DFW Scrum: January with Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks

DFW Scrum is honored to host Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks for our January MeetUp (please register here). Each quarter, we strive to host an industry leading expert to help us expand upon our knowledge and learning throughout the year.

Our speaker of choice for January sends a clear message to the Developer community on the skills and practices necessary for Developers who are engaged in Scrum/Agile processes. DFW Scrum caters to all roles (Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Developers, Executives, Managers, Stakeholders, etc…) involved in the Scrum process and our goal is reaching out to attract the Developers who are a key component to the success of Scrum implementations.

Scrum certainly excels at managing the logistics of projects as well as providing the self-organizing structure that makes Scrum successful, however, it does not necessarily prescribe an engineering practice that focuses on quality/craftsmanship; it simply says that you MUST have one that delivers the quality that Scrum demands. We hosted Ron Jeffries in July to broach such a topic on Technical Excellence and now we carry that message forward to kick-off 2010.

More details to follow on venue/location. We are reaching out to many professional groups who wish to hear Martin speak. We know his knowledge is not limited to Scrum/Agile and welcome Martin to help improve the Software Development communities of DFW and surrounding areas.

If you are interested in assisting with sponsorship or have any questions about this event, feel free to contact Lance Dacy.

Mike Cohn’s Presentation to DFW Scrum

A special thanks to DFW’s Agilists that came to DFW Scrum on TUE 10/27 with Mike Cohn. Our topic was on Agile Estimation and we had almost  90 people in attendance. Too often we struggle with how/what to estimate. Mike did a great job of presenting the topic and answering our questions in an informal Q&A.

While this meeting started as a DFW Scrum meeting, the APLN’s Dallas Chapter reached out to us and offered to co-sponsor the event for their members as well. So thank you to Fellowship Technologies, APLN, and Improving Enterprises for helping us pick up the expenses for food, space, etc…

Several people emailed me and asked if we would be videoing the event. I did receive permission from Mike to video and post the meeting for viewing. Keep in mind that this video was very static. I did not have the chance to take really good video, but over all, I think you can see Mike, his slides, and hear the group very well. In addition, Mike’s slides are also available for download.

Our next meeting will occur on TUE 11/17 at 6:30PM at Improving Enterprises in Dallas. We have yet to settle on the topic, but feel free to get involved in the discussion and propose ideas. We will be giving away a spot in each of Mike’s classes, Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner. You must be present at our November meeting to win.

We have had several vendors ask if they can sponsor or talk to our group as well. While I did not intend for this to become an advertising train, we recognized that some of our members would like to see the products that are out there in managing Scrum projects. So we hope to have a “Vendor” session at some point and we think this might be best done over the December month and take place as a virtual meeting. This should facilitate vendors demoing their products and allow people to interact in a virtual meeting space. Thoughts?

Stayed tuned for our January meeting as well. We have requested Martin Fowler to present to our group on TUE 1/19. I think many other groups would benefit from this session, so I am reaching out to other Agilists in the DFW Community to see if they would be interested in co-sponsoring this event so that we can get as many people involved as possible (it’s a rare thing to get Martin in town, believe me). We are still gathering interests, but stay tuned to our site for registration / location information. If you want to sponsor / involve your group, please send us an email.

Agile Skills Project

I (Lance Dacy) have/had the great pleasure of attending the Agile Developer Skills Workshop Summit in Ann Arbor, MI hosted by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson. The summit took place MON 10.12 through THU 10.15. The intent of the meeting was to recommend the best way to address the large gap we see in the Agile industry where developer craftsmanship is largely at the discretion of the team / individual.

We would actually like to see some model that would close that gap by assisting individuals in self assessing themselves, providing a skills inventory of learning objectives, and even perhaps a way for the community to evaluate your experiences against the required skills determined by the community. There has been much debate about developer certification and the summit intended to represent the fair and rational views of the community on this subject (more to come on that at a later date). I wanted to capture some of the momentum experienced at the summit and send a huge thank you to Ron and Chet for championing such a large project for the Agile community.

InfoQ Article describing the event

Blog by Andre Dhondt describing the 3 days in detail (great pictures and detail)

Blog by Ron Jeffries describing the event

I have started a discussion on our MeetUp site that will allow you to comment on the subject. I am interested to know what the DFW Community thinks about Agile Developer Skills.

I hope to see you on TUE 10/27 when we meet with Mike Cohn on Agile Estimation.