January 2008

The Archives

• Viva Agilista

  Change: Reality Checklist

  01.14.08 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  Organizational transitions are hard. It really requires a lot of items to be put in place before any real change can happen. All of them are people related. 1) Risk-taking culture, 2) Leadership, 3) Coaching, 4) Team structure.

  1) Risk-taking Culture
  The company has to have a environment where people are free to take risks. If people who take risks are punished, the risk takers leave. You’re left with people who do not want to take risks. People who don’t take risks won’t stick their necks out. They’ll be on the far-end of the adoption curve.

  2) Leadership
  This is tightly coupled with the ‘Risk-taking Culture’. The leadership must at least be willing to sponsor time and training for new methods to be used with the product development teams. They need to adopt the change themselves, but they can _even_ play a wait-and-see role by experimenting with a few teams and see how it goes.

  3) Coaching
  Coaching and training. Learning new product development techniques is a really big mind shift. In an Agile context everyone’s world changes. Product managers need to be communicating features a lot differently than they had before, programmers need to be accustomed to requirements changing more frequently, QA needs to create more flexible testing infrastructure, user experience experts need to adopt their methods to teams working in iterations.

  4) Team structure
  There are two environments where introduction of Agile methods are difficult. a) A very large team (split up into multiple, smaller teams) working on a single large product that’s under the gun to deliver on time. Change is hard to manage when a deadline is looming. b) An organization which views their people as resources to get shuffled around every other month to work on new projects. When there are not stable teams, it’s hard for any change to take root.

  

• XP, not your mama's process

  AirWave Wireless (previous gig) Acquired

  01.11.08 | Permalink |

  I put nearly four years into my previous gig at AirWave Wireless. They were acquired this week by Aruba Networks.

  Wi-Fi Planet:

  I—and most of our customers—believe that Airwave is simply the best solution for managing multi-vendor networks. … What customers and prospects are requesting is true multi-vendor support … It is in the context of addressing market demand that Aruba is choosing to acquire Airwave

  –Dominic Orr, President and CEO of Aruba Networks

  Professionally, this is a proud moment. Congratulations to business development, sales, customer support and engineering.

  There is a method to Agile methods. Years of listening to customers, testing and coding works to add real value to a business.

  While searching for news, I noticed a recent job posting for AirWave Wireless.

  We believe that running code and short feedback loops speak louder than excessive documentation and month-long design meetings. We practice test-driven development and have a comprehensive suite of tests — over 31,000 at last count. We pair program, so you’ll learn the system quickly and have a great time doing it. We have short release cycles, which means your talents won’t sit idle working on projects that never see the light of day. Software you write today will be managing enterprise networks in just a couple of weeks. We’ve been cited as the longest running continuous XP project in the industry (six years and counting) so we have gotten quite good at embracing advantages while avoiding its pitfalls.

  Personally, I enjoy working at Airwave more than any job I’ve ever had. I am excited to come into work every day, I work hard for eight hours solving challenging problems, and then go home to lead a well balanced life outside of work. When I’m at work I get to interact closely with a group that is brilliant, funny, motivated, and inspiring. I spend most of the day smiling, laughing, and learning. The team we’ve built is truly a special group, and I’m proud and honored to be a part of it.

  Humm… a group of people that truly enjoy and take pride in their work. Does that reflect in the product they build? Does that impact the value they add to the company? You bet.

  

• Lean & Mean

  Throughput & Bangalore Traffic

  01.02.08 | Permalink |

  

Joe Arnold’s Blog