Wow, a very busy day the other day; my wife was sick in bed with a migraine, I needed to take the boys to the dentist for a check-up (where the only extraction involved my wallet) and a game of Squash to close the day (but let’s not go there on this occasion); and intermingled with all that were two fantastic community sessions:

• WSAF: iGovt / GLS: Experiences from the Trenches
• APN: A Retrospective of Sorts: an Evening with Jeff Sutherland and Jens Ostergard

First up was the monthly lunchtime WSAF get together, which this month was: iGovt / GLS: Experiences from the Trenches.   We had a very solid turnout to the event; it would appear that iGovt is very topical at the moment.

The first speaker was Bill Young, from the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) – the agency who actually manages iGovt (formerly known as the GLS).  Bill has been involved with the shared services for about five years, and he spoke of the big community effort that has helped progress iGovt to where it currently is, as well as providing a high-level overview of what iGovt is all about.  iGovt actually encompasses two things: the iGovt Login Service (iLS) and an Identity Verification Service (IVS).

As Bill mentioned, initial uptake has been poor, with the number of initial users in the 30,000 range; however, that may be about to change.  Many of the events attendees have noted a lot of increased interest in the shared services lately, and Bill mentioned that they were in discussions with a couple of significant New Zealand public sector service providers, which would bring a big uptake in usage – so the tipping-point of the iGovt services might be at hand.

Our next speaker was Datacom’s Simon Ferrari, he went into some more depth around how the systems actually work and how other systems actually integrate with the iLS and IVS.  The iGovt services currently available were built by Datacom, so Simon’s has an inner perspective that not a lot of people have.

The iLS provides both single-factor and two-factor authentication, the latter includes an SMS option that will text a token-code to the user logging in (cool).  Simon also pointed out the emphasis on privacy and how it is deliberately built into the system – as Bill added later the high degree of privacy is intended as “a feature”.

Finally Gabriel Smith and Lee Herd (from Intergen) gave us some useful insights from the perspective of someone wanting to integrate with the iLS and IVS systems.  Of interest was their work which implemented integration between the iGovt services and SharePoint. 

They also spoke of some of the key challenges you’re likely to encounter: knowing how much of the iLS and IVS you need to know (as Gabriel said “you don’t need to reverse engineer it to understand it.”), but the biggest challenge in their view was the co-ordination between the various parties which need to come together to complete an integration.  As mitigations to this they cited great technical resources provided by the DIA as well as the dedicated integrators (also from the DIA), one of which is assigned to integrating projects as an experienced touch-point for support.

APN: A Retrospective of Sorts: an Evening with Jeff Sutherland and Jens Ostergaard

For those who don’t know, Jeff Sutherland is one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto and one of the inventors of Scrum – which in agile circles makes him one of agiles “Top Guns” (and that’s not just a figure of speech – check out his unexpectedly short Wikipedia entry).

Jens Ostergaard is the worlds first first Certified Scrum Practitioner and one of the worlds first scrum trainers.  With over 20 years of practical experience he’s certainly well qualified to talk about scrum practices and adoption.

The format for this event was very informal – basically a mingling session of some of Wellingtons most enthusiastic agile supporters; the ‘formal’ part being an interactive session with no preconceived script (or slides – in fact no data projection at all). 

The content covered included a wide range of Agile / Scrum related topics but centred mainly on adoption; as well as some of Jeff’s first hand accounts of some of the things which influenced his thinking and which contributed to the advent of Scrum.

Jeff also placed particular emphasis on the value of testers, “they should be first class citizens”, and the simple ideas (very core to Scrum) of smoothing out your processes and removing waste.

Here’s a list of some of the more interesting points which I jotted down during the event:

• On the subject of testing (at the feature level) Jeff told a story of when he was working with Palm.  Jeff suggested they measure the value of testing directly after “code complete” instead of during the next sprint (three weeks later, which is what they were doing).  They found (after a month of measurement) that if it cost them one hour of testing at “code complete” it cost the 24 hours to test three weeks later.  “Does that mean it will take us two years to ship something we can ship in a month?” The answer of course, is yes. 
• Was it OK to use developers as testers?  Absolutely, use developers to do testing if it allows you to remove bottle-necks in completing testing.
• On the subject of some of the early work agile related research (while at Ford) Jeff made reference to “The Surgical Team” (referred to in IBM Systems Journals, and written about by Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man-Month"), which was believed to be the fastest way to write software; where one person does all the coding, and they are supported by many specialists (tool specialists, documentation specialists, and so on).    
• 65% of all requirements change.
• 70% of change management processes fail; Jeff cited the primary reason as being simply a lack of urgency at the management level.  These comments were made with reference to Agile / Scrum as that is a change management process.
• Reference to Conway’s law: structure of the code will reflect the organisation. 
• Jeff (in a tone which I would describe as approving and delivered with a seriousness that suggests it was a point worth taking note of) spoke of the “next generation of (Microsoft) tools that will ship in 2010” – these will include Scrum guidance, and Jeff specifically recommended following their guidance. “If you do you will be a survivor.  Microsoft intends to a survivor.”
• Two simple metrics to hyper-productivity:
  1. If you see bug can you fix in less than 2 hours: production will double.  This relies on automated testing and continuous integration.
  2. Story process efficiency.  Build a list of impediments, and prioritise them (and hence their removal).
• The talk closed with a very fitting reference to the Japanese term which started the whole “Lean” manufacturing concept off at Toyota (see: Toyota Production System): “Muda, Muri and Mura” (also see: Wikipedia).  In essence this simply means to: Smooth flow (no bumps); smooth out the flow (remove pressure points); remove waste (impediments). 

As was noted, both by members of the audience and the speakers: the theory is easy, it’s putting it in practice that’s often the most difficult.

Photo's of the event will be posted soon to the APN's Flickr account.