SeattleScrum meeting on Thursday February 28th: Agile Estimating and Planning

Topic: Agile Estimating and Planning.

We’re excited to be hosting Mike Cohn from Mountain Goat Software. Mike Cohn has agreed to take a few hours out of his busy schedule to share some of the secrets of successful Agile Estimating and Planning. He will be talking about a range of estimating and planning topics that are sure to appeal to a large variety of people, from developers to senior management.

About the Speaker: Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development and Agile Estimating and Planning, as well as books on Java and C++ programming. With more than 20 years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes, from startup to Fortune 40. A frequent magazine contributor and conference speaker, Mike is a founding member of the ScrumAlliance, and serves on its board of directors. He can be reached at mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com

Meeting Date and Agenda
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
6:00pm Food & Drink
6:30pm Some words of Thanks
6:45pm Topic: Agile Estimating and Planning
7:30-ish End of talk, general questions etc.

Location
Qpass Corporate Headquarters
2211 Elliott Avenue
Suite 400
Seattle, Washington 98121
Phone: +1.206.447.6000

Further inquiries can also be emailed to SeattleScrum at Gmail dot com. This announcement may also be found at Seattle Scrums home page: http://www.SeattleScrum.org

SeattleScrum meeting on Thursday January 31st: Agile Requirements With Fit

Topic: Agile Requirements With Fit

Agile projects are all about communication and collaboration. What does that mean for requirements? There’s no up-front requirements phase… does that mean there’s no requirements document or tool? What about functional testing?

Join James Shore for an exploration of requirements on agile projects. James will share what he’s learned about agile requirements in eight years of working with agile team, then introduce Fit, the confusingly-named Framework for Integrated Test. Learn why Fit isn’t what everyone thinks it is, what it has to do with agile requirements, and how you can use Fit to improve communication on your project. This will be an interactive session, so bring your product owner hat and join in!

About the Speaker: James Shore is the project coordinator for Fit and maintainer of the Java and C# versions. He’s been leading agile teams in success and failure since 1999. He’s been struggling with the question of agile requirements and functional testing for nearly as long. In 2005, the Agile Alliance granted Jim one of the two inaugural Gordon Pask awards for contribution to agile practice. His new book, The Art of Agile Development, has recently been published by O’Reilly. Find his blog, essays on agile development, and more at http://jamesshore.com.

BONUS: We will be giving aware 1 free seat to Mike Cohn’s Agile Estimating and Planning course (Feb 28th)

Meeting Date and Agenda
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
6:00pm Food & Drink
6:30pm Some words of Thanks
6:45pm Topic: Agile Requirements with Fit
7:30-ish End of talk, general questions etc.

Location
Qpass Corporate Headquarters
2211 Elliott Avenue
Suite 400
Seattle, Washington 98121
Phone: +1.206.447.6000

Further inquiries can also be emailed to SeattleScrum at Gmail dot com. This announcement may also be found at Seattle Scrums home page: http://www.SeattleScrum.org

Haiku Driven Development … the presentation.

Last nights presentation by Michael Tardiff was a hoot! I really enjoyed it! Michael talked about keeping teams productive in an insightful and entertaining way with personal stories and examples.

He has also kindly provided his presentation for us to share, and you can download it here: haiku-driven-development-black.ppt

This was the last SeattleScrum meeting for 2007. Our next meeting will be in January, 2008 so until then I hope you have a great holiday season!

SeattleScrum meeting on November 29th: Using Ritual and Ceremony to Sustain Agility and Stave Off Process Fatique

Topic: Haiku-Driven Development, or Using Ritual and Ceremony to Sustain Agility and Stave Off Process Fatigue

Agile methods like Scrum involve repetitive meetings and actions that can, over time, become routine and lose some of the freshness, challenge and novelty that they offer a team that’s just starting out. How do we put “heart” into agile processes? How can team leaders and members inject variety or even whimsy into what they do every day?

In this session workshop, we’ll explore how agile teams can avoid having these essential routines become, well, routine. We’ll draw on experience from Scrum and agile teams and provide examples of how teams avoided having agile processes become more albatross than aid. And if you have examples of how your team has met these challenges, we’re looking forward to hearing them.

About the Speaker: Michael Tardiff has been working with teams to deliver software and services for over two decades, in large enterprises and small startups on both coasts and in Europe. His life became measurably and permanently better seven years ago when he happened upon XP and then Scrum, and he hasn’t looked back since. Buy him a beer and he’ll listen to your questions about making agile methods work in the real world, or write him at mjt@taoproductions.com.

BONUS: We will be giving aware 1 free seat to Mike Cohn’s Certified ScrumMaster course (Feb 26-27)

Meeting Date and Agenda
Thursday, November 29, 2007
6:00pm Food & Drink
6:30pm Some words of Thanks
6:45pm Topic: Haiku-Driven Development
7:30-ish End of talk, general questions etc.

Location
Cobalt Group Headquarters
2200 First Avenue S
Suite 400
Seattle, WA 98134

Further inquiries can also be emailed to SeattleScrum at Gmail dot com. This announcement may also be found at Seattle Scrums home page: http://www.SeattleScrum.org

ANN: Mike Cohn has offered one (1) free seat in each of his upcoming Seattle classes.

Mike Cohn has generously offered SeattleScrum one free seat in each of his upcoming Seattle classes. This is exciting! Mike is an author (“Agile Estimating and Planning”), international speaker and director of the Scrum Alliance. We’ll be giving away the CSM course at our November 29th meeting, and the AE&P course at our January 31st meeting.

The dates for these courses are as follows:
Feb 26-27    Certified ScrumMaster
Feb 28        Agile Estimating and Planning

More information is at: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/city/Seattle

SeattleScrum meeting on Thursday, October 25th.

Topic: The Ripple Effect: how adopting Agile practices has created interesting and positive ripples throughout the company.

About the Speaker: Charlie Rudd is President and CEO of SolutionsIQ, one of the most successful Agile development shops and consultancies in the country. In the last four years SolutionsIQ professional service revenues have grown from three million to twenty five million. This growth has been driven principally through the adoption of Agile practices. Prior to joining SolutionsIQ, Charlie worked for seven years at Microsoft in IT management where he led the technical teams responsible for internal business applications and was responsible for establishing best practices.

Meeting Date and Agenda
Thursday, October 25, 2007
6:00pm Food & Drink
6:30pm Some words of Thanks
6:45pm Topic: The Ripple Effect
7:30-ish End of talk, general questions etc.

Location
Qpass Corporate Headquarters
2211 Elliott Avenue
Suite 400
Seattle, Washington 98121
Phone: +1.206.447.6000

Further inquiries can also be emailed to SeattleScrum at Gmail dot com. This announcement may also be found at Seattle Scrums home page: http://www.SeattleScrum.org

SeattleScrum meeting on September 26th: Your real world challenges adopting Scrum

We are pleased to announce the next meeting of the Seattle Scrum Users Group. Although then intent is to focus primarily on Scrum, all flavors of Agile (XP, FDD, Industrial XP etc) and Lean are welcome.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at the Cobalt Group’s Seattle headquarters. Chris Sterling will be facilitating a group discussion on “Your real world challenges adopting Scrum”. We welcome participants to bring their current or historical issues in adopting Scrum on their teams or in their organizations. The group discussion will allow multiple points of view to be expressed on how these issues can be worked on or resolved. Since we should have many people with diverse Scrum experience there should be a good cross-section of ideas.

We’d like to thank our four sponsors: QPass (http://www.qpass.com ), Cobalt Group ( http://www.cobalt.com ), Danube Technologies ( http://www.Danube.com ), and SolutionsIQ ( http://www.solutionsiq.com )

Topic: Facilitated group discussion on “Your real world challenges adopting Scrum“

About the Facilitator: Chris is an Agile Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer and has performed consulting and training for the last three years with companies ranging in size from Fortune 50 down to technology start ups. Chris is an original developer for the open source tool Story Test IQ (STIQ), a project that combines utility from Fit, FitNesse, and Selenium to create automated acceptance tests (http://storytestiq.sourceforge.net/). As founder of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) Puget Sound Chapter, Chris is very involved with coding and evangelizing good coding practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration, and collective code ownership, each a staple of the environment he has fostered and encouraged working at Solutions IQ and on projects like Story Test IQ (STIQ).

Meeting Date and Agenda
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
6:00pm Food & Drink
6:30pm Some words of Thanks
6:45pm Facilitated group discussion on “Your real world challenges adopting Scrum“, Chris Sterling, Certified Scrum Trainer, SolutionsIQ
7:30-ish End of talk, general questions etc.

Location
Cobalt Group Headquarters
2200 First Avenue S
Suite 400
Seattle, WA 98134

This announcement may also be found at Seattle Scrums home page. Further inquiries can be emailed to SeattleScrum at Gmail dot com.

Scrum From an Organizational Perspective

The full Powerpoint deck of Damian’s excellent presentation ["Scrum From an Organizational Perspective"] is now available. You can download the presentation as either a powerpoint file (link) or as a pdf file (link). I’d like to thank both Damian and Qpass/Amdocs for making this material available to the wider community.

ANN: Presentations needed for SeattleScrum

Following Damian’s excellent presentation at the first SeattleScrum,
I’d like to establish a calendar for the rest of the year. There are
some very good reasons why you may want to consider doing this:

• It looks good on your resume,
• Public speaking is difficult, and SeattleScrum provides good
• opportunity to practice in a non-threatening environment,
• Speaking at SeattleScrum is a great way to network and meet people
• from many different organizations,
• Speaking at SeattleScum allows you to increase you’re sphere of influence, and
• It looks great on your resume!!

Any topic that might be of interest to the Scrum community would be
welcome, and we’re looking for presentations that are between 30
minutes and 45 minutes. If you’re interested, the dates available for
the rest of the year are:

• Wednesday, September 26th (at The Cobalt Group)
• Thursday, October 25th (at Qpass)
• Thursday, November 29th (at The Cobalt Group)

If you’re interested, please send a note to SeattleScrum at Gmail dot com, or leave a comment.

First Seattle Scrum meeting was a blast!

The very first Seattle Scrum meeting was held on Thursday evening, and it exceeded my expectations! Although there was only a small number of us, the talk by Damian was excellent … very thoughtful and engaging. I believe everyone walked away with ideas for new possibilities.

I’d like to thank Damian for his presentation and for taking the time to speak to the group!