In this interview, I had the pleasure of meeting Federico Zuppa, who is an old friend of the Agile community.
Federico is from Argentina and has been working at 10Pines, a company very focused on the technical side of Agility, for about a decade. Federico was among the first to help promote the Agile movement in Argentina, and he has been a very active contributor to the Agile community in Latin America.
In this interview, Federico told the story behind “Agile Software Development in 10Pines”, which is a book that summarizes his journey through Agility and the lessons that he learned along the way. Federico’s journey began by practicing eXtreme Programming back in 2007 and it was then that his enthusiasm for Agility was born. At that point, he began to connect with other Agilist in his country and later he went to work for a couple of years in San Francisco, California where he could learn and read the most relevant books about Agile that had been written for that time.
Upon his return to his native Argentina, Federico joined the nascent 10Pines, which had the flat hierarchy as one of its fundamental pillars. Within 10Pines, Federico began to realize how software could be created in a company that shares and lives the Agile values. Following the principle of self-organization, Federico raised the idea of writing a book to his colleagues at 10Pines so that they could all evaluate it and decide if it was worth paying Federico’s salary while the writing lasted. Fortunately, the support was there and he began to write his book in an iterative and incremental way and with the help of reviewers and contributors who were his colleagues.
Federico said that by 2018 the book was completed and central ideas emerged from it, such as the sequential process that describes how they build a product in 10Pines when they are hired by a company. He included in the book an explanation of:
- Why they do what they do in each phase of product development
- Why it must begin with a Product Discovery to understand the problem and design the solution as a team
- Why a value proposition is needed
- Why user stories must be told and not written
- Why plans are one more artifact to achieve the final objective to generate business value
- Why iterative and incremental development is valid
- Why technical excellence enables the product to become sustainable over time
In closing, Federico commented that he would like to write another book or the next edition of the current one. Hopefully, this initiative will materialize in the future so he can describe even more details about what he and his colleagues will continue to learn by walking the path of Agility.
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