On September 6, I will give a presentation on daily assessment at the Lean, Agile & Scrum Conference 2013, Zurich. The presentation focuses specifically on how daily assessment provides the means for steering the architecture in an agile project.

Here is the official abstract:

"Emerge your architecture" goes the agile mantra. Emerge as in do not plan too much in advance because "you ain’t gonna need it". Instead, build and evolve it along the way. Sounds good, but how do you ensure the cohesiveness of the result?

Testing, pair programming and code reviewing are the proposed means to approach this problem. However, testing is only concerned with the functional side of a system, and thus, it is not able to capture structural contracts. Pair programming and reviewing work well in the small, but they do not scale when you need to handle the millions of details that form modern systems.

The architecture of the system is important and it deserves special attention. Daily assessment is a simple process consisting of the following routine:

• make architectural concerns explicit,
• craft automated checkers to capture the concerns,
• discuss findings within the team,
• distill corrective actions, and
• act.

This process requires both a new kind of infrastructure, like Moose, and the associated skill to enable you to craft checkers fast and cheaply. However, this is a technical detail. The critical benefit comes from making architectural decisions explicit, from involving the entire team, and from the daily system cleaning.

This tutorial is targeted to both engineers and managers. We cover the basics of the process, and we accompany the conceptual descriptions with real life examples.

More details can be found at humane-assessment.com.