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Conference Fun
It's good to see people you haven't seen in a while
One of the most interesting parts of conferences are the social aspects of them. I've always been an autodidact -- I learn things on my own. So I read voraciously. Conferences never made much sense to me, mainly because I'd rather read exhaustively what thought leaders had to say rather than hearing them for an hour. Plus there's a certain gateway process that happens with publishing: most editors are going to give authors a really good once over before publishing. The bar for speaking at conferences is not as high.
But what I didn't expect was the awesome social nature of conferences. People go to meet each other and make friends and talk about similar problems they have. I don't know that many people, but I must have seen a dozen people today that I knew. It was a great feeling seeing everybody! I have missed that by not going to conferences over the years -- and it was unexpected.
David Fox and I went out for drinks and dinner this evening to a place called "Dick's Last Resort" in Chicago. The waiters there abuse you and call you names. So it's just like being at home except you pay for it.
We had a blast.
But there were a couple of sessions that didn't work out so great for me today.
Agile is a practice based on the belief that the great majority of software development problems are people problems, not process problems. It's something I firmly believe. But as a result of this foundation, presenters are sometimes focused so much on people skills and games that it seems, well, hard to understand exactly how to apply this back into your teams.
The problem is that you can't tell if somebody is being really smart and deep, or if they just smoked a doobie out back after getting off a VW love bus. Or maybe both.
This is why I am a pragmatist.
This last session of the day was about "Learning beyond Agile". I went expecting to hear some stuff on NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, an excellent area of cross-ferilization) or Martial Arts, which also has applicable parts to training teams.
Instead we kind of got a guy that seemed like he was as surprised as we were that he actually got an hour and half from the conference to speak. The first thing he did was point to a hand-drawn map on the board -- it kind of looked like Christopher Robin's 100-acre woods -- and told us we were going on a journey through here and visiting all the cities and countryside on the way. He had some places marked as "You-ville" and some marked as "Town of Me"
I looked around for the love beads or bong but couldn't find one. Everybody else smiled. One guy in the audience congratulated the speaker: it was high time somebody took on this important subject!
High time? Perhaps not a good choice of words! (Note that I'm not saying this totally intelligent and capable speaker was stoned. I think it would have been better if one of us were, though.)
So he had a bunch of hand-written and poorly prepared games, that we played even though we didn't know why. He kept checking his watch and telling us how much time we had left, which you should never do. The whole thing had a feeling of somebody who kind of floated through throwing a few things together and was kind of drifting into our room for a while to channel for us before drifting out for a guest appearance on Love Guru.
At one point he had one guy playing "What's my line" at the front of the room, pretending he had super powers and thought he could fly, while a special "director's table" decided what the guy had to do next.
This was one game the room actually mastered:
playing "what's my line" with a volunteer.
I kept wondering "what's my purpose here?"
It just wasn't my cup of tea. I'm waaaaay too analytical for this.
So I didn't bother to fill out a feedback card for this guy. There wasn't much nice I could say.
I heard last year they had a session on "using Haiku for team building"
So your pays your money and you takes your chances.
The other session I saw was a basically where a guy would present an abbreviated version of his PhD dissertation and then the audience would throw rocks at it.
There was no Mr. Rogers neighborhood or singing involved.
It was fun: the topic was metrics for agile teams. The guy was extremely smart and obviously had done quite a bit of work -- but his ideas were completely out in wonk-city. His basic premise was this: we can gather all sorts of passive data about agile teams -- code check-in data, instant messaging stats, commenting on bugs, any kind of stuff the computer gets automatically -- and then we can provide teams with a flexible way to associate random stats with team performance. Sort of like Business Intelligence meets anal-retentive-man. The problem, as you can obviously tell, is that correlation does not imply causality. Team eat bananas on Monday and have a bunch of bugs on Tuesday? Happen more than once? Well then you better avoid bananas from now on. He didn't mean it that way, but it was like a machine to generate magical thinking.
Larry, if you're out there reading, it's possible to measure agile teams effectively. But you need to measure things that mean something and not random bits of data. You have to start with the hypothesis stage. I'd start with creating a DSL for the retrospective. Just a hint, guy, from somebody who has a patent application for a system for measuring agile teams and has measured a bunch and saw how much of a difference it makes if done correctly. Might want to think this one through some more.
All-in-all for today it was the people part that impressed me much more than the presentation material. I'm not sure if I can afford to do another conference -- unless I've invited to speak again -- but I hope I can work it out. I really enjoyed meeting people and hearing their stories.
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