Agilopolis Community Day 8

Posted Tue, 04/06/2010 - 20:19 by admin

Agilopolis Community is proud to invite you for a second lecture of a new series: “Agile – Theory vs Experience (ATE)”. It is planned as a series of short lectures or presentations of practitioner observations, experiences and best practices followed by fierce discussion. The goal is to go through all SCRUM components.

ACD7 that took place on Thursday 04.03.2010 brought over 40 people to NSN premises at Silver Forum, where the main speaker was Kristjan Deberni. Workshop shortly turned to be again area for discussion where Kristjan brought enourmous amount of practical knowledge.
Over 2,5 hour passed quickly and allowed only to get half through. Therefore ACD8 meeting is being organised for those who are keen to meet Kristijan.

Agilopolis Community Day 8, that will be held on 15.04. (Thursday), 18:00, Wrocław. The details of location and exact schedule you will find in invitation that is available after registering through this website.

Meeting agenda:
ATE: Scrum Master versus Agile Team part 2 by Kristijan Deberni (Rail Cargo Service)

Discussion will be focused on scrum master role in the context of agile team. What theory says versus Kristijan real life experience. The main question is how scrum master should behave in order to support team to the best extent possible. How to drive the team towards common goals.

Following topics will be discussed:

  • Scrum master responsibilities;
  • How to support team during estimation;
  • Sprint planning – if and how scrum master should influence team commitments;
  • Daily scrum – how to make good teams great;
  • Sprint review – if and how „fail” sprint;
  • Retrospection – how to make open discussion;
  • Scrum master – team member or not?

Presenter: Kristijan Deberni (Rail Cargo Service)

Kristijan works as and developer and scrum master in international
Rail Cargo Service company in Wroclaw. Since 3 years, he is involved
in work with SCRUM methodology, since 2 as a certified scrum master.
Kristijan was the first one to implement SCRUM in his projects and
later on through his company. SCRUM was used by him for a lot of small
to medium and one large project (over a year).

Currently, Kristijan works on SCRUM implementation for maintenance
and change request handling of an existing system.

Interested? We are looking forward to see you on 15.04. To participate & see more details please don't forget to register first. Coffee and cookies granted ;)

ACD8 is not enough? Please take a look at early announcement of ACD9!

DSDM as a bridge between PM BOK and Agile world by Tomasz Lukasiewicz (Research&Engineering Center)

Among agile methodologies, DSDM (Dynamic System Development Method) sometimes looks like a younger brother without being in the lame light as Scrum or XP. Also adaptation level especially through large companies is significantly smaller. It is very interesting phenomena since DSDM at first glance seems to be an excellent bridge between corporate PMI based process world and lean approach. It also looks as a good choice for small to medium size enterprises.
During the course of the lecture, DSDM key ideas will be presented in comparison to Scrum and PM Bok approach, especially in context of adaptation capabilities.

Presenter: Tomasz Lukasiewicz (Research&Engineering Center)

Tomasz is a Project Manager with over 7 years of practical experience at Accenture, Siemens, NSN and REC. Proven history of over 30 successful projects (up to 2M Euro). Unique combination of skills coming from participation in projects on nearly all available positions: team member, architect, line manager, project manager and finally as head of project management department. Wide experience in managing complex and distributed projects for largest customers in Europe (e.g. Vodafone, OTH, Netcom, Continental, Cinterion). Rare knowledge related to offshored project setup and quick enabling of large team in proprietary technologies. Agile consultant for largest Wroclaw’s companies. Actively participates in communities giving lectures on project management. Founder and active volunteer of Agilopolis Project Management Community.

Certified: PMP, CSM, SCJD, SCJP, TOGAF.

Please take a look at summary of previous Agilopolis Community Days:
ACDs

Best regards,
Your Agilopolis Team

Comments

Minutes of the meeting (ACD8)

by admin - 04/16/2010 - 00:55

As usually, meeting planned for 90 min took over 150 minutes thanks to lively discussion and experience sharing. Please find some notes below.

The most innovative concept that was presented was Tester Driven Development, it was even suggested that it should be published as a new methodology :). In generall, it is a model when there are more testers than required simply because they were available. In such model, verification is a separate team and testing is delayed by one iteration.

In Kristijan case, customer was delivered version just after iteration end, before any testing. Reason was that it was much more important to have early customer feedback than possible errors.

Despite the fact that it was fixed price contract, agile approach was applied. Thanks to customer cooperation (some kind of trust) it was possible to work on the backlog together with customer and in case change requests, some feature were reprioritized. Kristiaj was also supporting customer with its business needs sugesting new features or better utilization of existing one - kind of consulting.

Nice approach to get customer feedback was presented - lets try to organize some training for the customer in the middle of the project. It is best way to improve communication and get feedback from reluctant customers.

Large part of the meeting was devoted to role of Scrum Master. In generall, Kristiaj opinion was that SM is not part of the team. First it might impact team commitment, second - SM is kind of shield for the team, when working together with the team, he must also shielding himself which makes his position much weaker. How much time SM should spent on his task? As much as needed. In case there are free time, he might support team but as an addition not part of commitment ("wisienka na torcie"). SM is like a helsman, must adjust the sails to catch the wind and in case of wind being to strong, release it a little bit.
There were also some hints about his work:
1. team should be treated in similar way as a child, you are always there to support but never to do the work by yourself;
2. each event should be associated with some nice thing (e.g. cake), it is the worst what can happen if team is afraid about meeting.
3. customized pair programming, people are paired but only to work together on some most difficult and not standard elements.

But the most important hint was given at the end. Based on practice, people want to work but they want to do something that have any sense.