Next week, during March 3-4, I will give a course at GOTO Academy on Steering Agile Architecture. The registration form can found on the event website.
The course is based on the humane assessment method and it offers a novel and practical approach to dealing with architecture in an agile project. It is based on interactive sessions, it offers live demos, and exemplifies the lessons through real-life case studies.
On September 14, starting with 18:00, I will have the pleasure of giving a talk on Steering agile architecture at the GOTO Night event organized by Trifork in Zurich.
The event will also feature a Lean Coffee session with Jeff Sutherland. The event is free of charge. Please register on the event page.
On August 26, I will have the pleasure of giving a talk on Architecture as a work in progress at an event organized by the Limited WIP Society Switzerland in Zurich.
One key aspect of dealing with the Work in Progress is to visualize the queues. We have come a long way with dealing with explicit requests that come from outside. But, how do we deal with technical problems that come from within?
Let’s take the architecture of the system. It’s rather important as it can make or break your system in the long run. Of course, the agile mantra tells us that we should emerge the architecture. This sounds great, but how do we make sure it goes in the right direction?
One way to approach it is to make technical tasks explicit and put them in the same queue as the functional ones. This never really works because of two reasons: (1) business can rarely prioritize the work, and (2) it does not fit development workflows.
We argue that it is necessary to approach technical concerns differently. We still need to make them explicit, and we also need a queue. Only, it’s a different queue that is managed exclusively by the team and worked while dealing with regular tasks.
In this interactive talk we show concrete examples of how this works in practice.
Humane assessment is a versatile and generic method. That is both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that it can be applied in many situations. The weakness is that it is perceived to be too distant from concrete scenarios that development teams face.
To bridge the perception gap, I have started to look since a couple of years for classes of problems that are concrete enough to be directly applicable. The first one is that of steering agile architecture for which I designed a 2-day course.
The concept of architecture started to regain traction recently. For example, two new industrial conferences were launched recently on the subject [1] [2]. That’s a good thing.
However, there are still quite some open questions as to how architecture fits within agile development. Of course, the main focus still tends to be placed on how to create architecture, and less about how to deal with the existing one. Humane assessment fills the latter space quite well. Specifically, the daily assessment process helps teams to make architecture concerns explicit and keep track of what goes on in the system. That is why the course is not about good or bad architecture. It’s about knowing the real architecture of your software system, and choosing to how to steer based on that reality.
If you are interested in working with me, please drop me an email.
Here is a teaser video.