Startup without falldown: the slides

Here are the slides of my talk "Startup without falldown: strategic planning beyond wishful thinking", held at the 8th Italian Agile Day in Rome:

Startup senza falldown

View more presentations from Andrea Maietta

I'd like to thank everyone who has attended, I hope I haven't wasted their time. If you are one of the lucky (???) ones, please help me to improve and leave a feedback here.

If you want an exhaustive bibliography please register here and you'll receive it in a few days, with a bonus mind map of the talk.

Startup without falldown: strategic planning beyond wishful thinking

The official program for the 8th Italian Agile Day has been officially published. I am really happy (and a bit surprised) to see that my talk has made it to the final 26: I am sure that many of the talks that were left out would have been really interesting, so I'd better work really hard to be up to the task. Even because I know that the conference normally has quite a high bar...

It is always difficult to pick one of the talks that are held at the same time, and this year I will lose one more than I did in the previous years. I hope all sessions will be recorded, as it seems, so I'll be able to see them later.

Meet you there... And don't forget to register and donate :-)

Agile Day: independent, thanks to donations

The Agile Day is an event organized by members of the Italian agile community.

To mantain its independence, and at the same time guarantee both a quality programme and free access to registered attendants, in the last years the Agile Day has chosen a brave strategy: sustain itself with self-financing.

This choice has proven itself effective, and the Agile Day has reached its eighth edition and more than six hundred attendants in 2010.

The donations obtained from participants, enthusiasts and professionals that daily work with agile methods represent the esteem and the affection that the Agile Day has been able to conquer year after year.

All the raised money will allow the organization to reach the organizational targets that will make a great Agile Day.

That's why everyone committment becomes essential, every single donation is a step towards the success of the Agile Day.

The Agile Day will be held in Rome on November 19, 2011.
The access will be, as always, free.
All details can be found on the official site.

Our submissions for Italian Agile Day 2011

After breaking the ice at WhyMCA Paolo and I decided to submit a talk for the 8th Italian Agile Day which will be held in Rome on november 19, 2011. Then we lost a bit of control of the situation and submitted three :-)

Unlike most of the presentations we have seen delivered in the previous editions, mainly about technology and methods, which are the expected core subjects of the conference, we have submitted a proposal for a talk about business aspects.

We still don't know whether one or more of our presentations will be accepted; at the moment they're in for the perfection game, in which other submitters and the organizers can give their feedback on the title and the abstract of our talk to help us improve them (or to rule us out).

The abstract so far:

Startup without falldown: strategic planning beyond wishful thinking

Creating an app, even if successful, does not mean creating a startup. A startup serves the purpose of discovering and validating a sustainable business model, so the first thing your financial backers ask you is a business plan.

The best way to create one is to dice a little (the best dice are the multi-sided ones used in D&D as they add a nice variance to the results) and put the outcomes on an Excel file, possibly coupled with a presentation filled with bullet points, incomprehensible charts and never ending description blended with bad quality images.

And then? then you clash with the market.

Luckily there are alternative tools: together we'll see how to combine customer development and the business model canvas to analyze the business and to validate the chosen model.

Read all about our other proposals on Paolo's blog.

A little bit of customer development

After having a great fun at WhyMCA, Paolo and I are thinking of submitting a proposal for a speech for the 8th Italian Agile Day. Up to now we have two or three ideas, but, eating our own food, we should "get out of the building" and test the market to verify our hypotheses.

Up to now, we're interested in a business oriented talk and in prototyping. Maybe Alessandro will join us as well on the latter.

More on this will follow, but if there are any subjects you'd like us to speak about please let us know. If once was enough, or even too much, please let us know as well :-)

Italian Agile Day 2011!

Even an earlier bird than I was last year, I'm happy to announce that the 8th Italian Agile Day will be held in Rome on November 19, 2011.


It is a one day free conference on Lean Development and Agile methods for developing and managing software project aimed at developers, project leaders, IT managers, testers, architects and coaches with experiences to share or that are just beginning to dip into these themes.

Its declared aim is to share practical knowledge, experiences on the field and achieve an active involvement by all the participants.

Free access upon registration, limited seats. For the fifth time running, the event will be self-financed.

Unlearn your MBA

Be an enterpreneur and invest about one hour of your time to watch David Hansson give a talk at Stanford.



The talk is very interesting, David repeatedly insists on focusing on the importance of delivering value in a profitable way. He's also a good speaker, so time will fly by.

7th Italian Agile Day Mind Maps

Too entranced to take notes at the 7th Italian Agile Day, weren't you? don't worry, you can find the mind maps developed during some of the sessions here.

7th Italian Agile Day: a review

Yesterday it was held in Genova the 7th edition of the Italian Agile Day, which is so far the best I've ever attended, so the first thing I'd like to do is thank everyone for being there.

As always, I studied the program for about a week before I made up my mind on which sessions I would follow. As always, I didn't follow the plan. Hey, inspect and adapt, right?

After the usual introduction by Marco Abis, who with many others made all this possible, Paolo Perrotta gave the keynote speech, which was very interesting as it revealed a totally unexpected piece of information: software projects have problems, and writing software is difficult. Strange how I never realized that in all these years :-)

Paolo also talked about the waterfall method, which - curiosly enough - was not so "waterfallish" in the intentions of its author; all the problems originated from the (in)famous picture of phases, which originally referred to the phases of a single iteration. Moreover, there was also a clear note that stated that this model could not possibily work. Somehow this detail was lost.

Anyway, great speech, and all my compliments to Paolo that keeps improving his skills as a speaker.

Then I went for "Note to managers: IT is different, get over it" by Andrea Provaglio, which was very interesting and gave me many starting points for further studies. I was a little flustered when, toward the end of the speech, he said that all changes start from the management, which corollary is more or less that you cannot start anything from the ground up. I revived a little when in a private conversation he was so kind to tell me that all you have to do is persuade the management that a change is due. Sounds easy, but it is not. That's why you have to persuade the management that a change is due by showing them why they should be interested in that change, in such a way that they can understand what you're talking about because you use their language, and what would their advantages be. At this point I was quite happy to see that all the time I spend reading Neurolinguistic Programming manuals is not wasted, as Andrea suggested just what all the manuals do... there must be a reason if everybody agrees on that!

I didn't change the room for next talk by Fabio Armani, "Scrumban, a methodology fusion". Unluckily what should have been a nice background music became too loud to be kept so he had to turn it off. Another annoyance was the projector (or maybe the computer) that kept running out of sync. Putting aside technical problems - wich are always lurking when you have a public, no matter how many times everything went right just before the showtime - Fabio explained how he trains his teams and how they perform. Man, I want to work like that!

In the afternoon, after a very long queue for lunch, the first session was "The secret art of Agile Javascripting" by Luca Grulla. I think that if I had to manage a project with more 50% of the codebase written in Javascript I could just as well get mad. I mean, madder than I already am, of course. But, again, that is because I don't know the language as well as I'd like to (and, alas, as well as I should). Anyway, I'll try to follow his advice: separate what must be separated. And, yes, the DOM is an integration point as well.

Next, I ran to follow Alberto Brandolini for "Due uomini e una lavagna", which was absolutely different from what I was expecting, yet it was another great presentation, from which you could get all his passion and sound expertise. This was the occasion to meet him in the flesh after we exchanged a bunch of posts and comments: I knew he was a prolific writer, but I didn't know he had such a high count of words per second :-)

I was quite undecided for the last session (just like for the others), then I went for "TDD per le viste", a "pomodoroed" session by Matteo Vaccari and Carlo Bottiglieri. I already knew what to expect by Matteo, having seen a slightly modified version of his slides, but Carlo's part of the presentation was quite shocking. The reason of this lies in his (paraphrased) sentence "I was not told that TDD was just for the domain, so I started applying it for everything. TDD is a support for taking informed decisions, and it must be used as such". Sounds extreme, but probably it is not, we only have to get used to it.

And, just like that... it's gone!

The conference was really rich in contents, fast paced, and very well organized. Soon the recordings of all the sessions should be available online here. Also the funding went very well, with more than €5.500 donated by the community for the community (and while donating I also I brought home a wonderful shirt with a "will refactor for food" writing!).

What else... looking forward to the 2011 edition!

IAD 2010 sold out

I hope you registered as soon as you could, because for the umpteenth year (and running) the Italian Agile Day is sold out. Hope to see you there!

InfoQ: Sharpening the Tools

This is a very nice presentation very well led by Dan North. It offers several insights and hints, but I'd like to quote a couple of things.

At a certain point Dan says he doesn't like learning lunches too much, as the fact that you don't commit completely to learning but do it while you're eating somehow implies that education is not important, while it should be part of the job you're (hopefully) being paid for. It is sadly true, yet we have to work with what we've got: it will come as no surprise that I attend all these presentations in my lunchtime, but I found that given the circumstances it's much more effective than trying to reserve a full hour during the rest of the day.

The most important advices are found in the conclusive slide:

• always assume you're out of date
• you owe it to yourself to keep current

So... how much do you know what you don't know?

Registrations are open!

It is now possibile to register for the 7th Italian Agile day which will be held in Genova on November 19. Hurry up!

The proposed program is very interesting as usual, and as usual I'd like to follow many talks at the same time... I wonder what I would do if I weren't ubiquitous...

InfoQ: Agile Team Meets a Fixed Price Contract

I found another interesting article on fixed price contracts managed in an agile way. It also adds some considerations on budget spent, which you don't normally find in articles of the same kind.

7th Italian Agile Day

Unlike last year, let me be an early bird and remind you the 7th Italian Agile Day which will be held in Genova on November 19, 2010. And, unlike last year, I really hope I'll manage to be there!


The Italian Agile Day is a one-day free conference dedicated to the use of agile methodologies to develop and manage software projects. Its intended audience is composed by developers, project leaders, IT managers, testers, architects and coaches who either have experiences to share or are just starting to get interested in these subjects.

Its declared aim is to share practical knowledge, experiences on the field and achieve an active involvement by all the participants.

Free access upon registration, limited seats. For the fourth time running, the event will be self-financing.

6th Italian Agile Day

Better late than never, let me remind you the 6th Italian Agile Day which will be held in Bologna on November 20, 2009. Due to previous engagements (do I hear "baby girl coming"?) I won't be able to be there, but if the coverage will be as good as the one provided last year I won't miss the contents.


What I'll surely miss is the opportunity to meet so many brilliant people at the same time...

A Tale of Two Teams

Take a look at this interesting video that compares the traditional waterfall method with the agile approach.

DW-BI and agile

Kaushal Karnad asked on LinkedIn whether DW/BI projects can be run in an agile manner, as he points out that outputs are mostly reports and extracts and continuous integration would be an issue, having to move data across various DW layers every now and then.

Of course they are! DW/BI projects are, by their nature, to be run in incremental and iterative mode, as the risk associated with a full blown solution is way too high, even more that in traditional software development because of all the non-technical issues related to them. The best approach is to start from the core part of the business, which has the highest priority, and iteratively add new areas and refine what has been released so far, always trying to maximize the value for the customer. And that sounds like agile.

Outputs might be "only" reports and extracts, but what is important is the way you figure out the data and the paths you follow during your analysys: the more you use the system, the more you might feel the need to link apparently unrelated data to gain a deeper understanding of what you're delving into, thus requesting something more (or something different) iteration after iteration: not only new reports, but also new combinations and possibile paths. That sounds like agile too.

Continuous integration is normally about code, not about data, so maybe this is a false problem; anyway, the frequency of updates strongly depends on the real needs of the knowledge workers and often one update a day will suffice.

Agile Manifesto

I can't believe I have waited for so long... better late than never, I'm one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto.

Agile Day - Result Day

During the fifth Italian Agile Day, held last November, I missed the Retrospective for the Italian Agile Community, but I read everything about it in the following days. The community proposed a "result day" in which we would share our experiences and verify our progresses since the agile day, to check whether we're really improving or are in a "one step up and two step back" situation. Gladly accepting the invitation, these are my comments.

A small foreword is due for better to grasp what's behind the result: some of our customers belong in a very politicized niche, and (also) for this reason they say they absolutely need to know in advance exactly what they will get, when they will get it and how much it will cost. Ok, this is almost true for non political organizations too. Anyway, except for small projects, this normally forces us to rate the analysis and give a guesstimate for the software, which will be specified and formalized at the end of the analysis phase.

In the last few months I have been involved, amongst other things, in an assessment project for one of our customers: they need a software and they need it quickly, and we offered them a solution.

Our proposal has a paragraph that explains how we will build the software. It expressely says that the system will be realized in an iterative and incremental way. It says that the estimates are based on user stories (which we verified with their IT manager - our Product Owner, I daresay - who in turn has checked them with his colleagues). It says that the customer will prioritize stories. It says that the project will be divided in 30 days iterations called sprints, and that it will be monitored using a product backlog, many sprint backlogs, burndown charts and running tested features charts. Most of all, it says that the system will be validated by automated acceptance tests.

Well, this is my result: it may be small, but I am really proud of it because it might be a turning point from just being "agile inside" to spreading the agile way of thinking amongst customers and their managers.

I must admit that the fact our customers cannot afford the time requested by a traditional waterfall process made my task easier, but that does not touch me particularly; on the contrary, just the fact that everybody agreed upon the fact that the waterfall process is a longer and more expensive one and that an agile process is needed (we never mentioned it, but you've already figured out we're talking about Scrum) is more than enough...

Many other posts for the result day can be found on the Italian Agile Movement forum page on the subject.

Agile and procedural

Today I partecipated in a discussion started by Dennis Morton who asked if anyone had succesfully adopted Scrum, XP or RUP on non-OO procedural based applications. A little rephrased, these are my thoughts.

Scrum is relatively easy. Implementing Scrum could not be that easy because you have to face several impediments: one of the biggest ones is that it clashes with the existing culture, but that does not depend on the particular language you use.

As Keith and Charlie pointed out, life is easier for OO programmers, as there's plenty of relatively inexpensive tools and technologies (if not inexpensive at all) that can help them: Junit, Cobertura, JMock, EasyMock, Hudson, CruiseControl, Eclipse, NetBeans, and so on and so forth in a sparse order, just to talk about Java.

I don't know of similar tools to be used in RPGLE ("inexpensive" and "IBM" cannot share the same sentence) but that might just be my ignorance, so it is up to the team to find a suitable solution (that could also be an expensive but affordable tool).

Anyway, I have to point out that Scrum is just (?) a very good set of techniques for project management, but it is not enough, as you must have in place the proper engineering practices to benefit from the advantages that Scrum offers.

It is useless to give a product owner the possibility to steer the project at every sprint planning meeting if a simple change requires tons of programming hours, as she always has to weight benefits against cost. You can be agile because you have test harnesses supporting your changes. You can be agile because you continuously refactor. You can be agile because all the team members own all the code. You can NOT be agile just because you use Scrum, as you're just exposing problems - problems that most of the times existed well before Scrum was implemented, so don't shoot the messenger. You also have to master the tools to resolve problems. And the first and most important tool is people, so I'm completely with Keith and Charlie who put them in the heart of the process.

We have to undergo a similar challenge as we'll embark on a very big project next year, almost completely based on IBM technologies. As we're starting from about 650 pages of detailed requirements, aged about one year, a remote customer, a distributed team with several new members (not to mention the rest), we'll surely have to cope with changing requirements (no, not the band in which Craig Larman plays in his free time) and lots of other variables and issues.

It is likely we'll have some answers within the next few months; up to now, as it is well understood that we'll have an application layer exposing services, the only thing that I could think of is the use JMeter as an acceptance testing tool. As always, inspect and adapt, rinse and repeat :-)

We're open to suggestions!