Gartner AADI Trip Report

In December, I attended the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Las Vegas. This was my first Gartner conference, and I have to say I came away impressed. The quality of the presentations was excellent and the speakers were very polished. The main focus for me during the conference was Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Master Data Management (MDM), and Business Process Management (BPM). I have been selling the benefits of SOA for some time and hope that after attending this event we are finally ready to start implementing.

What are we looking to gain from SOA? First, I'll paraphrase what Gartner defines as SOA. It's about how to design a system with an architectural style that is modular, distributable, discoverable, swappable, and shareable. Given that definition, we are looking to improve our agility through improved responsiveness to business changes and improved developer productivity. I'm excited about the opportunity to lead this initiative and anxious to get started. My vision is to start with a centralized team that will focus on governance, service portfolio management, development, and support. We will focus on data driven services as I believe that is where the most short-term value is and will help us move our MDM initiative along as well. The team will very quickly need to become more involved with our business leaders in order to provide long-term value providing services that actually meet business needs. Finally, once we have some core services available, BPM will become a much more viable option for our business users.

The possibility of enterprises services working on a core set of master data that is accessible with a variety of applications and business processes is an exciting opportunity that has me driven. I'll provide an update on how we're doing in a future blog. If you have experience in this area, or suggestions on where to start, please let me know.

New Site for Kanban Beginners

If you're looking for an introduction to Kanban, then you must check out Kanban101. This site provides an excellent introduction to Kanban terminology and concepts. It also compares Kanban and Scrum from a high-level perspective. The site does not provide a lot of detail, but if you are new to Kanban or just want a refresher on the basics, then it's for you.

Staff Book Club Update

The team has completed The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork: Embrace Them and Empower Your Team and it was tremendously beneficial. Over the course of several weeks team morale, cooperation, and productivity has dramatically improved. The book was good overall, but I believe the most important part was the team involvement. We met twice a week with each team member facilitating at least 2 chapters over the course of the book. We had great discussions and wouldn't meet without the entire team present. If you lead a team, I strongly encourage you to start a book club and participate in it with your team.

Another one of the benefits, was the creation of a Team Mission Statement. This came up during the discussion of one of the chapters. We decided to create and publish one of our own. We solicited feedback from the team, received buy-in from our executive sponsor and came to consensus. The result's are now proudly displayed on the wall in each team members cubicle.

Finally, the team was so encouraged with the results from our first book, that we've decided to continue. We will be reading Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit starting in December. This is a relatively short read, 8 chapters, that we will finish after the first of the year due to holidays and vacations.

Team Mission Statement
"Leverage team insights, strengths, and competencies to deliver on-time, high-quality, cost effective solutions that provide increased and sustainable value to our business partners while supporting [Company]'s purpose, values, and vision."

BA Training In Mason

Ellen Gottesdiener is an industry leader on Agile Requirements and will be teaching a class at MaxTrain in Mason.

MAX will give IIBA Members and their colleagues a 10% discount off of the cost of the class ($1,295) AND also donate 10% of the registration paid to the IIBA Cincinnati Chapter! When registering, IIBA Members should use Promo Code IIBACVG20

Agile Requirements: Collaborating to Define and Confirm Needs

When: December 2-3, 2009

Where: MAX Technical Training, 4900 Parkway Dr, Suite 160, Mason, OH 45040

Registration: http://www.maxtrain.com/classes/classInfo.aspx?id=EBG-AR

Instructor: Ellen Gottesdiener

Overview: In agile projects, requirements are the basis for delivering business value for customers. Requirements analysis is integral to delivering the right product at the right time, and on time. This intensive course builds skills in creating small, well-defined requirements to deliver value one iteration at a time. Through practice exercises, you’ll learn how to define and prune your product backlog items, collaborate to develop requirements, adapt your requirements practices, and clarify your business needs. You’ll gain an appreciation of both the content and the timing of requirements analysis in agile projects, and you’ll learn why it’s crucial to collaborate with the entire project community. You’ll leverage EBG’s Agile Business Analysis Roadmap to learn when, where, and how to draw on other analysis models to build your agile project. Emphasis is placed on calibrating the content, format, and timing of your requirements analysis so that you can prepare for and participate in iteration planning and daily requirements analysis as requirements are transformed into code and tests.

This course is endorsed by the IIBA™

Attendees will receive 14 CDU’s upon completion of the course.

Questions on this course? Please contact MAX Technical Training 513.322.8888

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Cincinnati IIBA
cincinnati.theiiba.org

Model Oriented Architecture

The International Association of Software Architects has made available the presentations from their Model Oriented Architecture E-Summit. They are available here http://www.iasahome.org/web/home/blogs.

SQL Server Question of the Day

One of the tenants I live by is continuous learning. With my technical expertise based in SQL Server, I read the Question of the Day on SQL Server Central to test my knowledge and hopefully learn a new nugget that I can apply to my daily job. I have decided to post a few questions myself in order to share some of my experiences with the larger SQL Server crowd. Look for my next question that will be posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009. Hopefully you will participate and get the correct answer. Good luck and keep learning!

Scrum Master Role with Product Backlog

I've had a couple of intense discussions the last couple of days regarding the Scrum Master's role in managing the Product Backlog. During a Sprint Planning session, it was discovered that the backlog did not contain enough work for the development team for a 2 week sprint. During the planning session with the development team, a discussion started on what role the Scrum Master should take in ensuring that the Product Backlog was always detailed enough to provide enough work to fill a sprint. My stance was that the backlog is owned by the Product Owner and the Scrum Master should not have to spend time reviewing the backlog prior to the Sprint Planning in order to ensure it was ready or could become ready during the session. The planning session is time for the team to discuss the backlog and ask questions in order to gain enough details to provide an estimate and potentially accept the work for a Sprint. If the backlog is not ready and/or the Product Owner doesn't have the information the team needs during the planning session, then the team should not proceed. Some view this as the responsibility of the Scrum Master to remove the "impediment" of an inadequate backlog prior to holding the planning session. I disagree and would appreciate your thoughts on the subject.