My immediate need for understanding more about Agile development is that I’m helping to organize the new Reynolds Journalism Inst. News Collaboratory. The point of this effort, as Jason Kristufek recently wrote, is to be a “do tank,” not a think tank, for experimenting with new options for the news business.

That’s why we’re trying to engage in this community people with diverse types of “do” experience — technologists, librarians, entrepreneurs, financiers, advertising and marketing pros, etc. And, yes, journalists too. The point is to actually get people working together to try stuff and share the results, not just to talk about stuff.

The question then becomes: How do you get people to decide on which problems to solve or experiments to try, parse those out into doable chunks, move their efforts forward, and assess results? Rather than try to do this all on the fly, I thought it might be useful to borrow some ideas and practices from Agile development.

For context, here’s the Agile Manifesto, as well as an excerptWikipedia’s current article on Agile:

“Agile methodologies generally promote a project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.”

So with that context, here are my live tweets from this discussion (cleaned up a bit). Unless otherwise attributed, all points made here came from Desi McAdam…

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Now in the Agile methodologies session, which I hope will help with RJI collaboratory.

There’s a difference between Agile development & utter chaos. But Agile can devolve into chaos.

Agile is a very rigid process. If you don’t stick to the process, things fall apart quickly.

Agile is an iterative process: earlier work gets outdated quickly. Cycles are smaller, iterative, to adapt to change as change happens.

Pair programming is more popular with females — more interactive, cooperative. Keeps you on track, out of rat holes.

In Agile, you have to be disciplined: Organizations and your pair partner must be disciplined. Very accountable.

Pair programming is a wonderful way to do knowledge transfer.

Pair programming improves code quality. If you’re coding and someone’s watching, you’re less likely to do something hacky.

Pair programming is more productive. People don’t generally like to interrupt working pairs. (Interesting!)

Agile also is about sustainable work pace: Don’t burn people out, get the most benefit from coders.

Some companies require some up-front planning, like wireframes or mockups, before throwing Agile development team on it. Do you have a good base?

Agile used in Spot.us development process. David Cohn came to us with wireframes. We started storycarding. Right off bat, we had to prioritize and think about what desired feature could go.

Storycard = definition of a chunk of work. Say what the business value is first. Get client to tell you, helps set priorities

Glitches with Agile: Lack of quality assurance (QA): Developers should be writing test code. Pivotal tracker (popular Agile project management tool) doesn’t address QA.

Rally, other tools do account for QA — but they’re bloated and slow and tedious to use. Simpler configurable tools needed.

Standup meetings: key part of Agile process. Can work in any organization. Very short meeting: everyone stands up, gives recent and current tasks, identifies obstacles.

Agile is hard to do in a distributed environment (workers not in same location). iChat, screen sharing helps. Good manager/developer communication is crucial.

Good Agile stories follow INVEST principles (from Extreme Programming, a related discipline): Independent (self-contained), Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable (you can guess how involved/big it might be), Small, Testable.

ME: I’m liking the story analogy of the Agile process. I think media people will be able to relate to that.

Negotiable = not defining the story in such rigid detail that it can’t be changed.

Desi recommends Liz Keogh as a great resource on thinking about Agile.

ME: The Agile session is incredibly valuable! Desi rocks!!! I needed exactly this info right now!

I’ll be sharing more thoughts on Agile later — but for now here are a couple of takeaways that struck me:

Storycarding reminds me of journalistic news judgment. The process of breaking a project down into tasks that meet invest criteria reminds me how journalists and editors decide which news and information warrant development into a story. Both involve assessing a situation and needs, and matching it with criteria. Both appear to be more like art than than science or rote procedure.

Applying Agile techniques to other fields (such as news and journalism) is itself an experiment that should be handled in clear storycard-like chunks. It may not work, and it certainly would be a culture shift. I think, for cultural reasons this is a strong reason to involve geeks, entrepreneurs, and others in this process — and to team them together with journalists to promote knowledge transfer.

…More thoughts later. But for now, what do you think? Please comment below.

Recently a colleague asked me a question that I hear from many people: “How can I blog without making it a time sink?”

It seems to me that the key to blogging efficiently is this: DO NOT treat it like writing an article or report. That is, make blogging part of your ongoing processes for research, notetaking, and communication.

A blog post is not (or at least, it shouldn’t be) a writing assignment you must prep for and deliver as a finished package. Let go of the idea that you must have everything nailed down, organized, and edited before you publish. (A tough one especially for writers and journalists, I know, but consider it a kind of experiment or Zen exercise.)

Here are some specific techniques to accomplish that mindset and habit switch…

• Blog your initial brainstorming. At the point that you start to get intrigued by a topic or question, blog it. A post can be as simple as, “I’m starting to learn more about [X], and I’m wondering [Y]. Here’s why I’m curious about that. Do you have any information or views on this? Please comment below.” Boom. That’s a useful post — and potentially a good way to speed your learning curve and spark an engaging public conversation.
• Blog your research & discovery. Did you just pick up an interesting tidbit about a topic you introduced in an earlier post? Blog it. Cite the source, and say why you think it’s interesting, or why you’re skeptical or puzzled about it, etc. Link back to earlier relevant posts you’ve published, or use your blog’s categories to connect posts on a theme. Post done.
• Blog your interactions. Did you just have an interesting conversation relevant to a topic you’ve been blogging? Ask the person with whom you conversed if you can blog the relevant portion, and whether you can identify them. This is especially easy with e-mail or IM conversations, since you can just copy and paste. If they don’t want to be identified, you can just use the old anonymous-source trick, as long as the speaker’s identity isn’t crucial to the insight you’re sharing.Or, when you’re asked a question and the answer would be useful to many people instead of just one, blog your answer rather than merely communicating your answer privately. That way your answer becomes available and useful to all, permanently.

The clincher to all this is to use your blog as your backup brain — or at least as a public notebook. Why not get more mileage out of work you would have done anyway by changing your habits toward managing information and communication publicly? Instead of keeping your thoughts, notes, and conversations to yourself, post them.

The second advantage is that this information will probably become more findable and useful to yourself as well as to others. Ever tried to find that old notebook where you stored conference notes from three years ago? See what I mean? And, as I mentioned, adopting blogging into your existing processes can speed and enhance your learning process as well as increase your visibility and influence.

What do you think of this approach? Have you tried it? How might it work (or not) for you? Has it indeed lessened the “time sink” problem of blogging? Please comment below.

(NOTE: This post is a slightly adapted version of a post I published on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

For the past couple of years I’ve maintained a separate weblog, The Right Conversation, focused on the emerging and fast-moving field of conversational media — an enduring passion and professional focus of mine. However, it’s proven to be too difficult for me to maintain both weblogs. So I’ve decided to fold The Right Conversation back into Contentious.

I’ll be updating content from that blog and republishing it here at Contentious, including all comments, so that all the content will reside in one place and be accessible by a single site search engine.

What do you think of this move? Please comment below. And thanks to everyone who’s been reading The Right Conversation.

I just did something I’ve never done before: I’ve completely cleaned out my e-mail in-box.

No kidding. Right now I don’t have a single message in my inbox. All incoming messages have been processed. Aaaaaaaahhhhhh….

This is a huge step forward for me. Due to the nature of my work, I rely heavily on e-mail for my professional and personal life. Of course, I haven’t always managed it well, and I’ve tended to let things accumulate in my in-box instead of figuring out what needs to be done, if anything, with each message.

My inbox had become an inordinate psychological, emotional, and procedural burden for me….

MerlinMann.com

My hero, Merlin Mann.

I’d look at it and feel stress for all the things I haven’t even started to deal with yet. It was a chorus of internal and external voices nagging at me: “You haven’t started this project at all yet!” “I’m depending on you for this!” “You need to make a decision.” “What’s the status?” “Gahran, you’re screwing up!” “You don’t really care about me because you don’t respond to me!” “I want to distract you for a minute.” etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum

Last night, I actually fled to my mountain cabin to get away from the accumulated stress. I was pretty frazzled, and once when I looked at my inbox I actually screamed. Good thing I work at home, and I was alone at the time.

Running away to the cabin worked — partly because I only have dialup there, and Gmail is painfully slow on dialup so I tend to not check e-mail much up there. I drank some wine, sat on the deck as night descended and watched a couple of episodes of Deadwood on my laptop. And I slept well. I definitely needed an altitude adjustment.

In the morning I went for a walk, made breakfast, read a chapter in a Zen book about habits, and then drove back down to Boulder. On the way I listened to this podcast by Merlin Mann, the productivity guru of 43Folders fame. It’s an audio recording of a presentation he recently gave to Google staffers about his Inbox Zero approach to managing e-mail. (Sounds geeky and tedious, but it’s actually a lot of fun. Merlin’s a great presenter, very ungeeky and unpretentious.)

As soon as I got home, I opened my laptop and the stress descended upon me once again. So I started implementing what Merlin suggested in the podcast and on his site, and I started feeling better. I started with about 100 messages in my inbox, and whittled them down during the course of the day. I started with the most pressing things at the top having to do with finalizing arrangements for upcoming business travel, and then I finally attacked the pile from the bottom (oldest stuff) up.

I deleted. I archived. I labeled. I designated fodder and to-dos for ongoing blogs and projects. I handled quick responses. I delegated.

And then… I was done. It’s all clear.

Ahh, I can breathe…

Here’s the video of Merlin’s presentation:

Like many self-employed folks, I’ve got waaaaaay too much on my plate — in terms of client projects, “business housekeeping,” my own interests, and (of course) life. Managing time becomes crucial, and I don’t always do a good job of it. Every day I find myself procrastinating on something that I really should just get done. Of course, the effects of this accumulate through time and occasionally I end up in crisis mode trying to slam through something.

Don’t get me wrong, I get done the vast majority of what I need to do, pretty much on time. But repeated time-crunch crises suck.

One of my current goals is learning to minimize day-to-day stress, and procrastination definitely stresses me out. So I’ve been paying more attention to how and why I procrastinate. That’s been interesting. Here are a few things I’ve noticed about my own habits…

1. Shame. The top reason why I procrastinate is because I’m ashamed that I’ve already put off taking action one or more times. When I see an e-mail pop in, or a calendar reminded pop up, regarding something I’m already behind on by my own reckoning, I feel a flush of shame and want to just push it away. The bigger the accumulated shame, the harder it is to act.
2. Rebellion. Even though I’m the one in charge of loading my own “plate,” I sometimes get annoyed that it’s routinely overloaded. I then rebel against that sense of being burdened by ignoring a task that needs doing, or a communication that needs to happen.
3. Subconscious priority-setting. No matter what my conscious mind decides my work and life task priorities should be, my subconscious mind often has a very different opion on that subject. Sometimes I just don’t do things because I’ve lost motivation, I’m discouraged, or they just aren’t as important to me as they once were. Eventually my conscious mind is forced to recognize this and make choices — but that can get messy.

…Notice that these all have to do with emotions and the inner working of my mind. Notice I’m not trying to judge these as character flaws. They are simply processes and circumstances that exist.

I find that when I look at things for what they are, I can start to manage them or adapt to them. I never seem to get very far when I try to deal with my life, work, mind, and emotions as they “should be.”

I’m mentioning all this because I think these kinds of internal processes have a great effect on how people interact, cooperate, and conflict online and elsewhere. So don’t worry, I’m not getting all touchy-feely-woo-woo on you. I’m just starting to pursue a new line of inquiry. Bear with me.

Does your procrastination have emotional triggers? If so, what are the emotions, and how are they triggered? Please comment below.