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I tell you, I’m not an expert in agile, just someone who found solution to my professional problems using agile methodologies. If you are convinced too and want to move further, please join us at the end of august, for a lot of open discussions and fun. Things are moving forward in the ALE 2016 organisation. Already, a great diversity of people answer to our call as shown below, but we need more. Yes the ALE 2016 will be great as it has always been since 2011 in Berlin. For those who do not know about the yearly ALE event, please find below a few tips. What is it?  If you do not know yet about the Agile Lean Europe event, here a few tips. ALE is a event for practitioners, meaning people who already practice agile methodologies like developers, modern CEO, teachers, leaders, etc.  Sharing ideas and solving problems are the ALE mains goals: people can propose topics where they share their experience, other can ask to solve a problem the can’t alone  The event ...

No EN version yet here, sorry.  Second version. Précision du principe de communauté pour résoudre des problèmes. Ceci est un message personnel à toi qui serais dans le doute par rapport à ALE2016 . Il y a quelques semaines, j’étais à Mix-IT , une conférence de développement informatique / organisation, pour assister Yves Hanoulle dans l’animation du jeu The Scaling Ball Game . Durant les conversations hors des sessions, j’ai échangé avec différentes personnes sur le prochain événement auquel je vais participer : ALE2016 , A ma plus grande surprise, j’ai découvert qu'ALE impressionnait, faisait peur ou était incompréhensible pour ceux qui n’avaient pas encore jamais participé à cet événement. Mon message est simple : Laisse toi aller, viens à ALE2016. Durant les 5 premières premières sessions dans chaque coin de l’Europe, les remarques ont toujours été les mêmes. En repartant, tu auras : Découvert des participants qui sont tous très abordables. Tous viennent à cet évé...

The second ALE (Agile Lean Europe) main event occurred in Barcelona the 29th-31st August 2012. At the beginning of the second day, an energising passion could be felt and those who were in Berlin last year, understood that the ALEnetwork magic is repeatable. I would like to thank all the organisers for this gift and hope others will follow their example. A thousand tips, smiles, books, domains of knowledge to discover, etc. are now somewhere in my brain. Some of them will reemerge later, some are already digested. So here below are those currently on my mind.   People in action ALE participant engagement is probably the most astonishing differentiator with other events. During the full three days, at every moment, the attendees proposed, shared and enlightened workshops and sessions. All of them are passionate, with different levels of knowledge. Most of them have an activity related to the ALEnetwork, like organising an event for their local community, running online pr...

Update:  please find the xALEc Dashboard here .   xALEc is an ALE online open space using Google Hangouts every Monday 9:30 pm CET. Adrian, (@adibolb), Jaumes (@JaumeJornet ) and I had the first xALEc session on December 12th, 2011. The session was like a physical open space session: a great conversation, not focusing precisely on the proposed subject. We collected a few tips and answers to questions we hadn’t asked ourselves before the beginning of the session. So it works, and please find below some remarks and a few improvements to consider for the next ones. Twitter is the best place for sharing links before the sessions using the #xALEc tag. Sessions can be proposed anytime during the day. The session starts at 9:30 pm. Leaders may prefer to open the Google Hangout with extras, 5 minutes before the session, The language barrier will broken after 5 minutes of conversation (enjoy each accent). We are not there to speak English but to improve our Agile/Lean...

Update:  please find the xALEc Dashboard here . Last week, I talked with Olaf and Marcin about the possibility of meeting ALE guys online and sharing ideas and problems. But how could it be done? Using Internet communication tools for group conversations became a common practice a few years ago. Skype has been mainstream for this purpose for years. Due to its paid video offer for groups, only the voice system is really used. Google has proposed its Hangout system for a few months with a free video offer for groups. The availability of this function allows everybody to think about free group meetings online. Also, the facilities to use Google Documents in the hangout, provides a full online collaboration framework. Still to come, Google promised, a streaming facility for the people who want to listen to a conversation ( on air ). The open space format is finding more and more advocates in a wide range of communities and contexts. Future conferences will be more a mixture o...

At the beginning of ALE 2011 , the program sofa (Oana, Olaf, Marcin and myself) proposed an explanation of the organisation. Please find hereafter the session video and the Prezi used during this session. ALE by Example: The Story of Organizing ALE2011 on Prezi ALE2011 is already the past, but every day I learn something new from someone I met there. Sources: OlafLewitz : ALE2011—The Story of Organising with a Purpose

 During the ALE2011 unconference, a few of us spoke about local communities and ways to improve them through the ALE network. Hereafter, I tell you about what we are doing in Lyon this year and then ask you how we can share tips and get speakers to come here. What we used to do When we started having monthly meetings two seasons ago, we tried to produce slide-shows by ourselves or we took them from the Internet. Then, we presented them to the small group of attendees. We really understood we were missing interaction with people and also that the core volunteers were getting tired. The second year, we mixed games and conferences in different ways. But even though the sessions were improving, we were struggling to satisfy all attendees. Beginners felt the sessions were too high-level, and others were expecting more expertise or a different format. While writing these lines, I feel like we still miss something. Although we want to spread the best AGILE/LEAN practices to...

There are several ways to advertise your products and publishing a video tutorial on YouTube is a pragmatic one. Have a look at the one below from Hamid Shojaee from axosoft to understand the Scrum roles and artifacts.

Last April 2011, while I was recovering from organising Mix-IT , I kept coming back to the proposal to be an ALE2011 organiser. While 40 people had already committed, I posted a yes, telling myself, I would only spend a few minutes per week. However, like all the main organisers, I spent a few dozen nights working and collaborating through these Internet tools. I loved it! By committing to this event, I wanted to: get back into the international scene find practical tips and knowledge related to my professional context organise an international event from home find links from the Agile Lean European community to my local on These last days, participants, speakers and organisers have already explained ( see feedback page ), that the main differentiators with any other event, were the attendees’ engagement and their willingness to spontaneously share. For the first time in my life, among the few dozen people I met, I didn’t have to make a single effort with any...

In 2011, while agile methodologies are more than mainstream, the Product Owner position is still not well understood or defined. While I’m convinced the “Team engagement in a stream of value creation” is one key factor of agile principles, I can’t find a slogan for the Product Owner. When you want to learn about agile, you browse the Internet, find the best books to read , find a local community or an active mailing list. If you want to understand the agile Product Owner thing, you have a few ways to learn about this position. To be efficient, the first step is to understand your current context: Do you work in a project world with: A unique customer who knows his end users and pays for what he specified years ago? Your customer is inside or outside of your company, but the project’s health is yours and your customer’s problem. A customer who defined several bunches of requirements and wants to implement them step by step? Your customer is inside or outside your company and h...

As I explained in a previous blog post , I feel that trying to progress only by using books, the Internet and our local agile community exchanges does not provide us/me the tools to be really efficient. A few months ago, Alexandre sent me an Internet link to a group of Europeans who intend to build a network with different goals. If you read Olaf’s post , you will understand the full story, but the first important event was in Madrid at the XP2011 conference, where more than 30 people proposed a vision of the ALE Network . That is summarized in the video below. Utopian? If you take a look at the ideas , I bet you would tell yourself: there are too many ideas and nothing realistic will happen. A network the size of Europe seems big to me from a transport point of view. I was thinking myself about making a call this summer, but I was thinking about a closer border. It could be the Franco-Provençal territory first, then its extension would be done step by step. But the ALE...

The “ Club Agile Rhône Alpes ” was born in Grenoble and then, its creators helped us, Lyon citizens, to develop a section in our town . On Tuesday 7th of June, we hold a retrospective of this year’s activities. This backward-looking session also helped us to exchange about our general feelings of Agile/Lean in our area. Previous to the retrospective, Stephane made a brief introduction of his telecom lab and concluded by asking questions like: How could I teach agile to my students? What is the first step for agile in a research context? I understood Stephane is interested to be more active in our community. This is great news, because our active group was mostly composed of coaches and industrial profiles. Having a researcher will probably help us to define clearer goals and also push us to review the new research papers in our fields of knowledge. Welcome Stephane. Romain led the retrospective and proposed the speedboat game to achieve it. We didn’t accurately follow the fin...

Two months ago, Mix-IT took place in Lyon, and our team ( JUG Lyon + CARA ) will soon give some feedback about this event. For my part, I learned a lot. Below are a few points that I want to share with you. Context The idea of a conference in Lyon was initiated by JUG Lyon, and then they proposed that we (Lyon Club Agile Rhône-Alpes) co-organise it with them. For me, Agile Grenoble is the main Agile conference in this region and organising a similar event would be pointless. Therefore, a combination of Agile content with technical knowledge was a clever way to not tread on anyone’s toes. Self-organised team We talk a lot about self-organised teams in the Agile world, but most of the time someone defines the scope of the work. To be fair, Agnes’s ( JUG + Jduchess ) expertise in event organisation really, made the difference, because she really made sure everything was covered. For the first time in my life, I saw a group of people in which ideas were generated every day, ...

Mix-IT will occur on the 5th of April 2011 in Lyon at the Epitech Computer School located 5 minutes walking distance from the Lapardieu train station. Mixity or mixité (in French), pronounce it as you like, but there is only one spelling: Mix-IT and its domain name is mix-it.fr . By mixing agile, test, java, craftsmanship and new trends (NoSQL, HTML5, etc.), you will have a full day conference to share and improve your kwoledge in these domains. Due to the limited number of seats, make sure you book your place now . Also,  we are now accepting submissions for proposals for the event.

Agile Grenoble is the largest event of this discipline in France. It will occur the 23th November 2010 at the Alpes Expo . Please find the programme here . Find pictures of Grenoble here and skiing resorts may be open at this date....

Changing a corporate culture is always a nightmare, and if your software company needs to switch to Agile, it could be even worse. For example, last year, I was quite reassured by the good results with Agile, I mean at least our teams were definitly engaged. Then, I talked with a friend who works in a similar professional context to mine. He explained to me how chaotic the "scrum" was, where every morning, the project manager was fighting people while standing in front of a board. As Jean Tabaka does in her talk at Agile 2009 Australia, above, I used my friend's situation to explain one case of agile failure. I don't want to copycat the 12 failures described by Jean tabaka so : Read them on InfoQ , Check her presentation slides here, Finally listen to her, here below.

After years of doubt about finding a way to work effectively, with less stress due to the recurrent bugs spinning back from my customers, I finally plunged into the lean/agile world. I can tell now that by using agile methodology, I found a way to work with most of the current human profiles I meet in my professional life. Team work, definitely means something in this weird software world where communication has not always been a common asset. While reading the "team management profile" chapter of the "Agile Teamwork: The Leadership - Self-management Dilemma" article, I tried to remember several professional events where each profile was involved. Then, I was wondering if I could give some preference to a few profiles when building team or if I would prefer to have them all. Personally, I really don't want to have defeatists with me nor the type described in this article . I can see that the self managed team minimises each individual behaviour type, b...

For the last 20 years, many industries have been trying to apply Toyota's concepts to their fields of activity.  Based on Scott Killen agile's antecedents and a few other readings, I would like to built a sort of timeline up to the after agile/lean movement. Please add comments and recommencations. From the beginning. Anything from the ancient world? 1785 , Honoré Blanc , Mass production is beleived to be Eli Whitney's invention, but in fact he borrowed the concept from a gunsmith named Honoré Blanc. See, The investor's guide to nanotechnology & micromachines and Implementing Lean Software Development. 1866 , Samuel Smiles : Self Help with Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance. First edition 1859 (see wikipedia) . Why ? In The Toyota way (Jeffrey K. Liker) : Sakishi toyoda was significantly influenced by his reading of a book first published in England in 1859 by Samuel Smiles. 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor : The Principles of Sc...

On Tuesday 9th February, the 4th Agile Cara session occurred in Lyon. I was happy to see new faces, but on the other hand, it is hard to know why people are not regularly attending our by bimontly sessions. Alexandre presented us a subject he had enjoyed at the Orlando Scrum Gathering : Mapping Change Battlefield by George Schlitz & Giora Morein . Organisation change management is well known and is treated in many books like Leading Change (John P KOTTER) and online articles ( Pierre Collerette ), but in this case, the presentation has been constructed based on a Military battle Campaign metaphor. Even the subject is presenting a way to identify the resistance when it comes to proposing Agile adoption, these concepts are suitable for many other management situations. The main idea is to build an organisational map where influencers are red (Enemy of a move to Agile), green or white (Neutral) and then to draw arrows of influence between them. The result is clear, effecti...

Among the technical list given by Mikael Boman in his post dedicated to product owners, "Practice #4: Refactoring " is for sure, the most difficult to agree with. Version control system, Continuous integration, Automated testing are concepts around tools, consequently their deployment has a visual, understandable, palpable result, so there is no worry justifying their costs. If you don't get the Practice #6: Collective code ownership, wait for a few years until developers leave your company and then you will get it. Simple design: While the indicated article focuses on product owners, the simple design concept is obvious to many of us, but developers could feel it as a bridling of their creativity. While we all need to establish a software knowledge culture, where ideas around code design and patterns are understood, we face a dilemma when it comes to asking for simple creation. I didn't find a good way to recommend, but practices like pair programming and cod...