Card-Carrying Scrum Master

Dion Nicolaas (not pictured) displays the Agile in a Flash cards on his desk in the TomTom headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Showing a different card each day, he has inspired some colleagues to order their own decks!

Daily Meditations

On twitter, follow "buildndeploy" (Brian Kelly) for a daily meditation on Agile In A Flash. Well, mostly daily. He has a day job, and we certainly forgive a missed day. Brian is going through a card a day (when possible) and providing an 140char summary of his thoughts. Follow along by card number (use this index, or your own deck) and see what buildndeploy has to say.

Brian is using our hashtag #agileinaflash, so it is easy to catch up with his prior reflections.

Getting Better (guest blog post)

Today we have a short article from our guest blogger Johnno Nolan, who caught our attention in twitter when he said:

Great 2 hear the team talking soft dev. We go through an Agile in a Flash card every am and critique. Can feel devs caring again

Johnno Nolan's story is still in progress, but I felt that tweet was inspirational enough that I invited him to provide a short blog post, and he kindly submitted the following story.

I've worked here before. We developed with chaos. I left. They persuaded me to come back. They said it would be different. "We can do things a different way. Your way" they said. The chaos would be mine to tame. I accepted and returned.

The cold reality set in. The team was demotivated, resigned to the current system. Worse, we'd tried to implement 'Getting Better' before (I don't like to use the term Agile) but we'd lack courage and when the main change driver had gone, adoption fell by the wayside. There was mistrust, ignorance of doing things that way and then the team was asked to pick back up where they left off. So there's a been an open dialogue of what's been wrong and we've been focusing on the basics to 'Get Better'.

And we are.

I can look back a couple of months and we were not talking, not thinking, just accepting of the norm. Now we're learning together. Sometimes we have bad days, but today was a good one.

Before our stand-ups meetings we talk about one Agile In A Flash card. They say story cards are a placeholder for a conversation and that's exactly how we use them. We don't always agree with the card but we talk about it and try and understand. The cards provide a focal point.

Today was really productive, we finished more than we expected. We passed stories back because we didn't think they were good enough. We talked about design. We returned to the cards and talked more about process. For the first time in months we cared and we're proud of what we are doing.

We're not becoming Agile in a Flash but we're Getting Better Steadily.

Jeff and I are receiving several stories every week about how Agile In A Flash is helping teams re-engage with fundamentals. We'll be entertaining other guest bloggers in the future, in addition to providing some fresh content every month.

Card-Carrying Network Weaver

A welcome to Patrick Wilson-Welsh, seen enjoying his new deck of Agile In A Flash cards at the Agile And Beyond gathering in Dearborn, Michigan, where I dare say we had the most interesting table full of people in the entire room. Patrick really wanted these cards. Let us know how they're working out for you!

Card-carrying Agile Tester

This is Lisa Crispin, brilliant Agile tester and author, trainer, and early adopter of Agile In A Flash. Here you see her sharing deep testing insights with Jo, Edgar and Chester.

No animals were harmed or insulted in the making of this blog post.

Agile On A Desk

Dave Rooney, a card-carrying friend of Agile In A Flash, walked into a manager's office and what do you suppose he saw?

The astute observer will see all the cards are marked with either the compass rose ("The Plan" section) or else a waving pennant ("The Team" section). We intended those two sections to be especially interesting and useful for managers.

It does our hearts good to see Agile In A Flash in use. Your encouragement is always welcome here, in pictures, comments, tweets, purchases, or referrals!

Card-carrying Professional Scrum Developer Trainer

This is Andreas Ebbert-Karroum who is busy in Germany, leading codecentrics Agile Software Factory. He looks very happy to have his Agile In A Flash deck.

Card-carrying Team Effectiveness Amplifier

Say hello to George Dinwiddie. George is a well-known and well-respected software development coach and consultant, software blogger, and a Card-carrying Team Effectiveness Amplifier, and a friend of the Agile In A Flash effort (not to mention the authors).

Can you feel how the warmth of his personality radiates from this picture? Yeah, he's like that in person.

Restoring The Trust

Make sure you see Uncle Bob Martin's video Restoring The Trust, about the agile balance.  A certain deck of cards is prominently featured (thanks, Bob!) in the opening and closing moments.

There are a few other cards relating to balance, but clearly the Manifesto card is very close to Bob's heart,  as he is one of the original authors and signers of the both Craftsman and Agile manifestos.

Card-carrying Seer of System Dynamics

(in dramatic Black & White, no less!)

This is Esther Derby, a management consultant and Agilist who is helping companies to put a more human face on software development. We highly recommend her conference talks and blog. Here Esther has a brand-new deck of "Agile in a Flash" and a happy smile.

What's On Your Wall?

Tim describes how the Agile In A Flash cards help make his workspace more informative.

Agile in a Flash Card Index

In order to keep Agile in a Flash very low cost and actually make a buck or two, Tim and I were pressured to keep the number of cards to a very minimum. That's why you'll see no author bios, for example, and no index / table of contents. (Of course, if the book takes off and you buy bajillions of copies, we can likely justify an index.)

Without further ado, here's the index of cards (which also tells you, by omission, which blog entries here are not in this deck--if, uh, all goes well with sales, we'll be doing a second deck):

The Idea:

1. Why Agile?
2. The Agile Values, aka the Agile Manifesto
3. Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto
4. Role-Playing in Agile
5. Agile Success Factors
6. Courage
7. Redefining Discipline
8. Pillars of Software Craftmanship
9. Toyota Production System (TPS) Principles
10. The Right Process
11. Got Organizational Obstinance?
12. Got Individual Obstinance
13. Don't Get Too Deep in Technical Debt

The Plan:

14. Incremental Everything
15. Embrace Change
16. Reach Consensus on Story Priority
17. INVEST in Your Stories
18. Categorize Requirements with FURPS
19. Sail on the Three C's
20. Shrink XL Stories to Fit
21. Acceptable Acceptance Tests
22. Acceptance Test Design Principles
23. Story Estimation Fundamentals
24. A Winning Hand for Planning Poker
25. Iterate with Principle
26. Communication-SMITH with Information Radiators

The Team:

27. Shu-Ha-Ri
28. The Only Agile Tools You'll Ever Need
29. Successful Stand-up Meetings
30. ABCs of Pair Programming
31. Retrospectives
32. When Not Pairing
33. How to Be a Team Player
34. Collective Code Ownership
35. Coding Standards
36. Is Your Team Circling the Drain?
37. Pair Programming Smells
38. Stop the Bad Test Death Spiral
39. How to Stay Valuable

The Code:

40. Eight Crucial Practices of Agile Programmers
41. Build Superior Systems with Simple Design
42. The Seven Code Virtues
43. ReallyMeaningful Names
44. The TDD Cycle
45. FIRST Properties of Unit Tests
46. Triple A for Tight Tests
47. Prevent Code Rot Through Refactoring
48. Refactoring Inhibitors
49. Field Guide to Mocks
50. Break Unit Test Writer's Block
51. Test Double Troubles
52. TDD Process Smells

How to use the deck

People have been asking how to best use the cards in their teams.

We've had several notes via twitter or email about teams reading and discussing them at retrospectives or standup, and even using them in lightning talks at conferences.  We are happy to see them used in this way.

But people have been asking how normal, individual, non-coach team members can use the cards. Jeff provides our recipe for use of Agile in a Flash:

• Pick a card that's relevant and read its front
• Read the back
• Re-read the front to help ingrain the short list
• Consider tacking the card up, so that it's in your face, helping you ingrain the concepts
• Seek and re-read related cards to get a more complete picture of the topic
• Visit the corresponding post here on the blog site if you seek more detail on the topic and why we said some of the things we did
• Visit the links located on many of the cards and at the blog site if needed

Don't forget to google the subject matter, because there is more written than we could fit in either the deck or the blog. Other opinions and recommendations are equally valid.

Please share and discuss the cards with your community, starting with the local software team and its neighbors but extending to conferences, user groups, or any other willing listeners. New insights can come from anywhere.

Javaranch Event

The Big Moose Saloon welcomes writing team Ottinger and Langr to a special event:

This week, we're delighted to have Jeff Langr & Tim Ottinger helping to answer questions about the new book Agile in a Flash. See this page for a description of the book.

The promotion starts Tuesday, February 22th 2011 and will end on Friday, February 25th 2011.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, Pragmatic.

Please see the Book Promotion page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Sit in, ask or answer some questions, see if you can't win your free Agile In A Flash deck. If you don't win one, don't worry. We still have a few left for sale.

Sighting Report

From an undisclosed location in Des Moines, Iowa, comes this sighting report. It is likely a book store, judging by intact plastic wrap and "Alphabetical By Author" sticker on shelf. It also looks like they're down to their last copy. Snag it now, before their supply is totally exhausted!

Card-Carrying Mad Railer

David van Leeuwen, Card-carrying Mad Railer, shows off the new deck of Agile In A Flash that he won in a drawing at the Madison, WI conference.

Lisa Crispin and Courage at Belgium Testing Days

Our deck of cards makes a surprise appearance at Belgium Testing Days 2011 thanks to Lisa Crispin and her experience with the Courage card.

It is pleasing to see the cards having a supporting role in the lives of respected professionals, and to see them appear in a testing conference instead of a more predictable place like an Agile or programming conference. Markus Gärtner provides descriptions of several talks in this blog.

Card-Carrying agile author

Jeff Langr, programmer geek and computer addict shows off his Agile in a Flash deck in front of a warm fire in Colorado Springs. Look, Ma, no shrink-wrap! Tim, have you opened yours yet???

Card-Carrying Embedded Software Engineer

Card-carrying embedded-software engineer James Grenning, fellow-author, fellow-ex-ObjectMentor consultant, owner of Renaissance Software, great guy.  Here James shows off his deck of cards at a Starbucks near Mundelein, IL.  Doing embedded software, but don't know how to do it test-first? See James Grenning (and buy his book Test Driven Development for Embedded C to be released very soon).

Card-carrying Rocketeers

Card-carrying Hash Rocket team members show off their deck of Agile In A Flash cards gifted to them at their office in Chicago.  They are a really great, kind, competent group of people worthy of your business. Tim loves their open workspace and open hearts.