Scrum User Group

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: 45% [?]

Our next Cape Town event is a scrum lunch and learn. It will take place on 5 November 2009 at BB&D offices in Century City.

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

Popularity: 48% [?]

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

Popularity: 37% [?]

Well, we had a full house today at South Africa’s first Scrum Day.

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”

Popularity: 100% [?]

Tobias Mayer is perhaps one of the more influential scrum trainers. (He’s definitely one of the most provocative.) His blog, “Agile Anarchy” has a new post about the importance of the scrum board to the scrum process as a whole.

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.

Scrum(tm) - a 3M product

Popularity: 35% [?]