Social Glass

It’s been two years since my last trip to China.  This time I’m here to conduct Agile training.  I conducted a two day workshop with practical, hands on sessions.  My team of 18 asked a lot of questions, which is usually a sign that I was getting the point across.  If we’re successful, I’ll be writing whitepapers on how to be Agile with offshore resources.  If we’re not, well, that’s another story.

And Chinese Sprite was my favorite, throat wetting drink during the session.

The Business of APIs Conference went well.  Mashery put on a great conference, and over 200 people attended.  There was an ensemble of impressive speakers, including Michele Azar of Bestbuy, Marc Frons of New York Times and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.  And then there was me.  Checkout my presentation below:

I’m happy to announce that I’m one of the featured speakers at the Business of APIs Conference in NYC on 16 November.  I’ve been leading the charge to open our data at Active.com, and we’ve started a slow rollout of our API.  I’ll be talking about the journey we’ve taken to get to where we are today with our API.  We’ve still got a long way to go.

If you’re in NYC on Monday and are interested in APIs, come by and check it out!

(cross-posted from the active.com Product Development blog)
I came across these while reading the Agile Software Development blog and thought they were interesting enough to share here:

1. Active user involvement is imperative
2. The team must be empowered to make decisions
3. Requirements Timescale is Fixed
4. Capture requirements at a high level; lightweight & visual
5. Develop small, incremental releases and iterate
6. Focus on frequent delivery of products
7. Complete each feature before moving on to the next
8. Apply the 80/20 rule
9. Testing is integrated throughout the project lifecycle – test early and often
10. A collaborative & cooperative approach between all stakeholders is essential

It’s a difficult transition to move from Waterfall to Agile, especially with a distributed team. But if done correctly I’m convinced the payoffs in improved efficiency and quality could be great.

I manage a number of software developers and quality assurance specialists.  Most of them live and work in San Diego.  But others are scattered across various US states and in China.  It’s challenging to create a sense of culture and community given this fact, and I’d be lost if it weren’t for Skype and tinychat.  Tinychat is a free video conferencing solution that allows me to connect my teams in a more personal way.  Body-language is an invaluable communication medium (especially with teams that speak English as a second language).  I find it easier to get a read on somebody if they’re frustrated or don’t understand what is being said, and often I’ll pause and allow those who did understand time to translate to the others.  And who can doubt the communicative value of a “thumbs up” or smile?

The audio features on Tinychat aren’t stellar, so I find I use Skype for audio and tinychat for video when in a conferencing situation.  When it’s a one on one situation I’ll use only Skype.

I’ll never go back to straight audio conference calls.  It’d be like flying international business class, then going back to economy when business class is free.  Ludicrous.