XP2010 accept

The 11th International Conference on Agile Software Development is coming up (June 1-4 in Trondheim). Unfortunately, I will not be able to be there. But I have been authoring and co-authoring some material for the conference.

First, Morten's and my experience report "Tech Challenges in a Large-Scale Agile Project" was accepted, and will be both presented and included in the conference proceedings:

This experience reports focuses on the major technical challenges that arose during the project, especially those challenges that we think can be attributed to the SCRUM methodology. For each of them, we try to identify the consequence and the cause, and then follow up with any solutions we tried, and an analysis of whether the problem was successfully solved or not. The session paper lists three major examples of such problems.

Then, I got accepted a lightening talk as well: "Agile Methods may Discourage Quality". However, since I have to be attending a customer at the time, Morten will be presenting this instead of me.

Agile methods, and in particular scrum, have a very strong focus on productivity and immediate business value. The developers are encouraged to complete their tasks in due time, and this may lead to quick and dirty solutions. Thus, a quality assurance system is required to ensure that technical quality is within required bounds. This system may be implemented through pair programming, code review, design review etc. It is crucial that whatever QA systems one choose, it has strong enough authority to inflict a decrease in focus factor, or even a postponed deadline.

Cheers and good luck to you all in Trondheim! See http://xp2010.org/

Technical debt in agile projects

I'll be presenting my opinions on technical debt in agile projects at Communities in Action 2010 tonight.

The presentation can be found at slideshare but I'll let you in on my three "lemmas" as a tech lead:

• make it simple and easy to report a technical shortcoming
  
• don't let it backfire on the whistleblower
  
• decide the matter in a setting with both technical expertise and executive power