Agile Knoxville

Agile Knoxville meets to have some fun while sharing agile software experiences and best practices, to network, and help others with issues related to agile software development methods. We talk about Scrum, eXtreme Programming, Lean Software Engineering, and other topics that are relevant to agile software development.

Whether you are a developer, manager, tester, writer, executive, or student, you will learn something about agile software development.

We meet at Scripps headquarters in West Knoxville:
-From Knoxville: I-40W to Exit 378B. Go north on Cedar Bluff Rd. Turn left onto Sherrill Blvd. The room is the Training Room at the Scripps Networks Knoxville Tech Center at 9721 Sherrill Blvd. You enter from Sherrill at the guard shack with the fence around it. Enter the Parking structure and go to the 3rd floor. Enter the building from the 3rd floor entrance nearest to Interstate 40. The Training Room is the first room on the left.
Questions? Call Adrian Carr at 865-924-6319

In this practical workshop, we teach you how to apply scenario based decomposition skills to slice Scrum Product Backlog Items into appropriately sized items ready for the Sprint Planning Meeting. Product owners often define stories that are too big to develop or test within a sprint. A team member with scenario based decomposition skills can help the product owner slice features into small sprint-sized items that can easily be developed and tested within a sprint. This is a crucial skill that many Scrum teams lack. In this workshop, we will demonstrate the technique, then if there is enough time left we will have the workshop participants apply the technique on their own, producing appropriately sliced and sized items ready for the next sprint planning meeting.

6:00-6:15 Pizza from Recruitwise and Networking
6:15-7:45 Announcements, Meeting

Should I adopt pure Scrum or adapt it to our company's culture? Does the concept of "Stop, Inspect, Adapt" also apply to Agile adoption within my company? Come join us as Alston Hodge (Enterprise Agile coach) leads a discussion on when to adopt and when to adapt Agile values, principles and practices. He will share real-world examples of successes and challenges in addressing this issue.

Alston Hodge is a certified Scrum Professional, certified Scrum Product Owner, and Project Management Professional with 25 years of diverse management experience in multi-million dollar program and project implementation. He has proven experience in completing programs and projects in a variety of industries including Insurance, Information Technology, Energy, Government, Healthcare and Hospitality. His extensive experience includes coaching, managing, mentoring, and training scrummasters, product owners and project managers. Alston is the founder of the Louisville Agile Forum and serves as the enterprise Agile coach for Humana.

We all know that Agile is sweeping the project management world. Or is it Lean? Lean Agile? Scrum? Kanban? Scrumagilean, maybe? Jon Terry of LeanKit will discuss how these ideas relate to each other. How Lean principles provide the organizational framework to allow Agile to succeed beyond the team level. What the Kanban method really is. Hint: It's not just an alternative to Scrum for maintenance teams. And how you can use the data that Kanban provides for dramatically better forecasting and continuous improvement.
We will discuss:

• The Toyota Production System and its Lean/Agile children
• Lean Principles Overview
• Visual management and pull scheduling
• Kanban, Scrum, and Scrumban
• Workflow metrics based on actual results not estimates

Jon Terry is Chief Operating Officer of LeanKit, makers of LeanKit Kanban. Prior to joining LeanKit, Jon held a number of senior IT positions with hospital-giant HCA and its subsidiary HealthTrust Purchasing Group. During that time he was among those responsible for launching HCA’s widespread adoption of Lean/Agile methods. Jon earned his Global Executive MBA from Georgetown University and ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. He is a Project Management Professional and a Certified Scrum Master.

On Thursday, January 26, Don Gray will present a talk on integrating agile with your company's culture.

Here's a synopsis:

Considering your company's culture when introducing Agile into your organization allows you to tailor your approach. Going even further, it's important to understand the people in your organization, how they react to change and what role they take in creating and changing your organization's culture. This experiential and discussion based session gives participants the opportunity to learn how to recognize their organization's culture, and perhaps more importantly, recognize how to manage objections based on personality types of the people who may appear to be resisting the change.

On Thursday, October 20, Jon Stahl and Gregg Bobinski from LeanDog Software will present "Agile from the Top Down".
From http://www.jonstahl.com:

I believe that IT Executives must practice what they preach. If they want teams to be transparent and agile, they need to practice themselves and lead by example. This talk will share some Agile & Lean techniques, applied in a new way, to help organizations understand their constraints so they can transparently carry forward their journey to becoming Agile. “Seeing the Whole” includes customers, projects, applications, people, leadership, financials and Standard Work. We will propose creating a BVR (Big (I mean big) Visual Room), refactoring the PMO and suggest some practices to help support this journey. Executives are challenged to sign the Manifesto, lead by example, be transparent and support Kaizen.

During this talk, I unveil 25+ physical boards and together we build a big visual room with open discussion. The first time I did this talk was in May of 2009 at the Central Ohio Agile "Path to Agility" Conference in Columbus Ohio. I have been practicing these techniques at 4 clients over since November of 2009. After 8 months of success, I felt it was tested enough to share it.”

On Wednesday, September 21, Linda Rising gave a fantastic talk on leading change with an organization.

On Tuesday, March 8, Tim Korson brings us "Dancing with Pigs". There are many ways to choreograph the activities within a sprint, but all of them involve intricate, dance-like interactions among testers, product owners, other team members, and chickens.

Becoming good at agile development is a little like learning to dance. Some of us are naturally born dancers and learn quickly and seemingly effortlessly. Others of us struggle for quite a while to get our two left feet coordinating effectively with the rest of the team. But natural or not, every team member needs to become good at the agile dance. This presentation hopes to help you become a better dancer by exploring five principles of agile interactions. More specifically, we will focus on those interactions necessary to discovering and elaborating requirements within the context of the Scrum framework.

Timothy Korson is a Scrum trainer and coach. He has had over a decade of substantial experience working on a large variety of systems developed using modern agile software engineering techniques. This experience includes distributed, real time, embedded systems as well as business information systems in an n-tier, client-server environment. Dr. Korson’s current focus is on helping organizations implement high value software using Scrum.

As a leader in the field of agile software development, Tim has authored articles, given numerous tutorials on agile techniques, and worked with numerous organizations transitioning to Scrum.

Although Tim holds a Ph.D. in business information systems as well as undergraduate degrees in math and computer science, his focus and experience is practical, not academic. His interests, education, and practical corporate experience have always spanned both technology and business perspectives. This focus on the application of technology to solve business problems is a perfect fit to his current role as Scrum trainer and coach. Tim’s sub-specialty is on working with testers in helping them to transition to their new roles as effective Scrum team members.

Tim is a frequent invited lecturer at major international conferences. The lectures and training classes he presents are highly rated by the attendees.

6:00-6:15 Pizza and Networking
6:15-7:45 Announcements, Meeting

This Q&A session will be led by Bob Schatz of Agile Infusion. Bob Schatz specializes in training, consulting and coaching in the practice of successfully using agile project management techniques to transform organizations and improve the performance of software development projects.

This Q&A session (with some slides), led by Joe Little of Kitty Hawk Consulting, will describe the Lean values and principles and practices within Scrum. Or that Joe thinks should be immediately added to Scrum. These will include: Kaikaku, kaizen, kanban, genchi genbutsu, flow, minimize inventory, work as a team, muri (or, don't have muri), eliminate muda, "half of what we know is wrong", pull system, single piece flow, stop the line, defer commitment, optimize the whole, the relentless pursuit of perfection, etc, etc.

Perhaps you will take away a very different view of Scrum. And Lean.

When was the last time you played with Legos? How about Legos and Agile together? Don Gray lead this session with a hands on introduction to iterative Agile development with... Legos! Participants had hands on experience with Estimation, Signup, Development, Showcasing, and Retrospectives.

Delivering business value, welcoming requirements change, frequently delivering working software and continual self-assessment are some of the Agile Principles. We learned how these guiding principles can be achieved using Legos to build a simple project Agile style.

Brian Prince from Microsoft talked about "Hands-On Agile Practices". Brian ran through the fundamentals of Agile Planning and Gave a great presentation on some real-world lessons learned from previous experience.

In the Driver's Seat - Business Driven Software

We want to build software that matters. Have you ever produced a product that didn't quite thrill the customer? Agile methods and Lean principles have brought incredible insight and efficiency into creating software. The software development teams, however, are only as successful as the value of the products we are creating. How do we discover and choose the right features to develop and release? Brenden McGlinchey from Net Objectives was our speaker on Tuesday, May 19. We discussed Product Management, Developer, QA, Business Analyst, and Management's role in the Lean Product Portfolio, estimation, selecting the right (and right-sized) features to build, and integrating customers into the process.

As a follow-up to last month's meeting, we will have our first ever video night, where we will watch a great presentation by Mary Poppendieck at Google. Mary is a speaker and author who specializes in Lean software development, and views things a little differently than the mainstream agilists. We'll have time afterwards for a discussion of the topics presented.

Ever been frustrated by those things that seem to hinder your ability to get things done efficiently at work? If you have ever thought about encouraging your boss (or their boss) to attend an agile meeting, this is the one. This month, Joe Little of Kitty Hawk Consulting, will be our guest. He plans to speak about Lean principles. For those that aren't familiar with lean, you can read more about it at poppendieck.com. Lean helps people and organizations take agile to the next level, and when companies embrace lean principles, work flows much more smoothly and efficiently, and business value is realized more quickly.

On February 12, Sam Reynolds discussed simplicity in software development. The AGILE Manifesto tells us that, "Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential". Figuring out how to be simple without being your own worst enemy is one of the more difficult (and most overlooked) challenges of implementing an AGILE strategy. The best time to reap the rewards of the choices of simplicity is when things look the bleakest.

On January 8, Michael Neel gave a great presentation entitled "Dependency Injection, Way of the Ninja" as a way of allowing and embracing change and maintaining good practices among all this change.
Michael C. Neel serves as board member and Vice President for the East Tennessee .Net Users Group in Knoxville, TN and organizes Knoxville's developer conference "CodeStock" (http://CodeStock.org).

Bob Schatz of Agile Infusion was our guest for the combined November/December meeting. Bob is a Certified Scrum Trainer who has trained Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Managers, and entire companies worldwide in the use of Scrum.

Mark Isham presented the results of a real-world large architecture redesign project that was running behind and failing, then brought back around using agile principles and Scrum. Mark recently gave a similar presentation at Agile '08, and at Agile Atlanta. He received fantastic reviews after the Agile Atlanta presentation, and also after the presentation here in Knoxville.

User interface engineers Jim Ungar and Bryan Grubaugh did a great presentation on the user centered design approach for agile software development at Jewelry Television. They explained the user centered design process, from research through design and testing.

On Thursday July 17, Marisa Seal and Josh Carroll gave a great presentation on the use of Test Driven Development and Automated Acceptance Testing at EdFinancial. We'll post the presentation slides eventually.

On Thursday, June 5th, Jean Tabaka gave a talk entitled "Agile: What is it and Why Should I Care?". This was a great presentation. We have a video of the meeting, but Google Video isn't converting large videos correctly for some reason. We'll get it out here soon. If you don't know about Jean, she is a nationally known speaker, and has given keynotes and presentations at many large agile conferences. She is also the author of Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders , and is an agile coach and mentor for Rally Software Development.

Jean has also been instrumental in helping EdFinancial apply agile principles to their business. You can read more about Jean here.

It's very simple. Technically, there is no "membership". There are no dues, membership lists, or anything of that sort. (Simplicity and agility usually go hand in hand.) You can come to every meeting, or none at all. You can sign up for email notices on the Yahoo group if you would like. If you do, you will receive occasional email updates on meeting times and topics, and sometimes information about other local events. Or, if you don't want to join the Yahoo group, you can just show up to any meeting. We'll post info here on upcoming meetings as information becomes available.