With me in this case. The world is also interesting, with many things going on on the energy front at the moment.

I just arrived home from the pair programming party in Mechelen. I worked with Pascal van Cauwenberghe on our new project 'hourensou' (Japanese for spinach, and for a practice from the Toyota way). We're building hourensou to help us level out the load for the various events we organize.

The amount of 'stuff' we have to do is getting to the level that some pragmatic automation will save us time. We've got about six people signed up to help already, as this will also be a fun exercise in making a ruby on rails application.

We also talked a bit about blogging. Pascal suggested making small deadlines for yourself and finishing 'whatever' within that deadline. So that is what I did, I made up most of this blog entry (and some more) while I drove back.

Agile Alliance election results

I was eligible as member for the agile alliance board, and I didn't get elected. A friend asked me about the election results today, apparently they haven't been made public or sent to the members yet.

Looking at the list of board members on the agile alliance website it hasn't been updated for at least a year, so I'll break the news then, this is what Rachel Davies mailed me:

The people who were elected this year are: Mike Cohn, Rachel Davies, Jutta Eckstein, Ron Jeffries, Ole Jepson, Brian Marick, Angela Martin, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.

I congratulate the new board, and wish them a lot of fun in a year where the alliance continuously delivers value.

So, watsgeburt with me? I've been giving three training courses in a month. Two runs of eXperience Agile here in Eindhoven, and training plus coaching on Pair Programming in Karlsruhe. That has been a lot of fun and learning, some of which I hope to feed back to this blog or the systems thinking wiki.

It was also quite exhausting, maybe that's why I had a mild flu last week. This week, I was taking it fast and slow at the same time. I'm focusing on getting things done, first attacking stuff that annoys me or stressing me out. The strange thing I find, is that while I was working on 'stuff' (which I normally postpone, because It's not stuff for nothing - I hate it), I was getting lots of inspiration. As well as a lot of stuff and things done, I was hyper active this week.

What am I up to next? I'm scheduled to give some more courses in September, meanwhile making some time for vacation (It seems I'm going sailing again :-) ), do a bit of coaching here and there (I'll be in Karlsruhe august 4 and 5, so if you'd like to grab a beer, feel free to contact me). I'm also working on developing and/or marketing a few new courses on agile software development and interpersonal communication.

I'm not likely to be bored. Ever. I'll be off now, the garden and my lunch are calling me. In the meantime, I recommend a listen to watsgeburt.

I see it more as being very playful with language. I couldn't care less for most Nederhop (Dutch Rap), but this one I find hilarious - the lyrics seem to be a good deal gibberish, and the beats are excellent. The word watsgeburt itself is a neologism (or gibberish, depending on your point of view ;-), and since according to my regular search engine, it hasn't spread to English yet, let's see what happens ;-).

Watsgeburt means 'what has happened', and it's pronounced in a funny quasi American accent. There's an attempt attempt at watsgeburts etymology over at the vpro website. The origin seems unclear, most likely it originates from another .

My thoughts are with people from my community over in London. Reading agile planet yesterday, I was touched by a very eloquently written eye witness report from Mike Roberts (on the bombings two weeks ago).

Curve has been playing my car stereo recently. This quote from Die Like A Dog resonates:

Peace in a world free from religion peace in a world where everyone gets heaven

Keep on rocking', keep on bloggin'. Back to the regular programming.

I'm currently developing a course on agile software development ( eXperience Agile) and a course on pair programming. I've been puzzling on pair programming before, and now seems a good time to pick up this thread.

I stumbled across Flow, stuckness and interruptions over at recycled knowledge:

Stuckness cannot be overcome by will or planning, only by insight, and the arrival of insight is not predictable.

One of the things Pair Programming and regulalry switching pairs helps me with is getting unstuck. Rob Westgeest and I completed the first run of eXperience Agile on monday. As we do with software, we develop the course iteratively. After this first version, we were looking for ways to simplify the code and support scripts we use for the programming case, an online auction system dubbed Agile Auction.

Observing both teams in the course competing, I got the feeling there were just a few too many steps between adding a new feature and having it show up on the auction site. I knew we could remove some, but wasn't exactly sure what. On tuesday, I was pretty exhausted, and was stuck thinking of improvements, so I decided to relax a bit. At night, I drove to Mechelen, Belgium to attend the pair programming party.

I put up some stories for our website acceptanc test framework rintegration. I also had some wishes for Wiki2Go. I wanted to have what I call Rublets - small bits of ruby application embedded in a wiki page. Pascal van Cauwenberghe said:

Funny you should mention that, I was just working on something along those lines...

Pascal wants the registration form for xp day benelux as part of the wiki (we use a wiki as back-end for the conference website), rather than as a separate page. So far, I hadn't delved in to Wiki2Gos sourcecode, as I'm just gladly using it. The funny thing is, that Wiki2Go is like Agile Auction written in Ruby, so that gave me an excellent opportunity to compare and get some fresh ideas.

So, what did I learn from working with Pascal? The Rublets feature was fairly easy to build (if you leave out security issues..), as it basically means opening up the templating system already present. Pascal's way of dealing with requests coming in from a browser was a bit simpler, so that enabled me to remove a step from agile auction on Wednesday. Pascal's approach to integration testing a cgi application is also different, as was the development environment he used. That was interesting to see.

What made it difficult for me to 'drive' while pair programming was the babylonian collection of keyboard layouts we have in Europe - just one hours drive and they're using AZERTY keyboards, which I as a QWERTY touch-typist have a lot of trouble with...

After about one and a half hour Rublets in a basic form were done, and we celebrated with belgian beer and looking around to see what the other pairs had done. Johan Peeters and Christian Neumanns had tried to build a web-proxy to simulate phishing - to see how and if websites can protect themselves against phishing attacks. Sven Gorts and Hans Keppens had worked on brainstorming session for xp day benelux.

Fun to see that agile people everywhere use similar ways of coming up with sessions. Hans and Sven sat around a table with a stack of index cards. They had brainstormed about six sessions, and afterwards they asked what sessions would have the most value - they're also going to ask their colleagues that.

So, at the end of the evening, I drove home with a ton of new ideas, new inspiration and Rublets for Wiki2Go. Beforehand, I wasn't sure how much fun a pair programming party could be, but it was :-) Especially if you start off your evening with belgian food and beer on a sunny terrace... Needless to say, I wasn't stuck anymore.

There has been a lot of debate (and I saw many session proposals around the topic) on Selling Agile. I believe it is best to sell as little as possible; make agile easy to buy by focusing on benefits and specific situations. Focusing on practices and how agile is different from other approaches works less well.

Working on projects, and going to conferences I heard many, many benefits, so the problem is not whether there are benefits, but more how to condense them, and make them specific to a particular audience. Marc Evers suggested storytelling, Nynke Fokma came up with making benefits for a particular role (e.g. an HR manager or executive).

I've just started a mind-map to work out the benefits per role for myself. Here's what I came up with for an HR manager (I've abbreviated HR, as I find applying the word resource to describe people to be old-fashioned).

Some Benefits of Agile for HR managers

• Less sick days
• Higher staff retention
• Easier hiring
• Higher employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is what it boils down to, really. People in a well running agile team are happier, because they are more productive, work with less interruptions, have good rapport with customers and management and generally feel they have a place they belong (remember the theme from Cheers?).

This results in less sick days (some people report a fifty percent decrease in sick days). As for hiring and retention, I asked a friend of mine why agile doesn't spread in his organisation, while his group is growing every year. He said:

People don't leave, because they enjoy working here so much, and as they tell others, others come to apply for a spot here as well.

If a team or group functions like that, hiring and retention almost become a non-problem.

The session was very interesting, however I did not get the "aha!" effect during it. The effect came later:

I always had the feeling that it what not possible to improve my communication or management skills. It was possible to improve the technical skills, but not the "soft" skills: one was a communicator or was not. Actually, this is false. It is possible to improve your communication and your management skills: that's what did the Balancing Act for me.