Scrum User Group

When: 8 April 2010, 6PM

Venue: Allan Gray Portswood office in the Presentation Room on the third floor. You can download a map here. Everyone parking in the Portswood parking area will have to pay for their own parking tickets. There is also parking available in Beach road.

Cost: Free

Sign up for this exciting event here.

Topic: Software Development Practices with an Agile mindset - Toe dipping at human speed

Slides: Development Practices

Marius de Beer will introduce Agile software development practices that teams can adopt without exceeding the rate at which they, and their management, can change.  These practices have been cherry picked as a low barrier start to a life long journey of honing our skill in meeting the demands of iterative- incremental- software delivery.

None of these practices are new, yet they are far less mainstream than their management counterparts.  The lack of adoption is caused by one part bad Public Relations (PR) and two parts panic. Panic is easily explained; Extreme Programming (XP) is the de facto remedy when development teams have to take a feature from “story” to “release ready” in two weeks.  Test Driven Development and Pair Programming are the only two practices in XP that have received significant airtime.  Both these practices cause developers to assume the fetal position and cry “mommy”. Bad PR is slightly more complex.  There has never been a business model around XP, which means no one took the time to explain it to executives that approve spending, and by extention, initiatives.

This talk will empower managers and developers to implement software development practices with an Agile mindset without fear or trepidation.

Aslam Khan from Factor10 and Roderick Lim Banda from KASE will join Marius for a panel Q&A session after the talk.

About the Speaker
Marius’ interest in software systems started at an early age and he has been “living the life of software” ever since.  After qualifying as a Mechanical Engineer in 1991 he focused on the design of mechanical systems with electronic controls.  In 1996 his transition to pure software systems development was complete. Since then Marius has been involved in most of the dominant software technologies and environments, from high availability back-end systems handling thousands of transactions per second, to small embedded systems running mission critical software with minimal memory and processing power. From 2002 Marius has been an avid practitioner of Agile Engineering Practices and as technical lead and mentor has help more than 10 teams adopt these practices. In 2008 he also started coaching in Agile Management Practices and completed an Agile Apprenticeship in the USA and Canada which included his Scrum Master Certification with Ken Schwaber. Marius has mentored teams in implementing Scrum and Kanban.

This event’s catering is kindly sponsored by Intec

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Popularity: 33% [?]

When: 4 March 2010, 6PM

Venue: Bandwidth Barn, 125 Heerengracht Street, Cape Town

Cost: Free

Sign up for this exciting event here.

Topic: UX and User Centered Design in Agile Development with Phillip Barrett

The most reliable way to achieve usability and deliver the right user experience is with user-centred design.
It’s a collection of tools and techniques that helps digital project teams stay focused on what customers need right the way through the design process. The talk will cover some basics on what UX is and then focus on Phillip’s experience using this approach with agile teams and the challenges this imposes.

About the Speaker
Phillip Barrett is a director of Flow Interactive, a user experience design, research and strategy consultancy based in London.
He’s been consulting in user experience since 1999, when he joined Flow. He’s designed all sorts of user experiences and worked with hundreds of users in the process. He’s worked with plenty of different client organisations too – including Vodafone, Standard Life and The BBC.

This event’s catering is kindly sponsored by Scrum Sense

Popularity: 41% [?]

When: 4 February 2010, 7PM

Venue: Bandwidth Barn, 5th Floor Buitengracht Centre, 125 Buitengracht Street

Topic: Kanban Software Development with David Anderson

David is credited with the first implementation of a kanban process for software development in 2005. David was a founder of the agile movement through his involvement in the creation of Feature Driven Development and continues to be a thought leader in the Agile space.

To help us cater for the event please register here.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 41% [?]

We had a great ‘lunch and learn’ session today. Many thanks to BB&D for hosting the event and providing fantastic snacks.

Topics covered in the Open Spaces format included: ‘What is the role of the analyst on an agile team?’, ‘Is TDD a design activity?’, ‘How self-organising should a scrum team be?’ and many others. We ran a total of three sessions of fifteen minutes with between two and three topics being discussed.

Afterwards we had a brief retrospective where we discussed the session. SUGSA Cape Town is currently trying out a variety of formats and it’s useful for us to get the feedback that will help us inspect and adapt our offering.

What worked well

• It was felt that the sessions were better than being lectured
• Participants got to choose which topics interested them
• A change from the last event was that we had a second ‘market place’ for topics and that worked well
• The food (I did say the snacks were fantastic)

Could be improved

• A few people had difficulty with it being during office hours
• A two minute warning for the end of the session
• Name tags (This came up at our last session and I forgot about it, so thanks for the reminder)
• To vary the format and sometimes have a presentation format with a topic marketplace for that content of the presentation

So it seems we should ideally have a mix of:

• Locations (Northern & Southern suburbs and Town)
• Timeslots (breakfast, lunchtime and evening)
• Format (Open Spaces is working well but have some presentation format events as well)

Popularity: 42% [?]