The first Thursday in December. Four confident looking presenters got themselves geared up. No walk in the park this. Each presenter had only 6 minutes to get their message across. Each slide had to be no longer than 20 seconds. What I didn’t know, until that evening, was that each slide had to automatically be set to transition after 20 seconds. No pressure!

First up was Sheetal Gordhan. Scrum is not for the faint hearted was her topic!

I’m looking at my notes now, and I see the Ken Schwaber quote: “Scrum is hard”. And right next to that I have Sheetal paraphase: “This kak is hard”. I like Sheetal’s version I remember us all having a good chuckle, leaned back in our seats and took in a nice big gulp on our drinks. Our evening was set, we were here to have some fun!

Sheetal’s presentation reminded us that only a small percentage of teams are actually successful in Scrum. It’s really not easy and we need to prepare ourselves when we embark on this journey. Even though there are 1,000′s of articles online, it’s still not enough to prepare us for what lies ahead.

I can honestly say that I, in 6 minutes, had learned more about what a newbie organisation to Scrum should expect than I have in any course attended or article read.

My favourite slide of Sheetal’s. Hmmm, this is a tough one, there are so many. I liked the Google statistics of how many results one can expect when searching for Scrum information. But one that really stood out for me was the All Blacks doing the haka. Titled ‘Scrum Rituals’.( Remember, this event was in early December, only a few weeks after the All Blacks were crowned World Champs!). What are your development teams rituals? The usual stand-up and retrospective, or do you have something unique?

Next up was Meloné van Heerden, with her presentation entitled, What makes a great leader. Meloné had recently attended a course on this subject, and used the opportunity to apply her learning’s into the software development, in particular, Scrum, environment. One could see that the learning’s had a big impact of her, as her talk was passionate and energetic.

The subject of an ‘authentic leader’. What is an authentic leader? Or rather, what makes a leader authentic? Mel took us through the 6 step of process of discovering the authentic ‘you’. A necessary self-awareness process. A look at intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.

My favourite slide of Meloné’s. I personally liked the way in which she modelled the need to effectively set a leadership example, with well-known figures. Nelson Mandela and Barrack Obama featured, with Obama’s family an example of how important it is to build a support network. But my favourite would have to be a slide which represented who we sometimes don’t change. Any guess who features? Have a look at the photo below.

Next up, the good man David Campey. David had an interesting approach. Each of his slides represented a photo he had taken of his agile working environment. We got to meet his team. His manager. His Product Owner.

It told a story of a project. Starting from a photo of his Product Owner, looking very visionary in a room with blue-sky type walls, through to photo’s of his team hard at planning, and ending with his team out on a boat trip

I’ve always found it fascinating to see how other organisations work. How they approach their Scrum repertoire. Especially local companies.

David’s presentation was recorded, so please have a look for yourself. I’ve already sent this out to my development teams. Motivational stuff!

And finally, Karen Greaves, who needed little introduction off course! Her talk was titled: “Agile Management: How to create a culture to help your team succeed.” It was awesome! Need I say more. Who thought a talk about management could be fun

Thank you to everyone that attended. And a big thank you to our four brave presenters. You were all superstars!

When: 2 February 2012, 6:00PM

Topic: Release Planning with Scrum: Controlling the Chaos                    

Sign up: Please sign up here in order to help us with catering.

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.

Synopsis:
The Agile Manifesto tells us that we should be responding to change over following a plan.  This encourages us to plan into the future at the last responsible moment.  But we still may need a plan.  A plan can help inform our customers what may be in the next release or by when their favourite feature may appear.  They can help inform stakeholders on the cost of the current focus and hence whether the investment makes sense at this time.  These are Good Things for a business.  The essence of agile planning is to understand that the plan may change.  The plan must be reassessed for validity every time new data comes into the system – usually at the end of a sprint. Plans often allow us to appear more certain than we may actually be.  The hardest part with planning in Scrum is ensuring that everyone understands that things change and we will respond as soon as they do.  Effective agile planning allows us to more reliably respond to the changing business and market needs as early as possible.

Objectives:
In this talk I will discuss some of the techniques that I have used over the last couple of years to do release planning.  I’ll touch on of some of the things that have worked for me and some that haven’t.  The ideas will range from some simple maths, to reporting release progress through a release burnup and overviews, to the how to deal with change and ensuring that people understand what it means.  I hope by the end of the talk I will have shared some ideas and generated some conversation around controlling the chaos that can surround a software development release.

About Patrick Vine:
I started my career more than a decade ago at Microsoft in Redmond. Since then I’ve moved through different companies as developer, architect and manager in diverse technologies and industries.  I first started to dabble in Scrum a couple of years back while working at Yellowtail Software where I helped the roll out of Scrum. While there I gained an appreciation for how well you can manage software using Scrum.  I’ve worked on Fixed Price, Fixed Team, Fixed Budget projects. I am passionate about working with Scrum, learning more about software development and helping teams get better on a daily basis.

Sponsored by

Stand-ups every day? Check.
Impediment-removing Scrum Master? Check.
Product Owner who understands prioritising? Check.
Teams that deliver working code every sprint? Check.
Review every sprint? Check.
Retrospective every sprint? Check.

Does this make your business truly Agile? For me there are a couple of checklist items missing:

Development practices that deliver high quality code?

A team of developers who understand one another and operate as a cohesive unit?

Team productivity doesn’t drop when a particular team member is away?

How would you answer? How would your developers answer?

It’s bring-a-dev-day at SUGSA! In fact bring your whole development team.

About Austin Fagan

I work for Unboxed Consulting.

I started writing software in 1999. I think I’m as bad now as I was then. So I don’t code now, my team keeps me as far from the codebase as they can, they shudder at the thought of me coding. I still can’t help being passionate about development. Weird.

I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to Agile techniques and great development practice since 2006 and I’ve been boring people silly about both since.

Sign up at Event Brite

Objectives:
Practise facilitation techniques
Get ideas for dealing with different situations
Have fun

for more info please click here

Sign up:

Please assist us with catering by signing up for the event

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.
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