We’re excited to tell you that the Scrum User Group of South Africa
(SUGSA) is planning the first ever South African Scrum Day, in Cape
Town on 01 September, 2009. Yes, the first of Spring!

More details…

This is the first reminder for the next SUGSA Gauteng event on the 21st of May 2009 and we have some interesting updates for you on the evening’s content:

As promised, we have an organisation who will present a case study on the benefits realised with the adoption of Scrum and Agile…

Case Study:

Harry King of Rosami Products & Services, who are contracted to 2Dialog – a company based in Richardson, Texas, will be presenting a case study on how Scrum is assisting them in realising the expected benefits of Agile off-shore development in South Africa…

Book review:

Lionel Bisschoff will again entertain us with a book review

Agile and Scrum Committee Reading List:

The SUGSA Gauteng committee will for the first time reveal what we are reading and a list of subjects and books/articles on those subjects will be handed out.

So far we had overwhelming response and we are looking forward to see everyone… however, please don’t hesitate to bring friends/colleagues and whoever you think might benefit or add to the discussions planned!

Event registration:  http://www.scrum.org.za/resources/event-registration/event-registration-gauteng

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 The previous events were so well attended and using your feedback from this, we have decided to use this event for an open discussion around Agile and Scrum with help from a panel of experts.

Case studies will be presented for discussion, Scrum practitioners and organisations using Scrum will be present to share their ‘war-stories’ with us and to answer your questions.

 Join us for an evening of open discussion – bring your questions, bring your concerns, bring your own ‘war-stories’ and share with all of us… we are all keen to learn!

When: 21 May 2009

Time: 18:00 for 18:30

Where: Momentum Auditorium 1, Centurion, Pretoria (click for map)

Event registration:  http://www.scrum.org.za/resources/event-registration/event-registration-gauteng

Sponsors: Kaizania and Momentum

Refreshments will be served before and after the event.

For any additional information, please contact agile@kaizania.co.za.

The Cape Town chapter held it’s 4th event last night. We meet at Great Westerford, with venue and food kindly sponsored by Intec and drinks sponsored by Scrum Sense.

Hilton Giesenow, Development Manager at 3Fifteen and Microsoft MVP spoke on continuous integration (CI). He spoke of CI as a continuum and just one of a number of good software development practices. He outlined 10 steps to implementing good CI, with the first 3 being an essential starting point:

1. Source repository - gotta have this!
2. Make code self-testing with unit tests (for bugs in legacy code, write a failing unit test that reproduces the bug, then fix!)
3. Automate the build - use one of the great free tools such as Cruise Control from ThoughtWorks; trigger to run every 30 mins or on each check-in.
4. Everyone commits their code daily (at least).
5. Every commit should be built (all code is integrated)
6. Keep the build fast
7. Test in a clone of the production environment (use VM’s)
8. Make it easy to get the latest deliveries (for example use zip of exe)
9. Everyone can see the results of the latest build
10. Automate deployment

In the subsequent Q&A session we noted that:

• You can implement CI beneficially in any SDLC process, whether Waterfall, Scrum or other.
• Scrum is (deliberately) silent on software development practices, leaving teams and organisations to choose their own.
• It is essential that teams implement good practices such as CI to complement the Scrum process if they want to improve.
• Doing CI will provide you with useful metrics as a side-effect, for example code coverage by tests, number of automated tests.

We’re grateful to Hilton for taking the time to spend with us!

Please join us for the next SUGSA Gauteng event on the 21^st of May 2009.

 The previous events were so well attended and using your feedback from this, we have decided to use this event for an open discussion around Agile and Scrum with help from a panel of experts.

Case studies will be presented for discussion, Scrum practitioners and organisations using Scrum will be present to share their ‘war-stories’ with us and to answer your questions.

 Join us for an evening of open discussion – bring your questions, bring your concerns, bring your own ‘war-stories’ and share with all of us… we are all keen to learn!

When: 21 May 2009

Time: 18:00 for 18:30

Where: Momentum Auditorium 1, Centurion, Pretoria (click for map)

Event registration:  http://www.scrum.org.za/resources/event-registration/event-registration-gauteng

Refreshments will be served before and after the event.

For any additional information, please contact agile@kaizania.co.za.

Greetings to all SUGSA visitors!

This is your official invitation to the next event to be held in Cape Town.

When: Wednesday 13 May, 2009 at 18h00 for 18h30
Where: Great Westerford, 240 Main Rd, Rondebosch (corner of Main and Dean). Click here for a map.

Click here to register for this event

Agile practice: Continuous Integration
Aside from the business challenges of the solution, the process of integrating the various bits and pieces of any reasonably-sized system can itself be time consuming, troublesome and difficult. To make matters worse, it is usually left towards the end of project, when pressure is often the greatest. This means the very integration process itself often introduces further bugs! Continuous Integration attempts to address these concerns.

At its core, Continuous Integration is the process of integrating the disparate components of a software system on a very frequent basis, often many times per day. However, in addition to addressing the actual challenges of integration, CI itself requires various tools and processes to be in place, and each of these is able to bring significant benefit to both the solution and the team. In this session, we will look more closely at the core concepts around both CI and the underpinning processes it relies upon. In order to demonstrate these concepts and keep it practical, we will make use of various well known tools and products.

About our Speaker: Hilton Giesenow
Hilton has been developing software professionally since 1997. Focused primarily on Microsoft tools and technologies, he lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa as a development manager and as a software architect and technical lead on enterprise projects. With experience ranging across a wide variety of platforms, client types and locations, Hilton is a Microsoft MVP, a regional lead for S.A. Developer.net, the national INETA representative, and a regular author and speaker at professional, community and academic events and conferences. His random ramblings can be found at http://hilton.giesenow.com/.

When: Wednesday 13 May, 2009 at 18h00 for 18h30
Where: Great Westerford, 240 Main Rd, Rondebosch (corner of Main and Dean). Click here for a map.

This event is kindly sponsored by Intec Billing which means that attendance, snacks and drinks are free!

Please don’t forget to register by clicking this link.

After a hiatus, here are some scrum links for you to expand your knowledge and hone your craft.

I found Jeff Patton’s ‘Story Map‘ to be a useful discussion on an alternative to the 1-dimensional product backlog.

It was also the basis of one of the Open Spaces sessions at the recent Orlando gathering. This is definitely not a vanilla scrum technique, so not suggested for beginners. Jeff’s presentation explicitly states he believes it to be a ‘Ha’ technique (in the Shu-Ha-Ri schema).

One for the scrum masters among the readers: the Scrum Alliance has a run down of a discussion on the ‘Top 10 Organisational Impediments‘. Which will also give you a chance to check out the zooty new Scrum Alliance website. There is lots of content from the Orlando Gathering there as well.

The hot topic at the moment in the scrum community is all about the role of certification and testing. Mishkin Berteig’s view of the beta test can be found here. I’d be curious to hear in the comments what people’s view of the test are.

Till next time

Thank you to each individual that joined us for the 3rd get together of the Gauteng Scrum Alliance on 19th March 2009.

I thoroughly enjoyed the session as it was a healthy mix of learning to know one another, learning more about Scrum and learning that we are not alone in our quest to be the best we can be.

We started of with great snacks and drinks sponsored by Kaizania (thanks Arrie/Lionel!!). I had some nice discussions with a couple of people and it looks like everyone was discussing something along the Agile/Scrum line.

Photo above: Did you know that we had more than 20 brand new faces that evening!

We then had a presentation around Scrum and Agile by Arrie, followed by a book review by Lionel.

Lionel talking to us about the book 'Lean Software Development'

Then followed the open discussion session with participation all around. For me this is what a user group is all about:

• networking
• socializing with people sharing in your pain and pleasure in the work environment around Scrum
• having a sounding board for your rationale on how you want to do what you want to do
• getting the phone number to ‘phone a friend’ in your hour of need

Scrum is all about relationships, with one another, in your teams, with the product owner, with the “project manager” :), that is why a user group also helps us build those relationships outside the organization to strengthen our resolve.

The stronger all your relationships are, the better the trust, the better overall achievement/result for all.

I only got home after 22:00 the evening, but it did not feel like that. Thanks to all of you that were there.  Bring your topics for next time and lets discuss them. We will be reviewing the feedback each of you provided and take all into consideration.  Let us help one another to be the best Scrum entities we can be.

View the presentations from the event here:

1. What is Scrum?

2. How to implement Scrum within an organisation?

Last, but not least, please book the next event planned for 21 May 2009 so long…

Hope to see you all there!!

Rigard de Wet and the rest of the Gauteng committee

Greeting to all SUGSA members and visitors!

SUGSA Gauteng Event # 3 : 19 March 2009 @ Momentum ( Centurion )

The SUGSA Gauteng Event will be held in Pretoria (JHB venue sponsor needed for the next event?). We are planning an evening full of Scrum related content, and yes, refreshments and some food will be served before and after the event. Therefore, if you are interested in the content, to meet other individuals and organisations interested in or doing Scrum already, or just for the food and drinks, please join us on 19 March 2009 from 18:00!

When: 19 March 2009

Time: 18:00 for 18:30

Venue: Momentum Auditorium, Centurion ( click for map )

RSVP: Please go to http://www.prohmote.com/0b0798e6 to register yourself and guests for the event. Should you experience any difficulties, please send a registration email to scrum@kaizania.co.za.

Agenda for the evening:

18:00-18:30 : Arrival

18:30 : Welcome and SUGSA update/ scrum.org.za etc  ( Arrie van der Dussen )

19:00 : Scrum-in-5-minutes for the Scrum novice ( Rigard de Wet )

19:20 : How to adopt and Implement Scrum within an organisation ( 10 min intro by Arrie vd Dussen – then an open discussion around the topic)

20:30 : Book review and Agile/Scrum recommended reading list

21:00 : Summary and close-out and then drinks afterwards

We hope to see all the regulars and a load of new faces, therefore, please invite everyone you think would benefit from this event!

Kicking off with the latest from Jeff Sutherland. Jeff recently gave a talk on ‘Scrum Shock Therapy’. Similar to the approach apparently used in MySpace, Jeff advocates a ’shock and awe approach’ described in this blog post. It’s kind of a rough change management process and will likely cause some unhappiness. My take is that change is like pulling a band-aid off; best to do it all quickly and get it over with.

Imesh Soni has a good article up at Scrum Alliance, which could probably be called the ‘9 Habit of highly Ineffective Scrums’ or something. It describes which tricks are used in traditional waterfall organisations and need to be changed for scrum teams.

From Ukrainian Agile discussion group comes this paper on how to use LEGO(tm) to simulate a scrum. Useful in showing people how the various principles and practices fit together.

For our Product Owners in the audience, Jack Milunsky has a good top 10 list of the things which a PO are supposed to be doing.

From Jeff Atwood (who is apparently a CSM) a really good article about team dynamics and the importance of eliminating the ‘bad apples’. As a scrum master it’s critical that your identify the impediments a team member may be imposing on the team.

For the techies, a good article on how to handle intermittence when using test driven development.

And from Ron Jeffries one on the necessity of refactoring. Ron’s salient point is that if you’re practising agile development your design must evolve. Under those circumstances refactoring is a ‘law of nature’.

Jurgen Appelo has published an excellent scrum presentation that you can find on his blog. Its a really good one for people not that familar with scrum and covers the history, practices and discussion on some of the usual questions.

Lastly, from the ever reliable InfoQ comes a good discussion about the pros and cons of physical information radiators. I love my Big Visible Charts; hiding things in a web application just don’t seem like a good idea, but go read the article to hear from more than one viewpoint.

Till next week.

Twas a blistering night in Cape Town, and nearly 50 newbies gathered to hear the tale of ‘Scrum’…

Mike Freislich, our MC, kicked off with some feedback on what the user group committee has been up to. If you’re reading this on the new site, then you probably know about some of them already.

We’ve relaunched the website, started adding more dynamic content.

We now have a local scrum discussion group which already has some good discussions going.

There is also the events announcement group, which hopefully people know about, since they were at the event.

The committee is also offering services in the form of sending a scrum evangelist to your company if you would like someone to speak about scrum.

Then into the presentations: I gave what felt like a very hurried presentation about the basics of scrum. Trying to cover all the roles, practices and artifacts as well as some tips and insight on what it takes to implement it into your organisation all in 30 minutes was a challenge. It probably didn’t help that the air conditioning was going full blast (not that it seemed to help much) making it difficult to be heard.

Questions after the presentation focussed on the reasons why scrum implementations tend to fail; Ken scwaber is quoted here as saying approximately 75% of teams attempting to implement scrum, will return to their previous ways of working.

The consensus that seems to emerge is that it is likely due to the necessity for handing over the locus of control from the traditional management structure to the teams who will be doing the work. Many organisations struggle with this and abandon the framework.

A copy of the presentation can be found here. For other (much better) presentations, you can look here and here.

A short break and Chris Tisdall from Allan Grey next spoke about his experiences as a Product Owner, implementing scrum. Some wonderful insights into the challenges of rolling out scrum at an enterprise scale. Chris is passionate about being a Product Owner and it really came through in his presentation. I think he has a lucky team; a Product Owner who gets scrum, has a vision for the product and leads his team.

Some of the questions posed to Chris included ‘What kind of career pathing is done for team members in a scrum organisation’ and ‘How do you handle bonuses and increases for a team in an individualist culture’.

No real answers emerged, so perhaps they’re good topics for future meetings.

We wrapped up and headed for the cold drinks, with lots of interesting discussions after.