William C. Wake's Blog

December 2004 Archives

Team rooms

William Pietri has posted a picture of his team room, at http://www.scissor.com/resources/teamroom/

I'm maintaining a gallery of team rooms, too, at http://xp123.com/xplor/room-gallery/index.shtml. I'd love to have pictures of your team room or charts that you use.

XP2005 CFP

IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper submissions: January 16, 2005
• Acceptance notification for full papers: March 6, 2005
• Submissions for tutorials, workshops, panels and activities, PhD Symposium, and posters: March 1, 2005
• Acceptance notification for submissions other than full papers: March 20, 2005
• All final manuscripts: April 3, 2005
• Pre-registration ends: May 7, 2005

Conference Chair: Michele Marchesi, University of Cagliari, Italy
Local Chair: Mike Holcombe, University of Sheffield, UK
Program Chair: Hubert Baumeister, University of Munich (LMU), Germany

For any additional information please contact Hubert Baumeister at: program_chair@xp2005.org

Creativity

Design of Cranium

NASAGA '04 - North American Sim. & Games Assoc.

Nov. 3

"High Performance Teamwork," by Thiagi et al. This session used the commercial game Break the Safe (TM Mattel) as a vehicle for looking at a team's ability to work together. "Break the Safe" is a cooperative game - the team wins or loses as a whole. Thiagi made the point that high-ropes courses etc. can be too exciting - the teamwork they engender doesn't necessarily transfer back to day-to-day experience.

What makes a team? Having one (clear) goal, and more than one member. Ideally, these people are interdependent, and have diverse skills.

Thiagi reported a modest experiment around anonymous vs. identified feedback; they found anonymous feedback was better. But feedback that's a laundry list is too much - better to give people one actionable item.

"High performance teamwork depends on individual skill."

Nov. 4 "99 Seconds". This session gives each presenter 99 seconds to make their point.

Judee Blohm showed how to fold a piece of paper in half and make a book, "My story" in 10 minutes: a cover, 2 pages of content, and a back page "About the author."

Thiagi described a good 99-second session:

• It's auditory, not visual
• It's a blended medium - should provide both entertainment value and educational value.
• No bait and switch - be self-contained.

"Play Their Games Your Way" - Les Lauber and Bill Wake. We provided a boatload of games, brought from yard sales, and encouraged people to study how they worked, and to take inspiration to make their own games.

"Six Keys to Making Learning Active", Mel Silberman. "People have to go through a learning experience to have a change experience."

1. Hearing: Clear overview, catchy headlines, vivid examples, creative comparisons and analogies.
2. Seeing: flipcharts/whiteboards, overheads, handouts, live demo, video, props, posters, dramatization, cartoons.
3. Questioning: pair questions, written questions, highlighting, planted questions, question selection. "Asking learners questions is 1/10 as effective as letting them create their own."
4. Discussing: don't use open discussion. Use subgroup discussion, partners, go-around, next speaker, panel and fishbowl. Discuss in groups of four.
5. Doing: test, experiency, practice, perform without prompts.
6. Teaching: jigsaw teaching, peer lessons, peer tutoring.

"Cracker Barrel". This session gave people ~20 minutes to make their presentation, with a bunch of people presenting simultaneously at different tables (with 5-10 participants at each for each 20-minute session).

Sonia Ribaux showed off easy board games. One example was tic-tac-toe made with post-its - answer the question and acquire the square. She also had some generic board templates. Another group showed off a board game they'd had a graphic artist design, and Kinko's put on vinyl; that looked very nice. Another table had Thiagi present magic tracks. Another table had Leslie Brunker demonstrate a number of interesting (if obscure:) skills.

"Classic Games Night" - I went to Chris Saeger's demonstration of the classic Beer game. His version used a smaller board that a pair could manage, but demonstrated the same systems issues.

Nov. 5

"Junkyard Sports" challenged people to use found materials to create a golf course.

"Sharpen Your Thinking Skills", by Brian Remer and Bill Wake. We developed a session to compare intuition/flow, deduction, and induction.

"Dancing with Garbage: The Art and Science of Putting Stories to Work", by Jo Tyler. This keynote led with a touching story about a garbage man who dances.

The speaker works with teams to help a company hear its own stories. This helps with both explicit and tacit knowledge, and lets people mentally rehearse a situation without consequences. She helps find stories by asking and listening, by using stringers, by soliciting stories from outside, and by web sites and so on.

There are shadow stories as well: the dark side. They take longer to tell and are harder to stop. You need to be careful with them.

In telling stories, space matters: line of sight, acoustics, lighting, chairs, airflow.

Tellable stories that listeners like: authentic, relevant, structured, audience awareness, engagement, theatrical devices.

"Training Games for Two", Thiagi et al. They used traditional card games, modified to work with custom cards.

"Free Cell": this was free time for game-playing. I spent most of my time on Vanished Planet, another collaborative game.

"Ten Secrets that I Learned in the Last Ten Years", Thiagi.
1. Profound truths. Bohr said, "The opposite of every profound truth is also a profound truth." Ex. "Look before you leap" vs. "He who hesitates is lost."
4. Diversity. He took an exam and was found to be "naive and racist". "Treat humans as humans, and don't patronize."
3. Perseverance. Do something a little each day and keep doing it - for years!
7. Game design. Three approaches: realistic model (takes too long - by the time you're ready, the world has moved on); "build an airplane while you're flying it - design a game while you deliver" (using improv and situated cognition); framegames (content and process separately).
8. Goals. "Focusing on goals is the most dysfunctional behavior you can have." "If you have objectives, you cannot be objective." Consider Open Space approaches; most conferences are BLM - Be Like Me. Don't have SMART goals - if they're achievable, what's the point?
5. Facing reality. "Reality is an illusion."
6. Training. Individualized.
2. Fun. "Immersion and engagement are what matter, not fun." People learn when they're in an emotional state, happy or sad. Fun is a byproduct of learning.
9. Problem Solving: managing polarities is what's important.

"The Wonderful World of Words", Sonia Ribaux and Kevin Eikenberry. "Fractured Proverbs" had us fill in creative answers to half-proverbs. "Quote and Questions" had people find the person holding the card matching the other half of a quotation. "Speak One Word at a Time" is an improv exercise.

"Demagnetic poetry" has a set of words printed on half a file card, and teams could create their own poems.

"The Wizardry of Accessing Your Mental Potential", by Sandy Lieberson and Sandy Dignes. They used "Serious Play" tools from Lego (TM) to have people create art demonstrating a challenge.

OOPSLA '04

10-24-04 - Sunday, and 10-25-04 - Monday

"Usage-Centered Design in Agile Development", by Jeff Patton. This tutorial used a series of exercises to simulate how UCD works.

"Dungeons and Patterns", "Test-Driven Development Workout" - Steve Metsker and I offered our tutorials on patterns and TDD. We also did a session on Framegames for the Educator's Symposium.

10-26-04 - Tuesday

"The Future of Programming", by Richard Rashid. He described several interesting bits of research. One system created a "black box for humans", capturing video every few seconds. SPOT is Small Personal Object Technology, e.g., very smart watches. There will be a kit available 1Q05. He also described research in development tools, for better testing and better modeling.

"Mock Roles, not Objects" by Steve Freeman and Tim MacKinnon. This left me once again aware of how different the mock object approach is from how I do TDD. The design seems more conscious. I don't know how much that's good or bad. It does make dependency injection more natural.

"Systems of Names and other tools of the not-quite-tangible", by Ward Cunningham. He reviewed the idea of mining experiences for patterns. He used System of Names as an example of this, with a very simple Problem => Solution form. He also likes the idea of leaving room for new things: the wiki has a prompting statement for new pages. Finally, Ward reminded us of the importance of being receptive to discovery and integration of new ideas.

"Methodology Work is Ontology Work", by Brian Marick. Ontology refers to the kind of things that exist (philosophically). Brian highlighted Lakatos' philosophy, and suggested that the result is that it's rational to produce a program that seems exciting and spins off results (regardless of its "truth"). (To be fair, Brian pointed out that Lakatos would hate this attitude.)

So:

• Have a hard core 3-6 postulates.
• Work out the consequences, and merrily ignore counterexamples.
• Prefer novel confirmations.
• Keep throwing off new results.

Brian described a second "trick": use perception to provoke action and reinforce ontology. For example, have Big Visible Charts that show a team where it is; have monitors that go red when tests break.

"Agile Customer Panel" (various).

• "Customer is not an administrative role" (?)
• "Customer interaction patterns are simple but difficult" (Linda Rising)
• "How do we know what has value?" Put it in ridiculous order, and let the customer rearrange it. Tie groups of features to business value, favoring early deployment as proof.
• Customer prioritization is hard but has the best opportunity for creating high value.

"First courses in Computing Should be Child's Play", Alan Kay. Changing the bulk of people requires a contagion model. Flow as a balance of challenge and ability.

10-27-04 - Wednesday

"Code Complete", Steve McConnell. There are plenty of bad ideas, but there have been advances: higher-level design, daily build and smoke test, standard libraries, Visual Basic, Open Source Software, the web for research, incremental development, test-first development, refactoring as a discipline, faster computers. But - software's essential tensions remain: rigid plans vs. improvisation, discipline vs. flexibility, etc.

"JMock Demo".

"Wiki BOF". Seeding can be important: seeded pages with incomplete ideas, invited guests, no passwords, compelling questions, etc.

10-28-04 - Thursday

"Amazon Web Services", by Allan Vermeulen. There will be computer-to-computer "grid computing" superseding the person-to-computer web computing era. He demonstrated a variety of tools that you can use with Amazon to make this work.

"Outsourcing - How will your job change?" (panel). It's clear there's fear of outsourcing, but it can work. Approaches built around the idea that "they" aren't just as smart as "we" are are misguided and doomed.

"Exocumputing", Jaron Lanier. He tried to suggest different approaches to computing. Computers as built today are very brittle. Perhaps we can try new ways inspired by biology.

Scrum Gathering Oct '04

The Scrum gathering was a workshop gathered for a couple days in Denver, this past October. We worked in three groups: metrics, process, and facilitation. (Scrum is an agile process. I think of it as approximately the project management part of XP, though that's of course not fair to either one:)

I participated in the facilitation group. (The others were metrics and process.) We spent a lot of our time trying out a variety of simulations and other means to help teams understand what it means to do Scrum. I contributed two exercises: Push Line/Pull Line (a demonstration of lean manufacturing), and Second Agenda (a role-play of a standup meeting).

Esther Derby shared a debriefing framework she uses: What/Gut/So What/Now What? "What" asks for objective data about what happened. "Gut" asks for your emotional reaction. "So what" asks for your interpretation. And "Now what?" asks what you'll do next. This framework helps us avoid jumping to interpretation too early.

The process group identified challenges around cross-functional teams, the role of testing, and the challenges of leading or lagging behind (e.g., the analysts want to be an iteration ahead). The metrics group identified metrics as a means of making management comfortable, and created and highlighted various means of helping with that.

I enjoyed this workshop a lot. As always, it's good to meet people and put names with faces. It really helped me feel a sense of community.

On my way out of town, I passed a quotation on a building: "Stay firmly in your own path and dare; be wild two hours a day!" - Paul Gauguin.

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