(This was written just after the Smidig conference but got lost in daily life and something else (probably very important!). Just posted it to get it out of the way)
I attended the 5th Norwegian agile conference Smidig in November, and as any good agilist, I thought I’d do a little retrospective for the conference. Often the good ideas flurry at the conference, but when reality sets in when you return to work, the good ideas have a tendency to move to the back of the consciousness and not get tried. So, in order to prevent that here’s a list of impressions and more importantly a list of things to try out at work.
1. Pull based Meetings
This is an idea I had before the conference, but it solidified during it. Instead of running regularly scheduled demos, plannings and backlog grooming meetings, make them happen on-demand. Demo when you have something to demo, estimate and ready stories when backlog is getting slim. And perhaps use shorter, more frequent meetings instead of longer, infrequent meetings. Long meetings suck.
2. Code Review as Step on The Board
We have an informal, voluntary code review step, but use is infrequent and varies a lot. After a lunch talk with my former colleague Rune Sundling, who work in kanban heavy shop, I thought it worth a try to create a code review step before “done”. Wonder how the team will react to the suggestion, though :-)
3. Defining requirements quantitatively
I didn’t catch Tom Gilbs talk at smidig, but I know his ideas on this subject. And I am in a position to try this out now. A lot of work will have to go into finding the right quantitative measures for the requirements, but I like the idea and I think it fits our domain and prioritization process well.
Btw, the talk videos are already available on the smidig vimeo account (first videos appeared the same day the talks were held!)
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