Agile Product Development

Newsletter about teaching at HARBOUR.SPACE in Bangkok, Thailand

February 7, 2024

Today at HARBOUR.SPACE we talked about metrics. Thanks to Chris Rogers for first sharing “The Space of Developer Productivity” by Nicole Forsgren which was the reading assignment and philosophical underpinning for our discussion of “agile” metrics. If you haven’t read that piece I recommend it highly. As we enter the age of AI, we’ll need to rely on metrics to figure out what the heck everyone is doing (including our new AI virtual team members), so we need to be alert to their value as well as potential misuse.

Link to article “The Space of Developer Productivity”

February 6, 2024

Teaching in Bangkok is so rewarding! ❤️ After a week emphasizing how important human relationships are to being truly agile, and intentionally establishing as much psychological safety as I could, it was time for a retro.

Last time I taught at HARBOUR.SPACE in Barcelona I held a retro about how the class was going. While I got invaluable feedback that helped me improve the class, we had too many students (20+) and too much of a power imbalance (I grade them) for us to go deep. This time, I decided to ask each scrum team to run a private retro over the weekend on (a) the team project they had done on agile roles and (b) how their team was working together in light of all I had taught them about team dynamics. I was nervous, because some of the teams didn’t do well on their first team project, and most of the team members didn’t know each other. The students are highly diverse culturally and linguistically (see prior posts). Had my brief explanation of retros been enough? Was I setting them up to fail, or to have an emotionally challenging experience?

Imagine my delight when ALL FOUR TEAMS held truly meaningful, deep, and productive retrospectives, all on their own! 🎉 Here are some excerpts from their personal reflections:

• the Retrospective session that the team had was unbelievable. We came from a team that was extremely diverse who all felt like total strangers, but ended up with a team that was ready and eager to support one another. …almost everyone of us personally opened up for at least 20 minutes… We became a team where we agreed to share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences over the next two weeks. We now know that everyone came with good intentions, but language barriers and expressions of our own character could have made one to think otherwise.
• Hearing my teammates share their frustrations and positive suggestions, made me feel more connected to them and to our shared goals as a now, agile first team.
• Other folks shared their thoughts too, and suddenly, it felt like we were in this open, comfortable space.
• The whole retrospective and assignment prep marathon lasted three whole hours, but surprisingly, everyone was all in, working passionately late into the night.
• After the retro, A wave of relief and satisfaction washed over me. I felt a sense of accomplishment. I contributed meaningfully without compromising my principles.
• It was interesting to see other members highlighting issues I didn't even notice or didn't think about as a potential issues.
• Before the retro, we had a lot of issues like time commitment, team alignment and agreement to singular ideas since we all come from different backgrounds. During the session ... We just felt so much human and grounded. One thing for sure, we learned to foster a renewed sense of psychological safety, something I never thought could be important to productivity and team work.

February 1, 2024

Bangkok class update: Today we created team agreements, then formed scrum teams through a self-selection exercise. In the local culture, avoiding causing others pain by discussing difficulties is highly valued - people tend not to speak up. For some of my students, agreeing to speak up honestly if things are not going well is VERY difficult.

I gave each team a hard assignment, due tomorrow. I told them that for my last class in Barcelona, I found out afterwards through the feedback submissions that some scrum team members did not pull their weight, and others had to do all the work. Even though I asked repeatedly if this was happening, no one spoke up until it was too late. So today, I proposed that as part of their grade, the students would anonymously grade EACH OTHER on how well they collaborated with the group. But guess what? They quickly agreed that wouldn't work either, because people would vote-swap and game the system! We agreed to keep the idea open for now.

It turns out that I have a few students in the class who've been using agile for many, many years. Also, I have some young undergraduates who have barely heard of agile. This presents a great opportunity for peer teaching and learning, because "agile" as it is practiced in real life varies greatly here from what I have seen in other countries. Also, Shu Ha Re.

Tomorrow we're diving into using AI for agile, looking at Perplexity, Claude, Chat GPT, and my own personal agent based on Agile 2 and what I've learned so far about crafting good GPTs. Should be a fascinating day!

Chinese New Year is coming up soon. Today on the campus we were treated to a display of dragons and acrobats, it was astonishing. Here's a few pics from UTCC, and one of Wat Arun at sunset I snapped last night.

January 31, 2024

Hello from Bangkok! What an amazing city, and teaching here at HARBOUR.SPACE is fantastic. On Monday, students read the Agile Manifesto in their native language and in English, and compared the meanings with one another - so fascinating to hear their conversations. If you ever have the opportunity to run this exercise with people who speak different languages, try it - very eye-opening. Once I get the transcript, I'll share some of their insights.

January 20, 2024

One of the best aspects of my work with HARBOUR.SPACE is the international students I teach. How fascinating to discuss agile with people from many different cultures, each with unique ways of working. We read the manifesto in all their native tongues and compare notes on translations. Such deep insights emerge! My class starting Monday has students from:

• Czech Republic
• Germany
• India
• Kenya
• Malaysia
• Myanmar
• Nigeria
• Philippines
• Russia
• South Africa
• Thailand
• Turkey

Link to the Harbour.Space course syllabus