What?

How?

”Code”

? ? ? And so on

Part I: Some obvious

The question “why go agile?”…

…is quite often not answered

Checkbox agile…

…doesn’t work too well

If project managers are behind the initiative…

…expect focus on process

Scrum or Kanban…

…people over process?

Engineering practices are hard to implement…

…but easy to skip when the going gets tough

Telling isn’t enough…

…experiencing it is a more effective way of learning

A forgotten practice…

…with built in coaching

Pair programming!

Part II: Some surprising

The better the team…

…the more they learn from coaching

More than 10 000 km apart…

…but the problems are the same

…however dealing with the problems is different

“We would like to learn X”…

…but they need Y, Z and K first

BDD works surprisingly well…

…with the business people

Well-known books and authors…

…are kidnapped for the wrong intentions

Part III: Some most important

Scrum+XP is a common combination, but…

…DDD a missing piece

The codebase…

…is the bottleneck

Software economics

Complexity

Productivity

Question is, do we have essential or accidental complexity?

Process, engineering practices, DDD, great code

etc are necessary……but not sufficient

ReferencesThe big picture of software development

http://jimmynilsson.com/blog/posts/TheBigPictureOfSwD.htmIt works both ways

http://jimmynilsson.com/blog/posts/ItWorksBothWays.htmThe holistic view

http://niclasnilsson.se/articles/2008/02/29/the_holistic_view/Playing coaches

http://niclasnilsson.se/articles/2008/04/27/playing_coaches/

Goldratt: Necessary but not sufficientGoldratt: Theory of constraints