Jeff McKenna's Agile Development Blog

Lightning Interview by Ward Cunningham

I thought it might be fun to show you an interview that Ward Cunningham did with me late last year. For those of you who do not know of him, Ward is a brilliant developer. He has many claims to fame including the development of CRC (Class Responsibility Collaboration) cards as a design tool and invention of the wiki.

I had the pleasure of working with Ward in the late 1980's at Tektronix in Oregon. We were working on Smalltalk and working on Patterns and the beginnings of the development style now known as Agile. Other interesting folks were at Tektronix at that time including Kent Beck, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Norm Kerth. It was a heady time and place with lots of passion and lots of great software.

Ward and I have kept in touch and this interview was an early one in his lightning series.

Welcome to Jeff McKenna’s Agile Development Blog

This blog will share my thoughts on Agile development and broader issues of team dynamics that go beyond Agile and software. I started this blog for several reasons. I have been coaching software development teams for some time (see Author Overview). Now I am focusing on the transition from traditional software development to Agile. In these efforts, I notice a lot of things and wanted a place to write my ideas down, share them, and start conversations. I also want a platform for my general musings on Agile development. I am partnering with other people including Bill Ives and David Socha in order to provide other perspectives (see Author Overview for their backgrounds and how we will work together). We plan to experiment with a number of different blog formats and welcome your input.

While I will reflect on the tools a bit, tool technology is not my main focus. I am more interested in the team and process issues since it is people, in the end, that have to get these tools to work. I have studied family and team dynamics and like to apply principles of complex adaptive systems. I feel that when things break down, or even better before breakdown occurs, we need to move beyond managing symptoms and treat root causes.

Let me offer an example, in most development shops noticeable time is spent prioritizing and dealing with bugs. That effort only manages the symptoms. It can be more useful in the long run to look at the operational side of development. An interesting issue is the time that elapses from when a bug, an unwanted change, enters the system and when it is detected. I have been in situations were that time was measured in minutes. Then developers could quickly learn from their mistakes, make immediate corrections, and move on. They learned and produced fewer and fewer bugs. Then we did not have to spend time prioritizing and dealing with long lists of bugs.

I will get into much more detail on many stories such as this one in the blog.

Sometimes it helps to turn things on their head. I was once asked to faciltate a release retrospective for a group of teams. I asked for six hours of their time. In these sessions in the past they would engage in examining what went wrong. The groans were loud and some team members decided to only dial in. Instead of looking at the mistakes, we talked about the times when they were most thrilled with a team’s performance. We never once discussed what went wrong, the positive energy level rose, and some of those on dial in came into the office for the remainder of the session. The team got back on a more positive track. Of course, I do not always get it right and I will share these stories also.

This blog is sponsored by Serena Software, a provider of application development and business software for companies of all shapes and sizes. I work for Serena. Some Serena’s tools and services support Agile development. We might talk about Serena on occasion, but this conversation is not about Serena, it is about the issues that everyone faces in Agile development.

Bill, David and I encourage you to browse our categories and not just look at our latest content. The categories contain the archives of our past posts. Many of these posts should remain useful as we will discuss issues in depth and not simply provide current news. Also use our search field. Often good blog content gets buried as it moves off the front page.

If you like what you find here please join the conversation through our comment fields. Our blog will allow us to learn of your comments regardless of when the original post was published. We look forward to hearing from your perspectives. We want to learn from you and we look forward to your participation.

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Our Agile Development Blog Team and Roles

Welcome to this blog on Agile development. I am Jeff McKenna, the Chief Agile Evangelist at Serena Software, I will be leading this blogging effort and creating most of the content (see Blog Overview for our plans). In this effort, I hope to capture some of my random and perhaps not so random thoughts, musings, teachings and rants as they occur to me.

Here is a bit about my background. I have been involved in software development for over 45 years and have been actively participating in the creation and delivery of agile software development since 1987. I have been involved in all areas of software product development from programming, system design and architecture to project management, testing, sales and marketing. Since the late 1980s I have focused on the people/process side of development. Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and I created the Scrum methodology of agile software development in 1993 at Easel Corporation and started the very first Scrum team. (Little did we know what we were creating!)

I have worked extensively with object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications and was the Chair of OOPSLA in 1994 that helped to incubate and increase adoption of several related disciplines including agile software development. Working with IBM, Cigna, ObjectShare, Easel Corp, Millennium Pharmaceutical and the US Air Force, I provided expertise in architecture, design and implementation for their first Smalltalk based object-oriented projects. 

As an Architect at Rational Software (now IBM), I made various contributions to Rational’s industry leading Rose product. These included extensions to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to support a UML model of testing.

I also worked with industry pioneers, including Grady Booch, to extend the Rational Rose product to natively support Design Patterns.
I am a Certified Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Trainer and Scrum Master, I have taught, coached and mentored agile teams using Scrum and Extreme Programming practices for many companies, including Oracle, PayPal, Borland, Vanguard, Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin, Tumbleweed Communications, V-Mark and Net Objectives.

Philosophically I am a Buddhist and I love good food and race cars. My wife of more than 27 years is Cory.

Bill Ives

I have asked Bill Ives to join me in this effort. Bill is veteran blogger who writes for two group blogs on enterprise 2.0 (the AppGap and FastForward), as well as his own Portals and KM. Bill has helped Serena with its blogging efforts before (see Blogging Serena TAG), including covering my Serena TAG session on Agile Myth Busters.

Bill has served for over 25 years in leadership positions as a consultant in knowledge management, community building, and other business applications of emerging technologies. He has worked with large and small companies in a variety of industries, and is currently focused, as a consultant and writer, on what the new Web brings to business. Bill also participates in several search-based start-ups including iQuest, and Wikigazette. Prior to his present roles, Bill led the Knowledge Management - Portals Practice at a major consulting firm. Bill has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Toronto and conducted post-doc research on how media affects cognition at Harvard.

Bill’s oldest daughter spent two years in a Buddhist country, Mongolia, and he also likes their views, especially respect for women. He is a painter when not blogging.

Bill is engaged to provide a partner and outside perspective to the discussions. Since this blog is about conversations, we will be starting many of these conversations between ourselves. Operating under the model of two heads being better than one, at times Bill may interview me, challenge what I present, or act as a sounding board on discussions. In some cases he may contribute posts to offer another perspective. However, we will be clear on the authorship on all posts and list whether it is post by myself, Bill, or a combined effort. You see the author or authors as a category at the bottom of each post and browse the blogs in each category in our right side bar. We also do conversations between the two of us and they are categorized as Interviews. We see this as an opportunity to experiment with different models of conversation and blog collaboration in a transparent manner. We plan to have fun and hope it is contagious. We welcome your input.

David Socha

David Socha is another colleague who will be co-blogging with me. David is a long-term student of the human side of software development. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, and has spent 18 years as a leader and programmer in a variety of software organizations.

I introduced David to agile practices back in 1999 when we both worked at Rational. As David recalls it, one day I said to him "Let's go to the bookstore. There is an interesting new book that I want to look at." That was Kent Beck's book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. According to David, software development has not been the same since for him. It made software development much more engaging. Ever since, he has been using agile practices and his people skills to help organizations improve their practices. He is a Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Product Owner, and has a particular fondness for biomimicry.