» software development

How to make your Dev team exceptional

Carlo Kruger — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:49:34 +0000

High quality software that meets the business needs can only come from an exceptional development team. Lets talk about the secret sauce needed to make your team exceptional.

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.

Gathering 2011 – The Buffalo Herd, for developers and testers

Adrian Punt — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 21:07:43 +0000

There is nothing quite as impressive as a herd of buffalo stampeding through the veld, nothing except a high performance Scrum team that is. This track, aptly named the Buffalo Herd is for the people who do the real work in Scrum: developers, architects, testers and other team members.

Not only will this track feature technical content and learning outcomes, but also provide insight into true Agile culture and principles, the cornerstone for any high performing Scrum team.

In Johannesburg, we look forward to the following:

Manoj Vadakkan

It’s the culture, Stupid! – Why Scrum is more than a few ceremonies, roles, & artifacts

Many organizations are attracted to Scrum because of its apparent simplicity and its potential to deliver results faster. However, most don’t realize that there are cultural changes which are also required in order for Scrum to be successful.

Manoj postulates that Scrum as a movement will fail if we do not bring the cultural aspects to the forefront. Attendees will participate in a dynamic discussion about the importance of the cultural aspects that are required for Scrum to flourish within an organization.

Kevin Trethewey

See code differently

Your environment and your own personal and professional life experience inform your view of what computer code is and should be. We will take a journey through some of the history of software code – how people have created and thought about it.

I will then describe to you how my experiences in Scrum and non-Scrumming environments has taught me how to think about code and the patterns that I have seen work (and fail).

Through this I hope to show how Scrum (and Agile teams in general) think differently about what code is – and hopefully inspire you to critically analyze the role code plays in your environment.

9 September 2011 – Sandton Convention Center – book your tickets online now!

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And in Cape Town, we are excited for the following:

Aslam Khan

Live your principles or stay in bed

We talk frequently of the values, principles and practices in software development. Most commonly in Scrum, are the references to extreme programming. I’ve been learning to be an extreme programmer for a long time, and it was really easy until I made the decision to not compromise on my principals, one at a time. This session is about taking software development principles, not matter where they came from, and applying them to designs, code and life as a developer.

What’s this got to do with Scrum? Everything. I see far too many teams compromise their way right from backlog grooming all the way through to the sprint-review, only to be snot-klapped a few sprints later. This session is not about magically exterminating all future snot-klaps, but how to deal with the snot and recover from the klap.

We will move between discussions, whiteboards and cracking open some code in an editor. My objective in this session is to challenge you and push you to make difficult discussions in your head and in your code.

As a side-effect, you will gain some insight into agile development too

Fadi Stephan

Software Craftsmanship – Imperative or Hype

Some Agile teams fail to figure out or implement technical practices that are necessary for long term success. Software craftsmen believe that without these technical best practices, the quality of software goes downhill and teams can no longer sustain their high levels of productivity. They established the software craftsmanship movement to reverse this downhill trend, improve the quality of software and maintain hyper-productivity.

Fadi Stephan introduces software craftsmanship, reviews its history, and explores the driving forces that led practitioners to create this movement. Fadi describes the software craftsman’s ethics, disciplines, principles, and practices as he explores the latest arguments between advocates and opponents of software craftsmanship. Learn the values of the software craftsmanship manifesto. Understand the current state of software development. Discover new tools and forums available to developers for practicing and mastering their craft.

Leave with new insights on how to become a quality software developer.

13 and 14 September 2011 – Erinvale Hotel, Somerset West – book your tickets online now!

We also have dedicated tracks for the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and Management. More information to come in the next few days, so please – stay tuned. Click here to view the detailed program.

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Hilton Giesenow on Continuous Integration in Scrum

peter — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:41:46 +0000

The Cape Town chapter held it’s 4th event last night. We meet at Great Westerford, with venue and food kindly sponsored by Intec and drinks sponsored by Scrum Sense.

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:

Source repository – gotta have this!
Make code self-testing with unit tests (for bugs in legacy code, write a failing unit test that reproduces the bug, then fix!)
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.
Everyone commits their code daily (at least).
Every commit should be built (all code is integrated)
Keep the build fast
Test in a clone of the production environment (use VM’s)
Make it easy to get the latest deliveries (for example use zip of exe)
Everyone can see the results of the latest build
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!