We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

I was talk-hopping today, so none of these are complete summaries, just enough to capture my impressions from the time I was there. I may go back and watch the video for the ones which turned out to be most interesting.

Yesterday, I noted a couple of practices employed by the QCon organizers which I wanted to note, to consider trying them out with Canonical and Ubuntu events:

• As participants leave each talk, they pass a basket with a red, a yellow and a green square attached to it. Next to the wastebasket are three small stacks of colored paper, also red, yellow and green. There are no instructions, indeed no words at all, but the intent seemed clear enough: drop a card in the basket to give feedback.
• The talks were spread across multiple floors in the conference center, which I find is usually awkward. They mitigated this somewhat by posting a directory of the rooms inside each lift.

Chris Read: The Cloud Silver Bullet

Which calibre is right for me?

Chris offered some familiar warnings about cloud technologies: that they won’t solve all problems, that effort must be invested to reap the benefits, and that no one tool or provider will meet all needs. He then classified various tools and services according to their suitability for long or short processing cycles, and high or low “data sensitivity”.

Simon Wardley: Situation Normal, Everything Must Change

I actually missed Simon’s talk this time, but I’ve seen him speak before and talk with him every week about cloud topics as a colleague at Canonical. I highly recommend his talks to anyone trying to make sense of cloud technology and decide how to respond to it.

In some of the talks yesterday, there was a murmur of anti-cloud sentiment, with speakers asserting it was not meaningful, or they didn’t know what it was, or that it was nothing new. Simon’s material is the perfect antidote to this attitude, as he makes it very clear that there is a genuinely important and disruptive trend in progress, and explains what it is.

Jesper Boeg: Kanban

Crossing the line, pushing the limit or rediscovering the agile vision?

Jesper shared experiences and lessons learned with Kanban, and some of the problems it addresses which are present in other methodologies. His material was well balanced and insightful, and I’d like to go back and watch the full video when it becomes available.

Here again was a clear and pragmatic focus on matching tools and processes to the specific needs of the team, business and situation.

Ümit Yalcinalp: Development Model for the Cloud

Paradigm Shift or the Same Old Same Old?

Ümit focused on the PaaS (platform as a service) layer, and the experience offered to developers who build applications for these platforms. An evangelist from Salesforce.com, she framed the discussion as a comparison between force.com, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure.

Eric Evans: Folding Design into an Agile Process

Eric tackled the question of how to approach the problem of design within the agile framework. As an outspoken advocate of domain-driven design, he presented his view in terms of this school and its terminology.

He emphasized the importance of modeling “when the critical complexity of the project is in understanding and communicating about the domain”. The “expected” approach to modeling is to incorporate an up-front analysis phase, but Eric argues that this is misguided. Because “models are distilled knowledge”, and teams are relatively ignorant at the start of a project, modeling in this way captures that ignorance and makes it persist.

Instead, he says, we should employ to a “pull” approach (in the Lean sense), and decide to work on modeling when:

• communications with stakeholders deteriorates
• when solutions are more complex than the problems
• when velocity slows (because completed work becomes a burden)

Eric illustrated his points in part by showing video clips of engineers and business people engaged in dialog (here again, the focus on people rather than tools and process). He used this material as the basis for showing how models underlie these interactions, but are usually implicit. These dialogs were full of hints that the people involved were working from different models, and the software model needed to be revised. An explicit model can be a very powerful communication tool on software projects.

He outlined the process he uses for modeling, which was highly iterative and involves identifying business scenarios, using them to develop and evaluate abstract models, and testing those models by experimenting with code (“code probes”). Along the way, he emphasized the importance of making mistakes, not only as a learning tool but as a way to encourage creative thinking, which is essential to modeling work. In order to encourage the team to “think outside the box” and improve their conceptual model, he goes as far as to require that several “bad ideas” are proposed along the way, as a precondition for completing the process.

Eric is working on a white paper describing this process. A first draft is available on his website, and he is looking for feedback on it.

Modeling work, he suggested, can be incorporated into:

• a stand up meeting
• a spike
• an iteration zero
• release planning

He pointed out that not all parts of a system are created equal, and some of them should be prioritized for modeling work:

• areas of the system which seem to require frequent change across projects/features/etc.
• strategically important development efforts
• user experiences which are losing coherence

This was a very compelling talk, whose concepts were clearly applicable beyond the specific problem domain of agile development.