Where:
Infusionsoft (Google Map)
2065 W. Obispo Ave.
Gilbert, AZ 85233

Agenda:
6:00 – Registration (Infusionsoft providing Food and Drink)
6:20 – Announcements
6:30 – Begin “Collaborative Exercises for Release Planning”
8:00 – Closing Remarks

PLEASE REGISTER - If you are already a member of the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group, you have already received an email about this event, just select the “Registration Link” in that email. If you’ve not received that email, please sign-up (on the right), and we’ll get it out to you!!

Topic:  Collaborative Exercises for Release Planning

Collaboration doesn’t mean working on a shared document. It means interacting with each other in meaningful ways. This highly interactive, workshop-style presentation will present some collaboration techniques focusing on those which can be used during agile release planning to dig out details which might otherwise be missed.  If your organization struggles with understanding true customer needs, or you struggle with estimating the size of a release, or you simply can’t manage to remember everything necessary for a successful release, then you should definitely attend this presentation!

Speaker Bio:  Bob Hartman (aka “Agile Bob”)

Bob Hartman is one of approximately 15 people the Scrum Alliance has certified as both a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC).  His extensive experience with agile and Scrum teams has included working with large and small organizations including HP, Western Union, Pearson Education, Weyerhaeuser, Siemens, Arapahoe County Colorado, Vibrant Media, Starz Network and the University of Iowa.  Bob founded both Agile For All and the Agile Cooperative and has dedicated himself to his vision of Making Agile a Reality® for organizations around the world.

When: Thursday - June 17, 2009 (6:00pm – 8:00pm)

Where:
Infusionsoft    (Google Map)
2065 W. Obispo Ave.
Gilbert, AZ 85233

Agenda:
6:00 -  Registration (Infusionsoft providing Food and Drink)
6:20 -  Announcements and topic selection
6:30 -  Begin “Topic Tables”
8:00 -  Announcements

PLEASE REGISTER - If you are already a member of the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group, you have already received an email about this event, just select the “Registration Link” in that email.  If you’ve not received that email, please sign-up (on the right), and we’ll get it out to you!!

Topic Overview:

We did this back in October, and it worked so well, that we’re doing it again.  We’ll begin the meeting by brainstorming on some Agile/Scrum topics.  We’ll all vote and select between 3-5 discussion topics.   Then, we’ll assign each discussion topic to a table – hence the name “table topics” .  The group will split up, and people will sit at whichever topic table interests them.  Everyone at the table will talk about the specified topic for a fixed period of time (e.g., 25 min).  After the time limit, people shift to another topic.  That’s it – simple, fun, friendly, and informative!  The topics will be whatever we decide at the meeting, so bring your favorite troublesome topic or question (we’ll have some topic ideas too).   Depending on the number or people participating, we’ll probably end up around 3-5 “Topic Tables”, and 20-30 minutes per topic.  That will give everyone a chance to rotate through several discussions.

Special Note: Are you new to agile/scrum?  Well, do NOT skip this meeting thinking “I don’t know enough”.  This meeting format is a particularly great way to meet experienced people and capitalize on their experience.  Topic Tables are good for newcomers as well as experienced “agilists”.  Everyone gets exposed to multiple topics, many viewpoints, and tons of experience all in a single night.

Speaker Bio:

No dedicated “speaker” – just members talking about all the hot topics!!!

Where:
Infusionsoft (Google Map)
2065 W. Obispo Ave.
Gilbert, AZ 85233

Agenda:
6:00 – Registration (Infusionsoft providing Food and Drink)
6:20 – Announcements
6:30 – Begin “The Product Backlog – Recognizing when a story is at the right level of detail (plus, determining story priority and estimating story size)”
8:00 – Closing Remarks

PLEASE REGISTER - If you are already a member of the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group, you have already received an email about this event, just select the “Registration Link” in that email. If you’ve not received that email, please sign-up (on the right), and we’ll get it out to you!!

The Product Backlog – Recognizing when a story is at the right level of detail, plus determining story priority, estimating story size, estimating release duration and committing to a schedule to deliver product

Stories, story priority, and story sizing is vital to the Product Backlog, Release Planning, Sprint Planning, and actual delivering of commercial or operational value iteratively and incrementally.  When you are sizing your stories, at the Product Backlog level, a story should contain just enough detail for the team to be able to estimate its relative size to other stories.  When estimating size of your stories, at the Sprint Backlog level, a story should contain enough detail for the team to be able to determine what the solution involves or what it will take them to deliver the story.

This presentation will cover recognizing when a story is at the right level of detail and demonstrate a technique to prioritize and size your stories. Russell will also discuss a technique to estimate velocity which can then be applied to Sprint 1 planning.

Speaker Bio:  Russell Pannone

Russell Pannone is the founder of www.WeBeAgile.com. With almost 30 years of experience, Russell is an industry thought leader and an agile/lean product (system-software) development practitioner.   He is also the Editor-In-Chief of the Agile Journal and the Agile/Lean Product Development Enterprise Adoption Lead and Coach at US Airways.

His passion is to serve in any way, working side-by-side with folks on real projects and applying system-thinking and delivering often commercial or operational value. While at the same time helping folks deal with the emotional and creative tension of moving from the individual’s, team’s or organization’s current state to their “shared” vision of “being” agile and lean.   Some of his system-software development credentials are:

• Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), application pending for Certified Scrum Coach (CSC)
• ITIL Foundation V2/V3
• UML 2.0 Fundamentals
• IBM Certified Solution Designer – IBM Rational Unified Process 7.0

Russell can be contacted at rpannone@WeBeAgile.com

When: Thursday - April 15, 2010 (6:00pm – 8:00pm)

Where:
Infusionsoft (Google Map)
2065 W. Obispo Ave.
Gilbert, AZ 85233

Agenda:
6:00 – Registration (Infusionsoft providing Food and Drink)
6:20 – Announcements
6:30 – Begin “A Scrum Project Experience”
8:00 – Closing Remarks

PLEASE REGISTER - If you are already a member of the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group, you have already received an email about this event, just select the “Registration Link” in that email. If you’ve not received that email, please sign-up (on the right), and we’ll get it out to you!!

Topic: A Scrum Project Experience

The Scrum framework is fairly easy to understand.  In about five minutes (http://www.infoq.com/news/2006/11/scrum-in-five-minutes) you can get basic definition.  Application and experience is the real way to learn!  In this meeting we will, together, do a simple project using Scrum.  We will have a Goal, Sprint Planning Meetings, Sprints and Retrospectives.  We will make estimates and measure our Velocity. Depending on our progress, we may do as many as five Sprints!

You need not worry about programming, testing or other technical skills.  Just bring your enthusiasm of participation and learning. The project will be easy…or not.  ;^)

Experience is the best teacher.  Even long-time Scrum and Agile practitioners can learn from a compact experience followed by discussion of what we learned.  Please come and help create something wonderful!

Speaker Bio:  Alan Dayley

Alan has been doing embedded development for nearly 20 years, in projects ranging from built-in and production test to embedded application firmware and embedded product user interfaces.  His awareness of information flow between people drove him to rediscover Agile principles as a means of revealing enterprise impediments and creating high performance teams.  A Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Professional, Alan now works on integrating Agile further into the enterprise, coaching in Agile for an engineering department designing next generation SSDs and continuing a grass-roots Scrum introduction he started over two years ago.  Go to http://dayleyagile.com to contact him.

Where:
Infusionsoft (Google Map)
2065 W. Obispo Ave.
Gilbert, AZ 85233

Agenda:
6:00 – Registration (Infusionsoft providing Food and Drink)
6:20 – Announcements
6:30 – Begin “Testing on the Team”
8:00 – Closing Remarks

PLEASE REGISTER - If you are already a member of the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group, you have already received an email about this event, just select the “Registration Link” in that email. If you’ve not received that email, please sign-up (on the right), and we’ll get it out to you!!

Topic:  Testing on the Team

We’ll discuss testers and testing on a Scrum team.  Topics to be covered will likely include:

• Agile – thinking agile not just agile practices
• Scrum – a framework not a rule set
• QA – preventing defects not just finding them
• Testing – validation and finding defects
• TDD – a mindset change, you can’t think of everything
• Continuous Integration (CI) – regression testing should always be done
• Test Environment – like for like systems or false positives and false negatives

Since each one of the above topics could be an entire meeting (or more), topic depth will depend somewhat upon audience participation and interest.

Speaker Bio:  Bob Small

Bob Small is the founder of The Quality Consortium of Phoenix  (http://qaphoenix.com).  He has 12 years experience in the IT industry.  Bob has been a developer for a Professional Senior care provider.  Bob started as a System Tester for the number one domain registrar in the world.  Bob continued his career in testing and advanced into Quality Assurance at a leading contact center solution provider.  Bob has recently started guest lecturing at local Universities and colleges.  Bob has won worldwide online testing contests (uTest.com).  He continues to learn Agile techniques and mentor those around him in testing techniques and methods.  He has taught developers and mentored junior QA analysts in testing methodologies and QA responsibilities.  Favorite quote is: “Plan your work, work your plan.”

Where:
Infusionsoft (Google Map)
2065 W. Obispo Ave.
Gilbert, AZ 85233

Agenda:
6:00 – Registration (Infusionsoft providing Food and Drink)
6:20 – Announcements
6:30 – Begin “Agile all the Way Down!”
8:00 – Closing Remarks

PLEASE REGISTER - If you are already a member of the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group, you have already received an email about this event, just select the “Registration Link” in that email. If you’ve not received that email, please sign-up (on the right), and we’ll get it out to you!!

Topic: Agile all the Way Down

Agile is usually described in the context of creating and supporting a more dynamic team inside of a old-fashioned, top-down corporate structure.  Much attention is paid to how to argue the benefits of Agile to nay-sayers, as well as finding and nurturing like-minded people to guarantee success.  But what if we were to build an entire company on an Agile foundation?  Should be a stroll in the park, right?  Don’t be so sure.  I’ll share some stories and lessons from living in this all-agile environment and talk about what we are doing right as well as the vast landscape of potential improvement ahead of us.

Speaker Bio:  Chris Young

Chris Young is the Scrum Master at Integrum Technologies.  He has been programming now for nearly 15 years, but he only counts the last three because in 2006 he joined the team at Integrum, and became an eager Agile practitioner.  Since then, Chris has been helpful to many teams and many projects as he tries to distill the essence of Agile Software development to his teammates and product owners.

The first page of the preface of this book made me wince! Not because the book is bad, far from it! The immediacy of Scott’s insight into the pain of software development can only come from someone who has been there and experienced the trials and tribulations of project failure (more than once).

I was expecting this to be yet another book on Design Patterns, but it really isn’t. This book attempts to look deeper into questions that cannot be easily answered and suggests a road map to evolve the profession of software development. It concentrates on practices, principles and disciplines that developers should follow when creating software, especially when thinking about how to implement features. It covers a wide range of practices, including analysis, refactoring, testing, and looks at how existing patterns should influence our design decisions.

The appendix includes some very good examples of common design patterns. Different styles are applied to each pattern to teach or remind us what type of problem each pattern is used for. UML diagrams, procedural code alternatives, non-software analogies and basic OO code for implementation are included for each pattern.

Since so many of us have to deal with legacy code bases, it’s always helpful when a book like this addresses that issue. Scott mentions hearing comments such as “this code is too hard to unit test,” “unit testing takes too much time” and “too many permutations to unit test.” He explains how these all point to design issues, and that leads into a great chapter discussing refactoring.

Why should we refactor if the behavior does not change? This and other similar questions are covered too, explaining the concept of technical debt and the frequency of developer burnout: “Decaying, hard to maintain software will disable a development team faster than anything I know.”

I would thoroughly recommend this book to any developer, however experienced or inexperienced, who wants to understand more about design patterns and how thinking in a design-driven manner can evolve our profession.

I caught up with Scott at SD West, to ask him a few questions about his book.

The meeting last night with “Agile Bob” was excellent.  Bob expressed thanks to everyone for a pleasant and intellectually stimulating meeting.

New Schedule

We announced that the group meetings will now start following a regular schedule.

• Our meetings will be held on the third Thursday of every month, starting on February 18th.
• We will strive to have special guests twice a year, on two of our regular meeting days.
• We will have special meetings outside of this regular schedule, as interest and opportunity present.

Please note, I announced last night that we will meet on the third Tuesday.  I was incorrect.  We will be meeting on the third Thursday of every month. Sorry for the confusion!

Back Story

Since the beginning of PhxSUG, we have been having meetings on irregular days.  The main reason for doing so is to be flexible for special speakers.  We have been able to accommodate their schedule to allow them to speak, since they were in town anyway.  The Steering Team for the group had several months of on-and-off discussion about this “random” schedule.  Some preferred to have a regular meeting day every month.

We finally chose to follow the regular schedule.  While we may not have as many special speakers, we feel the regular schedule will make it easier for local people to attend.  Your calendars can be planned out with the third Thursday evening set aside for whatever PhxSUG is doing.  Building the local community is very important.  We believe a regular meeting day will help do that.

And, we’ll inspect and adapt.

We appreciate busy schedules.  Every evening is precious time that must be spent in a valuable way. We are thankful when you choose to spend it with our community, growing our knowledge of Scrum and Agile.  We commit to making sure the time you invest provides great value to you and your teams!

Introductory Slides

I started the topic by showing a few slides from the excellent presentation “Being an Effective Product Owner,” by Roman Pichler.  The slides defined the many attributes, qualities and focus of a good Product Owner.  As usual, I was awed by the person described there.  If you have such a person on your team, keep them!

We then reviewed the basic roles of Scrum, to put the Product Owner position in perspective.  As we discussed, I updated the marker board.

Open Discussion

Having consumed about 30 minutes with the contextual introduction, we opened the floor for questions and peer discussion.  This was great!  It was very easy to just bring up some aspect of a Product Owner’s work and have people ask and answer around it.  I apologize for taking so long to write this summary because I don’t remember all the things that were discussed.  Some I do remember were about:

• Getting the Product Owner to better fulfill the role.
• Product Owners for large teams or multiple teams.
• Dealing with enterprise deadlines as a Product Owner.
• What happens to the team when Product Owners make demands.
• How the role works on a large project with many Scrum teams.

I hope someone took great notes and is willing to share them with the group.  Post them or link to them as comment below.  I’d love to read about details I may have missed!

After Discussions

I enjoyed the opportunity to talk to each other about Scrum during the break and after the main part of the meeting.  Seemed everyone was networking and learning from each other.  That is exactly the sort of reason to have meetings, peer support and community.

Perry and I also asked for ideas about future meeting topics.  I published these on the group mailing list and repeat them here for convenience.

• How do things like architecture concerns, hardware requirements, costs and other constraints fit into the Scrum framework?
• Doing documentation in Scrum.
• The relationship between Scrum and other Agile frameworks such as Extreme Programming, Lean, etc.
• Working with quality assurance on or with a Scrum team.
• Do a user story workshop, as in actually fill out story cards based on a requirements document or feature list
• Using Scrum to develop video games
• Something about “future shock” (I just noted “future shock” but now don’t remember what that means. The person suggesting had some great ideas about it.  Please fill in the details!)

This is the beginning of a PhxSUG Meeting Product Backlog that we intend to make a way to publish and keep visible to the group.  (If you have a suggestion of how to publicly communicate our group backlog, please let us know!)

Thank You

The evening was a great success, from my view at the front.  Thanks to high participation by the attendees and great food from Some Burros and provided by our Infusionsoft hosts, I rather enjoyed the experience.  I look forward to more meetings and interaction!

Where:
Infusionsoft (Google Map)
2065 W. Obispo Ave.
Gilbert, AZ 85233

Agenda:
6:00 – Registration (Infusionsoft providing Food and Drink)
6:20 – Announcements
6:30 – Begin “Doing Agile Isn’t the Same as BEING Agile!”
8:00 – Closing Remarks

PLEASE REGISTER - If you are already a member of the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group, you have already received an email about this event, just select the “Registration Link” in that email. If you’ve not received that email, please sign-up (on the right), and we’ll get it out to you!!

Topic Overview: Doing Agile Isn’t the Same as BEING Agile!

People often say “We’re doing agile at my company.”  What does that really mean?  Unfortunately it usually means the organization has picked a small number of agile practices they attempt to do without really paying attention to the overall results.  If a company is “doing agile well” it may even mean they are doing as many agile practices as possible.  However, in practice there is a big difference between “doing agile” and “being agile!”  Companies BEING Agile perform better than companies doing agile.  They see higher morale among their employees.  They use Agile as a tool rather than a process.  Most importantly, being Agile means being devoted to the principles which drive success rather than hoping the practices will drive success.  Whether you are using XP, Scrum, AUP, Crystal or another agile methodology come learn the basic principles and how to internalize them so your team, organization or enterprise can BE agile rather than DO agile!

Speaker Bio:  Bob Hartman

Bob Hartman, also known as “Agile Bob”, has spent over 30 years in software development.  His logic-based approach to development and quality was honed early in his career when he obtained both Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  After graduation he acquired wide-ranging industry knowledge by working in almost every role in the software industry including developer, tester, documentation writer, product manager, project manager, business analyst, development manager and executive.  Bob is no stranger to problems inherent in using an agile process having spent 5 years as VP of a publicly traded  company which switched to agile during difficult times.  Over the past 10 years he has grown from being an early adopter of agile to his current status as a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) who has done significant training, coaching and mentoring in all areas of agile development.  He has been a speaker at numerous conferences, seminars and workshops where his engaging style, holistic view of development, and personal anecdotes are always well received by attendees.  You can contact Bob at 303-766-0917 or through his blog at www.agilebob.com.