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.

Scrum(tm) – a 3M product

More details…

As promised, we have an organisation who will present a case study on the benefits realised with the adoption of Scrum and Agile…

Case Study:

Harry King of Rosami Products & Services, who are contracted to 2Dialog – a company based in Richardson, Texas, will be presenting a case study on how Scrum is assisting them in realising the expected benefits of Agile off-shore development in South Africa…

Book review:

Lionel Bisschoff will again entertain us with a book review

Agile and Scrum Committee Reading List:

The SUGSA Gauteng committee will for the first time reveal what we are reading and a list of subjects and books/articles on those subjects will be handed out.

So far we had overwhelming response and we are looking forward to see everyone… however, please don’t hesitate to bring friends/colleagues and whoever you think might benefit or add to the discussions planned!

Event registration:  http://www.scrum.org.za/resources/event-registration/event-registration-gauteng

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 The previous events were so well attended and using your feedback from this, we have decided to use this event for an open discussion around Agile and Scrum with help from a panel of experts.

Case studies will be presented for discussion, Scrum practitioners and organisations using Scrum will be present to share their ‘war-stories’ with us and to answer your questions.

 Join us for an evening of open discussion – bring your questions, bring your concerns, bring your own ‘war-stories’ and share with all of us… we are all keen to learn!

When: 21 May 2009

Time: 18:00 for 18:30

Where: Momentum Auditorium 1, Centurion, Pretoria (click for map)

Event registration:  http://www.scrum.org.za/resources/event-registration/event-registration-gauteng

Sponsors: Kaizania and Momentum

Refreshments will be served before and after the event.

For any additional information, please contact agile@kaizania.co.za.

Hilton Giesenow, Development Manager at 3Fifteen and Microsoft MVP spoke on continuous integration (CI). He spoke of CI as a continuum and just one of a number of good software development practices. He outlined 10 steps to implementing good CI, with the first 3 being an essential starting point:

1. Source repository – gotta have this!
2. Make code self-testing with unit tests (for bugs in legacy code, write a failing unit test that reproduces the bug, then fix!)
3. Automate the build – use one of the great free tools such as Cruise Control from ThoughtWorks; trigger to run every 30 mins or on each check-in.
4. Everyone commits their code daily (at least).
5. Every commit should be built (all code is integrated)
6. Keep the build fast
7. Test in a clone of the production environment (use VM’s)
8. Make it easy to get the latest deliveries (for example use zip of exe)
9. Everyone can see the results of the latest build
10. Automate deployment

In the subsequent Q&A session we noted that:

• You can implement CI beneficially in any SDLC process, whether Waterfall, Scrum or other.
• Scrum is (deliberately) silent on software development practices, leaving teams and organisations to choose their own.
• It is essential that teams implement good practices such as CI to complement the Scrum process if they want to improve.
• Doing CI will provide you with useful metrics as a side-effect, for example code coverage by tests, number of automated tests.

We’re grateful to Hilton for taking the time to spend with us!