The community-based Agile conference for practitioners, by practitioners.
Whilst we're on the topic of conferences, there is another, much more community-organised event happening back-to-back with YOW! in just a month from now.
"It has been a long time between drinks" as they say. During my recovery from a prolonged bout of pneumonia I have had the space to reflect on what I would like to share and the manner in which I would like to voice it. As a result, I have made a resolution to revive the blogging here.
During my Certified ScrumMaster classes we run a series of simulations to experience the behaviour of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). We do this by having all class participants behave as agents in the system who continuously adjust their position in a container (the room) relative to two other randomly selected agents. These two other agents are known as your “best friend” and your “worst enemy” (only for the purpose of these simulations of course)!
The biggest gathering of Scrum practitioners occurred earlier this month in Orlando, Florida and I was lucky enough to be there along with only a couple of other Australians.
2010 sees Scrum WithStyle adding some some exciting new activities to our training. One that has proven particularly worthwhile is a multi-team Scrum simulation using Lego. As trainer, I play Product Owner and provide the teams with a vision and an initial Product Backlog. The teams then clarify the User Stories and we capture the Product Owner’s decisions on the requirements as Conditions of Satisfaction. The teams estimate the stories before the Product Owner re-prioritises. The teams do some Sprint Planning and commit to certain Product Backlog Items. Then we’re off and Sprinting. Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives and updating the Release Burndown complete the process miniature. It’s amazing what Scrum teams can achieve in two or three 5 minute sprints!
It was a pleasure to kick off the new year of Scrum training at the country’s original seat of federal political power: Old Parliament House. Astute readers may recall a previous visit described on the Software WithStyle blog. Some of you may also know that Canberra is my home town and as such it is particularly rewarding to return there to help organisations improve their agility.
