Scrum User Group

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.

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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

Popularity: 4% [?]