Yesterday I had the pleasure of providing a 1h remote demo of Moose to the members of the Club Agile Rhones Alps. You can watch the recording on the cara74 page.
The audio and the picture was done through Skype, while the screen sharing was achieved through TeamViewer. It was fun to do it remotely. From and experience point of view, there were at least two things that made for a interesting experience:
- I did not see the audience. This was tough. During face-to-face demos, I spend most of my time looking at the audience as I try to understand what works, what does not, what needs repetition, or what needs to be told in a different way. In this case, it felt like driving blindfolded: dangerous and thrilling.
- Slow interaction. If during face-to-face demos I can react in real time to the points raised by the audience, in this case, the communication was less real-time. This was both a problem and an opportunity. On the one hand, this lag induced a low interaction. On the other hand, because of the lag, I had more time to think.
All in all, it was an interesting experience. At least for me.
Long time ago, almost in another century, while still a young student, I got hired as a software engineer at a software company. I was a junior working with seasoned engineers.
The company was located in a large house with a nice garden. When I joined, I was given two options for where to have the office. One was in a quite corner of a small room. The second one was in the lobby which was rather windy due to the several windows and doors, and rather noisy given that this was the place everyone was traversing through. I chose the second one.
After poking around a little while, I decided that I want to introduce some new things in the company. And, I did not make it a secret either. Of course, not many took me seriously. I was still a student still struggling with my final exams.
I knew I could not do it alone, so instinctively, I started to look for allies. To find them I needed first to construct a map of what was going on in the company to understand who has what skills. The first strategy was to ask around, but proved to not be successful because talking was perceived as a waste of time, and as everyone had real work to do they did not have time to talk with me.
So, instead of asking for something in particular, I decided I will simply listen to whatever they will have to say whenever they will want to say it, without me pushing any agenda onto them. To get them to do their talking around me, and not in another place, I installed a honey trap. Only it did not have any honey, and it was not a trap.
My formula was: peanuts and coke. Every day, I brought with me a large bag of salty peanuts and a couple of bottles of cold coke. As my office was in the lobby, I simply put the bag on my desk and invited passing people to have a bite. Peanuts are special because of two reasons. First, you spend more time working on getting the peanuts out than you spend on chewing. So, what do you do in the meantime? You talk. Second, you can hardly eat just one. You have to have more than one. And if you combine their saltiness with a bit of cold sweet coke, you simply want more. And so, in the end, you talk more.
This might seem like quite a manipulative trap. But, it is not so if you tell it openly. Every day I told them that I give them the peanuts exactly because I want to listen to what they have to say. I even explained how it works. And they still continued to choose to be there.
Not everything they said was important, but interesting enough everyone did have something interesting to say. After a short while, eating peanuts from my desk became a small thing and people would form groups to do it. In about a month I built my map, I found my allies, and together we started our little grass-roots projects to introduce concepts like automatic builds, continuous integration or project planning.
In about a year, people changed significantly the way they developed software. Do not get me wrong: It is not because I changed them. It is because they changed. I merely started the process by proposing alternatives.
The moral of the story: I am not sure if peanuts and coke are essential, but given a chance, people do seem to want to be listened to. And, it is also apparent that listening to people is a good start towards finding ways to improve the situation. Especially when it is them that have to finally carry on with the improvement.
On September 28, I will have the pleasure of giving a talk at Scrum Breakfast Bern about daily assessment, the humane assessment process that empowers engineers to control their system’s architecture.
You can find more information and a registration form on the SwissICT website. The attendance is free.
Many things have happened around humane assessment in the last couple of months. Among them, I decided to host my blog posts related to assessment on the humane-assessment.com/blog. Even if this blog remained rather quiet, the was anything but: over the last three months there were some 30 blog posts with novel content.
You can keep up to date by following @humaneA on Twitter, or by registering to the humane assessment RSS feed.
In the future, my assessment related posts will be featured mostly on that site, and not on this blog anymore. This blog will remain about presentation, representation and the rest (minus assessment).
The http://humane-assessment.com site was reshaped from the ground up to offer more information about the humane assessment method:
- the home page paints a brief overview of the reasons and ideas behind the method.
- the MiniBook offers a description of the context, of the method and of how to make it practical by integrating it in the development process, in the organization and by using appropriate tooling infrastructure. The minibook offers several diagrams that are also available in PDF form, and that can also be used as standalone flyers to ease communication.
- the success stories describe real examples of using the method in practice.
- the courses and services pages provide an overview of practical means to adopt the method in companies.
- the humane assessment blog will become the hub of news and information.
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Feedback is always welcome. Leave a comment on the blog, or simply contact me directly.