The panel started quickly down the dreaded TDD path.  You know the one where we proselytize about how everyone’s doing it, you should too, and the world will seamless fall into harmony once you get it.  It’s true, but how many times can you hear it from a talking head.  Good grief.  Go find a pair.

Not too long in a savior came from the back of the room and asked the panel what resources where available that discussed the soft skills of successful agile teams.  Barry jumped on this, because, well, he wrote a book about it!  (I have copy – thanks Improving!).  This monopolized the remainder of the session which was fantastic IMO.  From executive buy in to nasty team members and apairia it was great.

In the end I recall the following books being mentioned for further reading.  I dread buying a Kindle, Nook, etc. because I’ll simply flush my wallet down the toilet when lists like this come up:

    Individuals and Interactions (Barry’s Book)

    Managing Humans

    Passionate Programmer

    Coaching Agile Teams

Go grab a few and share them around the office.  Have some hug sessions and maybe pick up a beer for your pair.

I’m happy to announce that Cincy Clean Coders is really going to happen.  Details can be found at http://cincycleancoders.com, but suffice it to say the inaugural meeting will be held April 7th at 6pm in the Max Train facilities in Mason, Ohio.

Mark Haskamp was strong armed brave enough to offer to go first with me.  I’ll update the site with the topics for the first meeting soon.

Big Thanks to Ernie Stormann and Parag Joshi who helped push this through.  And a big kudos to the rest of Twitter for being excited about a topic like this.  It says a lot about where our industry wants to be.

Help! You might notice I’m not a designer.  If you want to help, we could use a site design that doesn’t compare to notepad in a browser.  Nothing special, just, you know, some other than black on white text.

We’ve made more tickets available this year, but don’t expect them to last too long.

Register here: http://cincydayofagile.org/

Topics you’ll find at Cincinnati Day of Agile:

^*Blog owner bias acknowledged

There will also be an awesome 3 hour, hands-on workshop by Mark Windholtz and open discussion round tables.

This team had been trying really hard for about 2 sprints, and to a lesser degree in sprints prior, to add TDD to their Definition of Done.  During the second retrospective the team made it quite clear there were roadblocks.  We spent quite a bit of time during that retrospective trying to diagnose and come up with a root cause.

The conclusion was that complicated setup in the tests was the blame.  This isn’t uncommon and is certainly a signal that the underlying system under test is doing too much.  What the team decided was that maybe it needed to focus on patterns for small, flexible, clean code.  So the team came up with…

The Clean Code Plan

At the beginning of each week team members each choose a design pattern, development practice, or tool to learn and practice.  At the end of that week each team member would lead a session with the team.  The general agenda of each session would be:

• Define and Describe the Pattern, Practice, or Tool.  Bring in others thoughts, comments, and interpretations that you’ve found.
• Demonstrate the pattern in action.  Since we are working on a project the team decided it was best that this *not* be done in the context of that project, but instead be done with a different background.  We wanted to get out of of the confines of the project and clear away any baggage or pressure.  We had one demonstration that was done in alternative languages to the project language which received kudos.
• Discuss ways that this could be applied to problems in the past or problems that are foreseen.  This part was hard, but I think will be the most fruitful as we move forward.

Fortunately for this team it can take a few hours (3-5) to do something of this nature.  A public group, not so much.  At least not regularly.

So here are my initial thoughts on a more condensed format.  Post your thoughts, ‘cause I’m all ears.  Maybe I’m being too structured here, but that’s my nature.

Duration: 1hour and half: Two 30 minute sessions on two patterns, practices, or tools.

Follow the same agenda of:

• Define and Describe the Pattern, practice or tool.
• Demonstrate the pattern, practice or tool.  Must be done in at least two languages or platforms.  I think this is key to getting people outside their comfort zone.
• Discuss ways to apply in past or upcoming problems.  This is a bit harder, because we don’t have a common project context around our discussions, but I think it’s important to keep this from becoming a rotation of talking heads.  It would hopefully remove some of the intimidation factor of speaking as well.

So what do you think?  Could it work?  We have an industry problem with quality practices, but no plan of attack.  I’m not saying this is one, but maybe it can help.

The summit is a great opportunity for me to give feedback, but I’m certainly not the only one with ‘ideas’ (just check Twitter).  So I want to give everyone a voice and I’ll do what I can to get it to the teams.

So go for it.  Submit and vote up feedback on this UserVoice forum http://tfsmvpsummit.uservoice.com

Keep it clean people!

This tweet sparked some interest and I’m happy to follow the rabbit hole.  So I threw up a twtpoll to find out who is interested in a similar concept, but open to all comers.  It would be entirely language and platform agnostic.  I have some initial ideas on how to make it work in a reasonable amount of time, but we’ll roll with the mood.

So let me know what you think:

Please retweet, email a link, whatever.  Just find people who would benefit (everyone) and convince them it’s a good idea. 

Do remember there is bound to be someone willing to sponsor food.  Might not even be pizza.

Let’s take it by the numbers:

12 Organizers

10 Charities

65 Volunteers

36 hours –> 1440 hours individually

$144,000 in value delivered

+200 repository commits

Add to that the time put in to create charity proposals, solution plans, and event planning.  This event was the culmination of passionate people applying themselves wholeheartedly well into the early hours of each day.

There are all kinds of thanks to be passed around.  On behalf of all the charities and organizers I want to thank every volunteer that took time out of their personal life to help deliver an incredible amount of value to organizations committed to wonderful causes.  Certainly we could not have pulled this off without the many sponsors who so graciously donated their wares and services to feed, fund, and thank our volunteers.

A quick look at some of the solutions delivered for our charities over the weekend:

http://john1512ministries.org

http://setonfamilycenter.org

http://elementz.org

http://diabetesdayton.org

http://www.hamilton-living-water-ministry.org

http://esc.schenzcustomdesigns.com (End Slavery Cincinnati)

http://civicgardencenter.org (Volunteer Service Coordination put online)

http://wincincy.probas.co (Foreclosure Prevention Assistance & Upcoming Events

Some of the more momentous tweets from #swogc:

@Muhokie Watching the @swohiogivecamp staff play Left4Dead during some down time. It is amusing. (Yeah, that was me)

@eymiha I have an awesome team – the site is built, rough edges are getting smoothed out, and it just looks great. FTW.

@benvonhandorf The moment of truth approaches… the business has arrived!

@SchwartzE Two new pots of coffee brewing

@mikewo I got SQL Pivot guidance from @chrisbarth1 via live meeting at #swogc. Pretty cool.

@JeetKunDoug @cromwellryan you get your Exchange question answered? I know just enough to be dangerous. (He proceeded to show up and help before I could reply!)

@wam Customer just (excitedly) signed off on our #swogc givecamp project http://www.hamilton-living-water-ministry.org/

Of course, I can’t end without a few pictures of the fam stopping in to see the… err… action:

During the late ‘90s and early 2000s immense business systems where built on the powerhouse platform known as Microsoft Office.  Having worked, well, at all, I’ve seen first hand the ugly, but quite impressive apps built by accountants and marketiers (mark it down, that’s my word) generating great revenues or savings for their companies.  I have replied to requests to “make that an enterprise web app” with “that will fail miserably, keep using it.”  The apps are a disaster waiting to happen themselves, but that’s why we have enterprise backup systems.  It’s just not worth the IT Department’s time to rebuild Excel when it is perfectly suited for their purpose.

In come WebMatrix, LightSaber, I mean LightSwitch, and all the other “low-end” tools.  These are obviously a trend that show Microsoft is abandoning the “high-end” developer (are we really that pompous that we consider ourselves “high-end”, get over yourself you geek.  I bet they make more cash per feature than you).  Or could it be that they are making up for the fact that the last great act of feature development shown by Microsoft to the “low-end”, revenue generating, feature shipping developer is the Ribbon Bar.  I guess you could add SharePoint in there, but I won’t bate you. 

Since 2002, we’ve seen 4 iterations of Silverlight, 4 versions of the Framework, WPF, WCF, the rise of PnP, 5 versions of Visual Studio, Azure, Hyper-V, Team Foundation Server (like it or not), and a dearth of other tools in the same time that Excel has received… drum role… the Ribbon.  Yes there are nicer icons to represent values and you can make prettier tables or charts, but seriously they still use VBA!  In that same time period we’ve seen 2, count them, 2 releases of  the platform on which many businesses survive.

So yes, Microsoft has thrown the Excel and Access productivity worker (not lowend developer) a bone.  They’ve made it easier for you to say, “Sorry, I don’t do Master-Details forms.  Here’s WebMatrix, call me when you want to ship.”  Get over it, start an OSS project or, if you liked it so much, help the IronRuby team build that platform up.  Whatever you do, stop whining and do something.