Make it stick.

A few days ago I was watching a recorder workshop by Angel Medinilla given at the Barcelona Lean Camp this February. He was explaining lean principles to the participants by having them practice a series of Aikido techniques or movements. But there was something in particular that he said that resonated with me.

"Metaphors are a powerful way of explaining things to people, because they stick, because they create a paradigm." I totally agree. In fact this post is a compilation of some of the metaphors and similes that I tend to use when explaining agile or explaining agile practices to someone. As usual, this is just my personal repertoire, but I would love to hear what you guys think about it or if you have any other examples that your prefer.

I plan to keep updating this post as I find new examples that I like. I hope you find them as useful as I do.

Angry Birds

I think most people know the angry birds game. In this game you have a goal which is to kill the pigs sitting at different positions on the map by throwing birds at them from a slingshot. You also have lot of obstacles that may prevent you from getting to the pigs directly. for example you would have boxes, metal crates, glass, etc. and some other variables like gravity, speed, the effects of impacting an obstacle, etc.

This is a good example in which to analyze and discuss the advantages of adaptive over predictive planning: transparency, risk management, etc. Another good question to ask would be: What if the pigs could move?

Crossing the river
You need to cross a river in a small boat but there are lots of stones on the way that you can't see because they are under the water, this stones will probably delay your arrival to the other side or even sink the boat.

You can discuss how frequent feedback cycles are like allowing you to lower the river's water level so you can see the tip of the rocks and avoid them in time or minimize damage.

Growing Roses
You are growing roses. You care after the plant and you know who long it will take to grow and give flowers. However, you don't know exactly how many flowers it will give. You can compare the plant to a product being developed and the flowers to the scope or features for the product.


Running a Sprint vs a Marathon
This is kind of evident. You would compare having a sustainable pace, flow and  rhythm,  to running a marathon, and burning the midnight oil to running a sprint. At the heart of everything is the question: How good are you when you are tired?

It is easy to define sustainable pace but hard to apply. It doesn't mean you can't sprint once in a while. Marathon runners do it too, at the end line, or to surpass another runner. But if you need to do it every time, you have a problem.

Building a road
Suppose your client wants you to build him a road so that he can go to his beach house. Does it need to be an 8 tracks highway or just a 2 ways paved road will suffice? Would a track in the middle of the woods be enough?

There are different levels of achieving the same end results or goals and building incrementally gives you the opportunity to deliver value (an unpaved road in the middle of the woods) and then improve upon it with your customer's feedback at hand. Maybe the unpaved road is enough. Or maybe at the beginning he thought he needed a highway, but he realizes now he doesn't. This is also a good sample to discuss prototyping vs building incrementally.

A car going somewhere
This sample is particularly centered on the roles of a SCRUM team. Where the whole car signifies the project or product being built. The driver is the product owner who has the vision and knows where car needs to go. The Team is the chassis or engine, and the Scrum Master would be the oil or liquid for the breaks.

This is it, for now, if you want me to include something else let me know. :)

Video Compilations - Agile Practices

Ever since I heard of agile I have been interested in it, not just because of the school of thought behind it but also because being the lazy programmer that I am, anything that helps me and the team out to be more productive is always welcome.


Last night I was going through some posts on G+ and I came across a video of a presentation by Jon Skeet on Skills Matter and along side there were a couple of other presentations on the subject of agile. So, as it often happens when I am in the learning mood I could not just stop there and I had to watch them all. Which gave me the idea of starting a series of posts where I would link to conferences, presentations, etc. on different subjects.


So here is the first of these posts. This time the subject is Agile Development Practices and it touches as much as the theoretical side as the practical side. Take a look and let me know if you find them useful.
Without further delay, here is the list and until next time!

The Agile Buffet

Scrum,Feature Driven Development,extreme programming, DSDM, Test Driven Development, Business Driven Development, Kanban - wow,lots to choose from. Why choose one when you can take the best from all of them? Let's talk about how to identify the best aspects of different methodologies and how you can work with them.

Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both

There's a lot of buzz on Kanban right now in the agile software development community. Since Scrum has become quite mainstream now, a common question is "so what is Kanban, and how does it compare to Scrum?" Let's clear up the fog. What are these things? Where do they complement each other? Are there any potential conflicts? The purpose of this session is to clarify Kanban and Scrum by comparing them, so you can figure out how these may come to use in your environment.

Visual Management for Agile teams

Join Visual Management blog author Xavier Quesada Allue as he explains basic patterns and introduces dozens of original ideas for building great task boards and visually managing your work and that of your teams.

Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum team

High performance depends on the self-organizing capability of teams. Understanding how this works and how to avoid destroying self-organization is a challenge. Until you understand complex adaptive systems and how Toyota works it is difficult to improve team velocity. Jeff will discuss three core topics:
1. Shock therapy as a strategy for booting up teams.
2. The Cosmic Stopping Problem, otherwise known as the choice uncertainty principle.
3. Punctuated equilibrium - how software systems evolve
Take advantage of these concepts and you may find a way to achieve the ultimate potential of a team. This session will be a "Deep Agile" presentation keying off topics presented to engineers at MIT.

Distributed Agile Development

Most agile methodologies tend to assume that the team is co-located in a single team room. They give little guidance as to how to address team distribution although proven practices are starting to emerge within the community. The Microsoft patterns & practices team has been experimenting with distributed teams for several years, mining proven practices from the community and experimenting them out on numerous agile projects. This talk summarizes those learning and proven practices and gives examples of their application – both good and bad – within their teams.

Scrum Tuning: Lessons learned from Scrum implementation...

Adwords introduced a Scrum implementation at Google in small steps with remarkable success. As presented at the Agile 2006 conference this exemplifies a great way to start up Scrum teams. The inventor and Co-Creator of Scrum will use this approach in building the Google Scrum implementation to describe some of the subtle aspects of Scrum along with suggested next steps that can help in distributing and scaling Scrum in a "Googly way".

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

As software developers, we face a risky, time-consuming and painful process in delivering software. The solution the delivery of software continuously through build, test and deployment automation. This session will talk about how we can move from CI to continuous delivery. It will also help to distinguish between CI and continuous deployment.

Emergent Architecture

Agile software development emphasizes that some increment of business value be delivered every iteration. How can this happen when your iterations are two weeks in length and you estimate it will take you two months just to design the database and the access layers? The answer is to think in differently.

Agile Anti-Patterns!

The popularity of agile software development processes and methodologies is imminent and fast growing. Many organizations and projects turn towards agile to help solve the problems of traditional software development. Scrum,extreme programming,test driven development,and lean are no longer the new kids on the block. 


However, with the rising popularity of agile, mainly due to lack of experience or management over-expecting results,in coming years many agile projects will fail miserably. Agile is not the silver bullet. In his enthusiastic style, speaker Sander Hoogendoorn, global agile thought leader at Capgemini and involved in agile projects since the mid-nineties, demonstrates the differences in traditional and agile projects, and shows why agile projects will fail – independent of the process used. 


Sander elaborates on a series of agile anti-patterns that people will recognize immediately. Think of the Scrumdamentalist, Agile-In-Name-Only, the Pseudo-Iteration, Guesstimation, the Bob-the-Builder Syndrome, Parkinson’s Law, the Agile Project Manager and Student Syndrome – of course, with many embarrassing examples and anecdotes from real-life projects.

Google Tech Talks by Misko Hevery about Testing and Refactorization

This is set of talks given by Misko Hevery at Google Tech Talks. It is definitely worth watching since it touches on the key principles of why we write code that we can't test and how to avoid or re-factor this mistakes out.