Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Agility

We first started Mob Programming in 2011. It was either late September, or early October. I have some records about that somewhere, and hopefully I’ll find them someday. This is essentially our eighth anniversary of when we began.

Our path from where we were to where we would be wasn’t an accident, as such, but where we were to end up was not a known destination. And more wonderful to me, it is still a path we are on. Where we are is merely on the way to where we will someday be.

As I look back on that beginning one thing strikes me as being an important aspect of the approach we were following for making the improvements we felt we wanted: We didn’t know what improvements we wanted.

That is, understanding we want improvements is good. Believing we know what those improvements must be, isn’t. We clog our thinking and limit the possibilities when we think we know what those improvements should be.

Discovery is such a powerful thing.

My way of thinking: We can make it possible for us to find the improvements we need, or at least recognize them when we stumble upon them, and that is better than believing we know what those improvements must be. Sometimes this can be rather straightforward, sometimes not so much.

However, this is a bit of a paradox I suppose, and I also suppose there is a bit of a trick to it. Sometime I might gather my thoughts about what that means and share it here. For now, this is enough.

Practical Refactoring – Tiny Steps to Better Code

2-Day Lab, Austin, Texas, USA

May 3-4, 2018 

With Llewellyn Falco and Woody Zuill

Eventbrite registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2-day-practical-refactoring-lab-austin-tickets-40431719361

The goal: “Clean Code That Works” (Ron Jeffries) , and getting there is half the fun.  Working with a legacy mess can be frustrating, boring, dangerous, and time-consuming.  When FIBS occur (FIBs = Fixes that Introduce Bugs) you often enter an endless Test and Fix cycle that can quickly escalate into a nightmare.  I’ve been there, you’ve been there.  How do we return to pleasant dreams?

In this code-centric workshop we’ll look at ways to introduce sanity and calmness into the process of maintaining and improving buggy, poorly written, poorly designed code.  Few slides, mostly code. We’ve been fighting the good fight for a long time and we are going to show you how to turn any project around and have fun doing it.  It is our opinion that we can fix and enhance any code.

We’ll be working on an example project, and learn the steps of making changes to code in tiny steps. We’ll explore ways to introduce tests to legacy code, and find ways to clean up the most common problems of duplication, clutter, complexity, and cleverness, as well as identifying and removing duplication.

Our approach will have us using Solo, Pair, and Mob Programming to do exercises and work with others as we experiment with many simple techniques that combine together to make a big impact on the quality and cleanliness of our code.

Learning Goals

• The basic goal is to learn enough about refactoring in baby steps so you can begin doing this immediately.  We’ll be covering a number of basic refactoring techniques that provide a wide range of easy to implement improvements, and learn how to identify some common code “smells” (symptoms of potential problems)

Instruction Approach

• Hands-on Exercises
• Interactive Dialogues
• Simulations, Videos

Agenda

Day 1 – Cleaning the code

• 8:30-9:00 –  We’ll alternate between instructional demonstrations and hands-on coding exercises.
• 9:00-10:30 – Basic theory of our approach to working with legacy code
• 10:30-10:45 – Break
• 10:45-12:00 – Instruction and hands-on exercises
• 12:00-12:45 – Lunch
• 12:45-2:30 – Instruction and hands-on exercises
• 2:30-2:45 – Break
• 2:45-4:15 – Instruction and hands-on exercises
• 4:15-4:30 – Retrospective
• 4:30-5:00 – Questions, wrap-up of the day

Day 2 – Discovering the emerging architecture

• 8:30-9:00 –  We’ll alternate between instructional demonstrations and hands-on coding exercises.
• 9:00-10:30 – Continue with theory of our approach to working with legacy code
• 10:30-10:45 – Break
• 10:45-12:00 – Instruction and hands-on exercises
• 12:00-12:45 – Lunch
• 12:45-2:30 – Instruction and hands-on exercises
• 2:30-2:45 – Break
• 2:45-4:15 – Instruction and hands-on exercises
• 4:15-4:30 – Retrospective
• 4:30-5:00 – Questions, wrap-up of the day

We’d love to see you there!!

Eventbrite registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2-day-practical-refactoring-lab-austin-tickets-40431719361

The third Mob Programming Conference is happening April 12 & 13 at the Microsoft Center in Burlington, MA.

Here are the pertinent links for the conference, and the Eventbrite registraion:

Conference Website:  Click here to go to the Mob Programming Website

Eventbrite Registration: Click here to go to the Mob Programming Eventbrite Page

I’m really excited to be working with Nancy Van Schooenderwoert and Llewellyn Falco to organize this gathering.

Learn by Doing

Mob Programming is a fairly new concept. This conference offers you a good grasp of it with a mix of talks, trying it out, and discussing with your peers. We’ll mostly be doing hands-on Mob Programming sessions at a variety of skill and experience levels, and in several programming languages.

Mob Programming Workshop

Woody Zuill (me) will be facilitating a Mob Programming Workshop that has been shared all over the world over the past 4 years.

Expert Mentors and Coaches

We have invited a number of very capable Mob Programmers who have been innovating with this idea for several years:

• Jessica Kerr – @jessitron
• Lisa Crispin – @lisacrispin
• Andrea Goulet –  @andreagoulet
• Åsa Liljegren – @_asa
• Elisabeth Hocke – @lisihocke
• Marcus Hammerberg – @marcusoftnet
• Nancy Van Shooenderwoert (Agile-Lean Partners – USA) – @vanschoo
• Joe Wright – @joe_jag
• Lennart Fridén – @DevLCSC
• Willem Larsen – @cascadiawillem
• Llewellyn Falco (Freelancer – Finland and USA) – @LlewellynFalco
• Woody Zuill (Independent Agile Guide – USA). – @WoodyZuill

They will be facilitating Mob Programming Sessions so you will have expert guidance as you join in with other “Mobbers” to work on interesting exercises.

A Mix of Activites and Sessions

While most of our time will be spent on actual coding and working together, we’ll also have a few talks (a Keynote and an Endnote), some retrospectives, some Open Space style sessions, and some Lean Coffee sessions.  In other words, this will be a powerful, hands-on 2 days of learning and sharing.

This is “immersion training meets powerful questions”. Learn by doing, then have just the right amount of reflection and talk to fuel another round of immersion learning.

We have a track for Managers, Executives, and Leaders as well. This is for people who might not be doing software development directly, but are managing, facilitating, or otherwise influencing the workplace and can help make improvements to the work environment.

Agile Games Conference

The Mob Programming Conference is being done in conjunction with the Agile Games Conference.  Agile Games is on April 9, 10, and 11 at the same location. Both events are hosted by Agile New England – one of the best Agile groups I’ve ever attended.

Here is a link to the Agile Games website: Agile Games Boston

Here’s a link to the Agile New England site: Agile New England

Please Join Us

Join us for two days of workshops and peer learning with talks from the originators and founders of Mob Programming. I hope to see you there!

Let’s get “All the brilliant people, working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer.“

The second Mob Programming Conference is happening April 6 & 7 at the Microsoft NERD Center at MIT in Cambridge MA.

Here are links to the conference website and Eventbrite:

Conference Website 

Eventbrite Registration

I’m really excited to be working with Nancy Van Schooenderwoert and Llewellyn Falco to organize this gathering.

Learn by Doing

Mob Programming is a fairly new concept. This conference offers you a good grasp of it with a mix of talks, trying it out, and discussing with your peers. We’ll mostly be doing hands-on Mob Programming sessions at a variety of skill and experience levels, and in several programming languages.

Mob Programming Workshop

Woody Zuill (me) will be facilitating a Mob Programming Workshop that has been shared all over the world over the past 3 years.

Expert Mentors and Coaches

We have invited a number of very capable Mob Programmers who have been innovating with this idea for several years:

• Lennart Fridén (Agical – Sweden)
• Alex Wilson (Unruly – England)
• Aaron Griffith (Hunter – USA)
• Nancy Van Shooenderwoert (Agile-Lean Partners – USA)
• Llewellyn Falco (Freelancer – Finland and USA)
• Woody Zuill (Independent Agile Guide – USA).

They will be facilitating Mob Programming Sessions so you will have expert guidance as you join in with other “Mobbers” to work on interesting exercises.

A Mix of Activites and Sessions

While most of our time will be spent on actual coding and working together, we’ll also have a few talks (a Keynote and an Endnote), some retrospectives, some open space style sessions, and some Lean Coffee sessions.  In other words, this will be a powerful, hands-on 2 days of learning and sharing.

This is “immersion training meets powerful questions”. Learn by doing, then have just the right amount of reflection and talk to fuel another round of immersion learning.

Agile Games Conference

The Mob Programming Conference is being done in conjunction with the Agile Games Conference.  Agile Games is on April 3, 4, and 5 at the same location. Both events are hosted by Agile New England – one of the best Agile groups I’ve ever attended.

Here is a link to the Agile Games website: Agile Games Boston

Here’s a link to the Agile New England site: Agile New England

Please Join Us

Join us for two days of workshops and peer learning with talks from the founders of Mob Programming. I hope to see you there!

Let’s get “All the brilliant people, working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer.“

The first Mob Programming Conference is happening May 1 & 2 at the Microsoft NERD Center at MIT in Cambridge MA.

Here are links to the conference website and Eventbrite: Conference Website – Eventbrite Registration

I’m really excited to be working with Nancy Van Schooenderwoert and Llewellyn Falco to organize this gathering.

Learn by Doing

Mob Programming is a fairly new concept. This conference offers you a good grasp of it with a mix of talks, trying it out, and discussing with your peers. We’ll mostly be doing hands-on Mob Programming sessions at a variety of skill and experience levels, and in several programming languages.

Expert Mentors and Coaches

We have invited a number of very capable Mob Programmers who have been innovating with this idea for several years:
Lennart Fridén (Agical – Sweden)
Alex Wilson (Unruly – England)
Aaron Griffith (Hunter – USA)
Jeremy Cash (Bluefruit – England)
Nancy Van Shooenderwoert (Agile-Lean Partners – USA)
Llewellyn Falco (Freelancer – Finland and USA)
Woody Zuill(Freelancer – USA).
They will be facilitating Mob Programming Sessions so you will have expert guidance as you join in with other “Mobbers” to work on interesting exercises.

A Mix of Activites and Sessions

While most of our time will be spent on actual coding and working together, we’ll also have a few talks (a Keynote and an Endnote), some retrospectives, some open space style sessions, and some Lean Coffee sessions. In other words, this will be a powerful, hands-on 2 days of learning and sharing.

This is “immersion training meets powerful questions”. Learn by doing, then have just the right amount of reflection and talk to fuel another round of immersion learning.

Agile Games Conference

The Mob Programming Conference is being done in conjunction with the Agile Games Conference. Agile Games is on April 28, 29, and 30 at the same location. Both events are hosted by Agile New England – one of the best Agile groups I’ve ever attended.

Here is a link to the Agile Games website: Agile Games Boston

Here’s a link to the Agile New England site: Agile New England

Please Join Us

Join us for two days of workshops and peer learning with talks from the founders of Mob Programming. I hope to see you there!

Let’s get “All the brilliant people, working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer.“

We are holding another FREE Mob Programming workshop at Hunter Industries in San Marcos, CA.  Our October 24th was a lot of fun, and a great success… so we immediately decided to do another one.

• When: Saturday, November 21, 2016 – 9:00am
• Where: Hunter Industries, 1890
• What – A full day of hands-on learning about team-work and Mob Programming.
• Register here: Workshop Registration
• Limited to 20 participants

Sponsored by Hunter Industries

All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place, and on the same computer.

Mob Programming is a cost-effective, collaborative and fun way to get work done together. It’s a whole-team approach to development, where coding, designing, testing, and working with the “customer” (partner, Product Owner, User, etc.) is all done as a team.

Participants in this workshop experience a typical day of Mob Programming while learning the mechanics of how to work together as a Mob and the techniques that make this form of development so effective.

Learn how a mob performs sample project work, including user stories, prioritization, test-driven development, refactoring, and retrospectives.

Designed and facilitated by Mob Programming pioneer Woody Zuill, this workshop provides a hands-on education in the art of mobbing and it’s significant benefits for your teams.

Learning Goals

• How 5+ people can be effective working on just one thing
• Heuristics for team size
• Guidelines for successful collaboration
• Handling competing solutions and ideas to a coding problem
• Encouraging politeness and kindness of team members
• Reducing or eliminating harmful conflicts
• Mobbing Mechanics
• Tools for team coding
• Workspace setup
• How to “Amplify Learning” and take advantage of continual learning opportunities
• “Real-time” and continuous Retrospectives to reflect, tune, adjust
• The theory of why Mob Programming is effective.
• Test-Driven Development (TDD) as a team
• Working with Product Owners, Business Experts, Testers as part of the team
• Refactoring as a team
• Continuous feedback at all levels of granularity

Instruction Approch

Hands-on Exercises, Interactive Dialogues, Simulations, Videos

Agenda

• What Is Mob Programming & The basics of how it works
• First Exercise: A Code Dojo to Introduce Basic Concepts
• Driver/Navigator teamwork Roles and Techniques
• Second Exercise: A sample project
• The Importance of Retrospectives
• LUNCH – Lunch will be provided
• Advanced Mob Programming Concepts
• Third Exercise: Expanding on the Sample Project
• Amplified Learning – How to take advantage of learning opportunities
• Resolving Conflict
• Retrospective and review

Here are the details and Registration at EventBrite:

Workshop Registration

I’ll be visiting the SB Agile group in Santa Barbara on Wednesday, January 21, 2015

You can find all the details about the location, time, and other pertinent info at their Meetup group page: http://bit.ly/1zdU7ha

Topic – Continuous Discovery: The Power of Pure Agile

Brief description:

The strength of Agile lies in the simplicity and clarity of the Values and Principles as expressed in the  Agile Manifesto.  I have found that if we take this philosophy to heart it can empower people doing software development in any organization, and enable us to make rapid strides to the “land of better”.

As leaders, activators, and influencers of change in the companies we work with, we must take responsibility to understand the philosophy of Agile, and learn to invite and draw people to share that understanding.  We need change, we want change, and we know we must influence change for the better.

I’ll share my thinking about “Pure Agile”, and how I use it in my daily work to enhance Continuous Discovery, Learning, and Growth in the teams and companies I work with.  Let’s explore together and discover the path to future we want to create.

I hope to see you there!

Workshops in Finland and Sweden this Fall

Public Workshops at Mystes in Helsinki, Finland

Along with Llewellyn Falco and Vasco Duarte I’ll be participating in 4 half-day workshops on the 23rd and 24th of October.

Mob Programming: If you are interested in participating in a Mob Programming workshop, where you can experience our Teamwork attitude and many ideas related to Teaming and collaboration, please join me for a half day hands on workshop.

NoEstimates: Explore with us our current thinking and experience on NoEstimates decision-making. In this workshop we will review and analyze why we do estimates and how we can improve software and product development while reducing the time and money invested in estimating.

Hands-On introduction to ApprovalTests: ApprovalTests make it easy to create descriptive, expressive, easy to write and debug unit tests. In this workshop you’ll experience how to use ApprovalTests to accelerate test-driven development for everything from simple strings to arrays, GUIs, and complex objects. ApprovalTests is free and currently available for C#, Java, PHP, and Ruby.

Practical Refactoring:  In this workshop we are going to work on a 300 line ball of mud, and experience some new approaches and techniques that will enable you to easily and safely revitalize your legacy code into a thing of beauty little by little. After this workshop you will have a practical, hands-on understanding of how small daily improvements improve large-scale projects over a few months. You will see how much your own project at work could benefit from continuous improvement.

Helsinki, Finland – October 23rd

Mystes Presents
STATE OF THE ART PRACTICES
IN AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Woody Zuill, Vasco Duarte & Llewellyn Falco
October 23rd & 24th, 2014

Tampere Goes Agile, Tampere Finland

I am really looking forward to Tampere Goes Agile, October 25th http://bit.ly/1vXa4sb

I’ll be presenting on Mob Programming, and likely doing a workshop on it as well.  I’ll probably be speaking about NoEstimates, and who knows what else.  As I understand it, this is a free event – which is pretty cool!

Øredev Developer Conference

Malmo, Sweden – Oredev 2014 – November 4th

I am very pleased to be returning to Malmo and the FANTASTIC Oredev conference!

Experience a full day of Mob Programming and learn the mechanics of how to work together as a “Mob”, and explore the underlying concepts that make this form of development so effective for my team.

Throughout the day we will be tackling a sample project and working on it using a full “extreme programming” approach – User stories, prioritization, test-driven development, refactoring, and retrospectives.

I will also do a session on Continuous Discovery,  The Power of Pure Agile, and I’ll share the stage with Vasco Duarte for a converstation called “#NoEstimates Unplugged – A Conversation About Agile As If You Meant It”.

And of course – I’ll be there and in Malmo for the whole week and I would love to have a chance to meet you and talk about Agile, #MobProgramming, #NoEstimates, or just about anything interesting.

Here it is.  You weren’t looking for it, but you found it.

Mob Programming!

Llewellyn Falco and I have done a number of presentations together.  I’ve always loved working with Llewellyn: I’ve learned a lot and had a lot of fun.  This “Practical Refactoring” presentaion is one of my favorites.

We’ve called it Practical Refactoring, 2-Minutes to Better Code, Code Excellence for Every Programmer, Code Excellence for the Average Programmer. I think we’ve presented this about 20 times.  We finally made a video of it, and thanks to Llewellyn’s dedication to editing it and posting it on YouTube – you can all now enjoy watching the fun.

This presentation was done at the Inland Empire .NET Users Group in San Bernardino.  They are an excellent group, and if you live near enough to attend their meetings you won’t be disappointed.

If you write down every 3rd word spoken, and then write it out backwards, you can read the special secret message hidden in the video. Remember, resistance is futile – or at least frowned upon.