2009-10-20 Review of last month’s planning session

At this session, our task was to assign values to topics first by having group members check off their topic of interest listed on a whiteboard (based on last month’s notes), without limiting their number of selections (check marks).  After counting check marks,  the 4 top topics were discussed (see photos below) with participants digging down to specific interests under the general categories and voting using the check mark system.

 A survey was sent out in last month’s meeting reminder notice to encourage you to express your interest level under each of  the general topics, however, most of you did not complete the survey,  so I will send out this month and give everyone a chance to complete.  (Many did not realize there was a survey to complete)

Tools & Techniques

 

Tools & Techniques continued

Testing & Automation

 

Mindset Shift

 

Teams

2009-09-15 Planning Session Results

Thanks to everyone for participating in the planning session. We broke into three groups and brainstormed what we should do this year! The results were captured as a Mindjet mindmap and you can download PDF or Word(2007) or Word (97-2003) versions of the mindmap.

Stay tuned for next steps!

Planning Overview

Building a Local Agile Community

Community of Practice

Monthly Sessions

12 Adoption Failure Modes – Barry Mullan, Rally Software

Barry Mullan, Technical Account Manager at Rally Software Development came up from Boston and presented the 12 Adoption Failure Modes at August’s meeting – thanks to Declan for arranging this session.

I wanted to mention that there are three items that I felt are important and remain with me…

1. The importance of how the ScrumMaster must be a “Servant Leader”.  And when a company is adopting Agile,  the right person for this role must be selected carefully and is not necessarily an existing Project Manager since this person may be accustomed to delivering projects in a “Command and Control” manner.

2. The importance of retrospectives for constant growth and improvement.

3. The importance of non-traditional roles working in a Lean environment so that both teams (development and outside of dev team) can collaborate efficiently.

And of course the information you are probably most interested in that Barry provided is below…

Original Recorded presentation by Jean Tabaka
http://bit.ly/12-failure-modes

Link to Barry’s pdf of slides
http://bit.ly/12-failure-modes-pdf

Jean Tabaka book ‘Collaboration Explained’ 

2009-09-15 Planning Session

In  this session we will kick-off our next year with a collaborative planning session. This is your opportunity to steer the P2P group in the direction that works best for you!

Tuesday September 15, 2009
4:30 to 6:00 pm
Accelerator Centre
295 Hagey Blvd., Waterloo
[Map]

We’ll have 3 different group sessions, each with a facilitator.  Participants will select the group discussion of most interest to him/her. The groups will have open discussion and provide recommendations for the champions and Communitech staff to review and plan the coming year.  Further discussion may be necessary.

Groups

1. Monthly Sessions

We would like to plan the sessions for the upcoming year and to identify topics and potential speakers. The outcome of this group will be a draft agenda.

2. Community of Practice

Communitech is targeting some P2P groups to move up to the next level of learning by being accountable to other group members.  E.g. session discussion takes place and people take what they have learned use it in the work environment and come back and report to group members failures and/or successes”.  In this group discussion will be around if and who this may or may not work for.  What and what not, etc. etc. The outcome of this group will be a recommendation on whether to persue this and any insights or caveats that would help make this community of practice successful.

3. Building a Local Agile Community

Can we In this group, discussion will include what makes sense for this community.  Some ideas could include:

• Agile Open Space Conference
• brown bag lunch sessions
• Coffee n’ Code sessions
• an Agile/Lean speaker at Communitech Tech Leadership conference
• an Agile/Lean speaker at Communitech CIO event
• tools to help build a stronger community wiki, twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, Blog, etc. etc. and how do we utilize these tools more effectively.

The outcome of this group will recommendations on building a stronger Agile community beyond monthly P2P sessions.

2009-08-18 12 Adoption Failure Modes

Join us at upcoming session as Barry Mullan, Rally Software Development, gives participants his take on 12 Adoption Failure Modes.

I happened to be on Rally’s site and came across this post from Ryan Martin that I thought may interest you.

12 Agile Adoption Failure Modes
Posted using ShareThis

Date of Session:  Tuesday, August 18th
Time:  4:30 to 6:00 pm
Location:  Accelerator Bldg west entrance (you must be a Communitech Network member to participate or contact Wanda if you would like to attend one session as a guest)

RSVP required to wanda@communitech.ca

2009-07-21 Phil Kirby on Lean

Phil Kirby from Thoughtware gave a great overview of lean thinking principles and practices. His real-world anecdotes helped ground the principles. Phil really challenged us to think about the way we build our products and businesses.

You can download a PDF of his Waterloo Agile Software P2PJuly 21 2009 presentation.

2009-06-16 Follow up on Agile in the Large

I really enjoyed Doug Treleaven’s talk on agile in the large and thought I would post a couple of references to related resources.

Books:

• Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises by Dean Leffingwell
• Agile Software Development in the Large: Diving Into the Deep by Jutta Eckstein
• Agile Portfolio Management by Jochen Krebs

Online Information:

• Dean Leffingwell’s Blog
• Agile Portfolio Management by Joanna Rothman

We are working on getting Doug’s slides!

2009-06-16 Agile in the Large

Managing a portfolio of agile projects presents a unique set of challenges.   At this session, we will spend time exploring agile portfolio management, the cornerstones of agile project status reporting, managing multiple products within a small team, and operating an agile team within a non-agile organization. The discussion will also include the motivations and evaluation metrics of business benefit, Return on Investment financial models and financial reporting requirements. 

Date:  Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Time:  4:30 to 6:00 pm
Location: McAfee Canada Inc.
565 Kumpf Drive
Waterloo
Free Parking

RSVP is required wanda@communitech.ca

Sessions planned for the rest of the year

Our planned sessions run through to the end of August. Here are the sessions plans to date:

Date	Location	Topic
June 16	McAfee	Agile in the Large Agile portfolio management Performance metrics
July 21	TBD	Lean Software Development Guest speaker : Phil Kirby – Thoughtware
August 18	TBD	Agile Tools Each tool presented by current user/vendor Interest from Rally, AgileBuddy

2009-05-19: Coding Dojo Results

Thanks to everyone that came out to the coding dojo; especially anyone who did some codin’!

It was the first time doing this for everyone and I thought we did rather well. We ended up with some pretty slick C# code for parsing Roman numerals:

using System;

namespace RomanNumeralsCodingDojo
{
  public class RomanNumerals
  {
    public long Value { get; private set; }

    public RomanNumerals(string value)
    {
      for (var i = 0; i < value.Length-1; i++)
      {
        var charValue = Parse(value[i]);
        var nextCharValue = Parse(value[i+1]);

        if (charValue >= nextCharValue)
          Value += charValue;
        else
          Value -= charValue;
      }
      Value += Parse(value[value.Length-1]);
    }

    private static int Parse(char romanCharacter)
    {
      return (int) Enum.Parse(typeof (RomanCharacters),
                        new string(new [] {romanCharacter}));
    }

    private enum RomanCharacters
    {
      I = 1,
      V = 5,
      X = 10,
      L = 50,
      C = 100,
      D = 500,
      M = 1000,
    }
  }
}

You can download the C# solution with unit tests here.