Encontro Agil was a success!

Hello everyone,
On Saturday, we (AgilCoop) ran the first 2008 agile conference in Brazil (although TDC had quite a few agile talks, the focus was not in agile). The Encontro Agil (or Agile Meeting) happened at the IME (Instituto de Matemática e Estatística - Mathematics and Statistics Institute) of USP (University of São Paulo). The event was free (as in free beer). We had around 200 attendees, 16 speakers, 2 debates and a free lunch.
We followed several ideas from the Agile 2008 conference. We had an ongoing retrospective on a wall between the two main rooms, we had an open spaces room that was interesting but quite empty since people are not used to those ideas, we had a birds of a feather session with 5 rooms discussing several topics and a huge updatable conference schedule.

On the overall, the feedback was great. Some things people pointed out in the retrospective board: we have to have more coffee, especially in the morning and after lunch. There was a load of information to be absorbed in too little time. Maybe increase the conference size or reduce the amount of information on each talk. Hand-over material has to been better selected.
On the other hand, people loved the agility in the event. We had to find a replacement talker (that was me) because another talker (Jorge) was late and the talk ran quite nicely. We adjusted the schedule on the fly to allow Jorge to give his talk anyway. The free lunch was one of the great points and birds got a nice feedback too since interaction is nicer than just listening.

A few statistics of the event. We had almost 500 people that registered themselves to come. From those, only around 300 confirmed their participation on the event a couple days before. And we had 200 attendees which gives us something around 60% drops from the original registration. As it is frequent on computer science conferences, we had 16% female attendees. Around 80% of the public was either a manager or a developer and had between 25 and 45 years old. We also had 41% of the attendees that had no experience with agile methods and 43% that were novice to it (had less than 1 year of experience). To my information, 60% never contribute to free software projects and 25% contribute occasionally. Finally, music is the extra-curriculum activity that most people practice (44%) and/or would like to learn more (48%) followed closely on the learning wish list by dance (35%).

I guess this is it for now. We will have all the content of the advanced talks on the web and a few videos of the event published around. I will post those when they are available. All slides should be available at the AgilCoop web site in a few days as well as on the conference's web page.

Future conferences in Brazil that will have some agile content are Rails Summit Latin America 2008 organized by Locaweb and mainly Fabio Akita and Falando em Agile organized by Caelum. Both will happen in October while I am at OOPSLA 2008 so I won't be there but I expect them to be quite interesting.

And get ready for next year, our goal is to have at least one international speaker.

Agile courses in São Carlos

Hello,
A couple weeks ago, I participated as an instructor in an agile course in São Carlos for Agilcoop. We used mostly the same slides and structure from the course in São Paulo available here. It was a 36 persons class with various backgrounds and age. Although instructors felt it as one of the best courses we gave so far, the feedback from the class wasn't that good.
For the courses, our Net Promoter Score were:

	São Paulo	São Carlos
Theoretical	68%	58%
Practical	60%	80%

It should mean that students from São Carlos liked less the theoretical course and more the practical one while São Paulo had the opposite effect. Considering those are different persons with different motivations and expectations, I would believe one course was as good as the other one and just the expectations were different.

The results of the practical course are also available here for São Paulo and here for São Carlos. The project is pretty nice but students had many problems with the Java Server Faces (JSF) technology. We expect to reduce this overhead for next courses by changing the project to something simpler. Maybe using Jabber or some instant message API. If you have any suggestions for projects that require little background knowledge, let me know. Bye bye!

Teaching agile methods: a nice experience

In the last couple of weeks I was envolve in two courses related to Agile methods. The first one, more theoretical counted with 9 talks:

1. an Introduction to Agile Methods (talking almost nothing about XP)
   
2. an Introduction to eXtreme Programming (XP)
3. Refactoring explained with examples
4. Tests: unit, acceptance, interface, integration and everything else possible
5. Planning agile projects
6. Test Driven Development: a practical approach
7. Tracking agile projects
8. Short introduction to Scrum
9. Short introduction to Lean

All the slides are available at http://agilcoop.incubadora.fapesp.br/portal/slides/curso-de-verao-2008 in portuguese only. I've been part of 3 of then (2, 5 and 7) and it has been a very good experience. It is amazing how people don't really care about understanding the depth of agile methods. They mostly want to hear that it works and that people actually do it for real. Other than that, I was quite happy with the results since I was evaluated pretty well among the talkers and the experience was good.

The last week was the practical course: eXtreme Programming Laboratory. We had 4 teams of 6 students each plus one coach for each. The project was a Java web system built with Java Server Faces (JSF) and the goal was to generate a site to a pizza delivery store cutely called AgilPizza. We had a small bootstrap ready with a static page, a dynamic listing page and a form one each of those with JUnit tests and some Selenium testing.
This experience was much more exhausting since those were full 4 hours teaching days with all sorts of codeaches one might have with a project. I am sad to think that my team probably didn't enjoyed and learned as much as possible during the course. Time restrictions, technical issues and the fact that I was the only one able to solve network problems took a lot of my energies and quality.
One thing that I can assure is that Java web projects are not the best system to work on. I am still searching for a system that has a very flat learning curve on a language that most people can understand and use. Maybe some more dynamic languages such as python and ruby would be good but people have a hard time learning new syntax so I might just take a deeper look into Groovy as an option.
Never the less, it was a very enriching experience and I am pretty sure next time (which will happen in 2 weeks) will flow a bit better even using the same project and the same coaches. I will post later on.

A research about developers' education failures

I'm working with a group of teachers, students and ex-students of my university with agile methods, as I already mentioned. In mid December, we've got a project approved with the Brazilian government to research what are the greatest problems that companies find in their developer's education.
We've set up a nice rails (Ruby on Rails) application with our questions to interview project leaders/managers in all sorts of companies. So far we have interviewed around 20 companies in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Campinas (our very small Silicon Valley) and Sao Carlos. There is no clear problem so far but I will be able to give you more information once we compile all the data to generate our report.

This report will be delivered in about 2 or 3 weeks with our conclusions to the responsible institution. Then we hope to request more funding to develop the courses that the companies selected and offer them. The best part of this is that all the material we produce will be available under a Creative Commons license in our website: www.agilcoop.org.br.

Note that the bad part of this is that all will be in Portuguese which means people will have to translate this work to be able to use it somewhere else. Since it's an open research, I hope I will be able to post a link with our report. As they say:
To be continued...

Late as always

Well,
As usual I am very late with everything. But this time, things are a bit more dangerous. I haven't finished the article about archimedes to submit to the Eclipse Technology eXchange (ETX). Worse than that, I am quite stuck with it. Can't write more than 1 paragraph per day currently. A big problem.

Also, I stopped working on last thursday so I should be a bit more active and present from now on. Got a lot of things to do but still I will make an effort to keep this up to date.

I have very few news at the moment about anything. Just a couple things that might interest people from around here:
I've been going to a Coding Dojo that just started in São Paulo (http://groups.google.com/group/dojo_sp). It is a very nice practice that aims to make programmer train their talent just like musicians and sportists do. Our meetings have been very nice and it is helping most of us to learn python and also to be more disciplined. We just changed our schedule to have meetings weekly on wednesday at 20:00 local time.

Also, I just became a student sponsored by the Qualipso project. I will be doing my masters on the lines of the project and, therefore, hope to finish my studies providing a nice set of practices based on agile methods to develop open source software. And, if possible, I hope I will participate in some nice open source development on the next couple years.

Last, but not least, I just joined as a junior member a very nice group called Agilcoop. The groups main purpose is to spread agile methods into the industry to improve the quality of software produced. Got a few nice tasks to do such as learning some Java FX (that's why I've been having codeaches with the eclipse plugin) and learning to write some classes. It promisses to give me work and fun.

Well, I guess this is all I can get you guys now. I hope to write more often from now on but let's see right?

Hugo