Finding Team Flow
by Paul Rayner

Living Documentation Step-by-Step
by Cyrille Martraire

 Live Coding with Sonic Pi
by Sam Aaron

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi defines flow state as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” We’ve likely all experienced this flow state individually at various times, but how do we achieve this at the team level?

In this hands-on advanced workshop, you’ll explore how to apply Lean principles of flow to your everyday development work. We’ll take a practical approach: participants will be working on real–world problems. We won’t be covering the basics of Scrum, Kanban or any frameworks etc. There will be no easy answers. Instead, you’ll learn how to ask the right questions, and how to evaluate different models of team flow. It doesn’t matter if your team does Scrum, Kanban, or something else, we’ll cover practical techniques you can take back and apply immediately to your team situation.

Learning Goals

This workshop is designed for experienced agile developers who want to move beyond basic Kanban, Scrum and task boards to a deeper understanding of how to apply Lean theory and practices in their context. We’ll cover:

• Modeling and visualizing your team’s development process
• Visualizing and troubleshooting feature development using timelines
• Story slicing techniques to enable smaller batch sizes and faster feedback
• Applying Systems Thinking and problem–solving techniques to team productivity challenges
• How small improvements in limiting work in progress (WIP) and reducing time spent waiting can lead to major improvements in performance.
• Challenges and approaches for limiting work-in-progress (WIP)

There will be individual and group exercises. We’ll also be working in pairs, using the application Flow as a teaching tool to visualize and measure the presence and impact of these hidden queues on team productivity. You’ll review actual work timelines for several teams to see a radically clear view of team progress and areas where work is getting stuck. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of lean principles, and a checklist of practical steps to confront and manage queues in your own team’s work.

Participant Requirements

You are an experienced software developer with solid experience on agile teams and desire to learn and grow. Bring your laptop to share with a partner for our pair-based discovery sessions using Flow. It’s recommended to read “The Principles of Product Development Flow” (Reinertsen, 2009), but not essential.

If you prefer coding over writing documentation, then you’ll love Living Documentation! A Living Documentation changes at the same pace as software design and development, from establishment of business goals to capturing domain knowledge, creating architecture, designing software and coding. It builds on top of BDD and DDD, but it also has its own key principles and novels ways to dramatically improve your documentation at minimal extra cost by using well-crafted artifacts and judicious automation.

This workshop from Cyrille Martraire, the author of the book “Living Documentation” (Addison-Wesley Professional), will guide you on how to implement the approach in your projects. Even if you haven’t read the book, this workshop is the right place to learn the main elements of a Living Documentation, step by step through a provided sample Java code base.

You will learn:

• How most knowledge is already there somewhere in your artifacts, even in an implicit form
• How just talking and working together may be enough documentation, and when it does not
• How to augment the code to make it fully explicit for further use by people and tools
• How to differentiate between stable and volatile knowledge, and how this informs the way to deal with it
• How to create zero-maintainance Evergreen Documents
• How to recognize Shameful Comments and improve your code from there
• How a word cloud can tell if you’re doing your domain model wrong
• How to generate a Living Glossary straight out of the code
• How Architectural Decisions Records can help make better decisions
• How Design Patterns help document a design decision very efficiently
• How to visualize a design structure by generating a Living Diagram from the code itself
• How to use plenty of other techniques to improve your particular needs, and the main traps to avoid
• How failing to do any of the above is in itself a valuable feedback
• How to introduce the topic in your project and with your colleagues

What you will need

A working Java 8 environment with Maven for two attendees The sample project (only using basic Java) will be available from github or from a USB key

Sonic Pi is a powerful new kind of synthesiser designed to be simple enough for anybody to use. By expressing your ideas in simple lines of code you can quickly create your own sonic compositions and before you know it you’re modifying the code as it’s playing to create your own live performances.                                                                                                      In this kickstarter workshop, we learn, jam, explore, share and perform with each other all through the beautiful creative medium of code. Use Sonic Pi to trigger synth patches, samples, studio FX and live loops.

No prior knowledge of coding is required – just an open mind to new ways of creating and manipulating sounds.

Please bring along a laptop and some headphones with Sonic Pi pre-installed. Simply head to http://sonic-pi.net and download the appropriate version for your operating system (Mac, Windows or Linux).