The Analogy Fest is an attempt to manufacture serendipity, to create the circumstances in which clever people might have an "Aha!" moment. We'll do that by having semi-structured, small group conversations about papers that draw analogies between software development and something else.

Analogy Fest will be held at the Agile Development Conference, June 25-28, 2003.

To keep up with Analogy Fest, point your RSS news aggregator at this RSS 0.91 URL. (It's a subfeed of Brian Marick's weblog.)

Getting Ready

You're reading this on the web. Good. That means you can browse through the papers. Print any that pique your interest. Read them on the plane to Salt Lake City.

Each paper is about an analogy between software development and something completely different from software development. The analogies may be serious or fanciful. In either case, they're intended to serve as a trigger for inspiration, a way to say, "What if agile development were like X? How would we do things differently?"

The Event

Analogy Fest meetings are held as part of Open Space. Like all Open Space sessions, they'll be scheduled on Wednesday at 5:15. Paper authors will pick the time they want to meet, as long as it's in the Open Space track (in the evenings).

Here's what we anticipate will happen next.

At the appointed time, a group meets. The meeting will probably have two parts. In the first part, the group asks the author clarifying questions about the "source domain" of the analogy. For example, we have a paper on oil exploration. The group might spend some time talking about how oil exploration works and how the people involved think about what they're doing.

Note that we assume - and will enforce the assumption - that participants will have read the papers before the discussion. People who obviously haven't read the paper should not be allowed to derail the discussion by asking questions the paper answers.

In the second part of the meeting, people will brainstorm ideas. Suppose they believed the analogy - how would they change the way they manage their next project? how they approach their programming? how they interact with the customer? The emphasis here is on concrete actions people intend to try when they next can, actions inspired by the analogy.

Papers

Ward Cunningham, The Journalism Analogy for Programming

Jim Highsmith, Software Ascent

A climbing analogy.

Gary Jedynak and Clyde Cutting, An Agile Project Iteration, the Pilot Way

An analogy between programmers and pilots.

Todd Little, Exploration and Real Options as an Analogy for Software Development

Oil and gas exploration.

Brian Marick, Boundary Objects

An analytical concept from science studies: does it apply to acceptance tests?

Bob Payne and Sanjiv Augustine, The XP Project as a Complex Adaptive System

Ken Schwaber, For As Long As Memory Serves

Geese migration and project planning.

Phil Agre, The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship

This isn't a submission to Analogy Fest, though Agre has given us permission to use it. It's something Marick read and would like to discuss. Warning: in the beginning (at least!), it will seem completely irrelevant. But I think the discussion of citizens staking out positions in a civil society has something to do with us staking out positions in the society of those who care about agile software development.

Your Hosts

Ken Schwaber is an experienced software developer, product manager, and industry consultant. He is one of the leaders of the agile process revolution, as a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, founder and director of the AgileAlliance, and one of the developers of the Scrum agile process. He has been in the industry for over 30 years, starting as a programmer and, by 1984, managing IT for one of Wang's divisions. In 1985 he founded Advanced Development Methods (ADM), a company dedicated to improving the software development practice. He initiated the process management product revolution of the early 1990s, when methodologies were automated and put to practical use on ADM's Mate process manager. He worked with Jeff Sutherland to formulate the initial versions of the Scrum development process and, since then, has helped numerous product and IT organizations implement, run projects, and build products using Scrum and agile processes. He has been a visible proponent of adaptive, lightweight, empirical process for software development.