Because 5 elected members ideally constitute a SUGSA Committee, the outgoing Committee deemed it unnecessary to hold a round of voting to determine the Committee for the new year. Consequently, it is with pleasure that I inform you that the 2011 SUGSA Committee comprises  Marius de Beer, Charl Dreyer, Kevin Fourie, Karen Greaves and Peter Hundermark.

One of the first tasks awaiting the new Committee will be to elect office bearers; once this has been done you will be notified by email.

On behalf of SUGSA, the outgoing Committee, and all SUGSA members, I would like to extend our best wishes to the 2011 SUGSA Committee for a successful year growing the awareness and practice of Scrum in South Africa.

When:

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

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.

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)

After the success of our last event which used the ‘Open Spaces Conference‘ format to organise the discussion, we’d like to try it again.

We will start promptly at 12:00 and end at 13:30

We welcome all roles (Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Scrum Team Members, and Stakeholders) and all levels of experience. So come prepared to bring your questions, issues, or barriers to Scrum.

Please sign up here.
Map to BBnD’s Offices

The long awaited videos from South Africa’s first Scrum Day are now finally available.

We have created a channel on Vimeo which you can find here.

Should you have any other questions, please email scrumday@scrum.org.za

Keep an eye out, we will be releasing the videos shortly.

The scrum day presentations will be made available here. The first ones are:

Business Track

• Charl Dreyer on “Product Ownership”
• Richard Bailey on ‘How I thought I could be a product owner and still keep my day job”
• Peter Hundermark on “Agile Metrics”
• Evan Person on “Transforming The Enterprise”

Technical Track

• Carlo Kruger on “Scrum101″
• Karen Greaves on “Scrum Smells”
• Aslam Khan on “Suicide is not painless”
• Kevin Fourie on “Where did my issue tracker go?”
• Alistair Fairweather on “Telling Stories”

Dr Jeff Sutherland’s presentation, “Take no prisoners: How a venture capital company does scrum”

I wanted to jump up and down when I read it. It speaks to me about why I hate the whole idea of an electronic board.

He also links to Xavier Quesada Allue’s blog, which echoes this practical approach to scrum and teams. I absolutely love his “Elements of taskboard design” which has real practical tips on what you can do to make your task board more effective. And he made me aware of “Super Sticky Post It’s“.

Now I’m off to convince Loren, Mistress of Stationery, to order us some of those. Sometimes the best tools are already out there.

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