The keynote starts with our dear agile chicken & pigs story. Pigs are the ones who are fully commited to the projects, all other stakeholders are chickens. Judged from the agenda, this session will be much about required skills and motivation. That sounds promising 
What’s special about agile teams? (read more…)
category: Agile Testing, devoxx | 
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This post is written on 14. October 2009 by Andreas Ebbert-Karroum.
Jeff Sutherland himself infected me with Scrum a year ago. We were using eXtreme Programming practices since years, and in my opinion Scrum was the ideal supplement to form an agile project management framework.
Since then we use Scrum in most of our projects in combination with eXtreme Programming and gradually certify all employees as Certified ScrumMaster. For me, Jeff has not promised too much: our customers enjoy a dramatic increase in productivity and quality. Especially the short release cycles (sprints), most often 2 weeks long, caused some excitement.
Even so, we have not always been able to fully implement Scrum together with our customers. During Jeff’s training, but also in Scrum Books by Ken Schwaber, it is always assumed, that Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team are from the same organisation. How does that fit into the working model of a service company as we are, and which roles are fulfilled by the customers and which roles are played by us? So far Scrum was not giving an answer to that.
(read more…)
category: Scrum, meet the experts | no comment
This post is written on 6. September 2009 by Mirko Novakovic.
Was yesterday really only the second day of Agile 2009? Then I have to hurry to write down my impressions, before the next day will have been started.
category: Agile, Conferences | no comment
This post is written on 26. August 2009 by Andreas Ebbert-Karroum.
Wow, the weekend and also the first day in Chicago are gone. Even before the conference started, I had the opportunity to meet many people whom I only knew from books and blogs. On Saturday night, shortly after arriving at the hotel, I met Scott Duncan (@softqual) and Bernd Schiffer (@berndschiffer) for a drink. We managed to arrange that over Twitter, very unique experience for me. We met in the BIG bar of Hyatt, with a splendid view over Chicago by night, and slowly warmed up for the conference.
Pizza, Chicago Style (pic by George Dinwiddie)
category: Agile, Conferences | no comment
This post is written on 25. August 2009 by Andreas Ebbert-Karroum.
This page lists all sessions from the forthcoming Agile 2009 conference, with a slightly modified calendar file to make them work
For the technically inclined, more background can be found in the accompanying blog. Here’s the most important, the list of sessions, ready to be imported into your calendar. Let me know if it worked, or if you still have problems.
This page lists all sessions from the forthcoming Agile 2009 conference, with a slightly modified calendar file to make them work
For the technically inclined, more background can be found in the accompanying blog. Here’s the most important, the list of sessions, ready to be imported into your calendar. Let me know if it worked, or if you still have problems.
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This post is written on 19. August 2009 by Andreas Ebbert-Karroum.
The first Meet the Experts – Performance took place in June and was a day to remember for all participants and organizers: new contacts were made, new insights and knowledge was gained, interesting discussions were happening – also food, drinks and atmosphere were great (See Slides & Pics from the event!)
The content of the second Meet the Experts is fixed and I am extremely happy, that we managed to gather the German-speaking experts also for the coming topic Agility:
The pitch of the performance event was rather technical, much code examples and discussions covering unknown depths of the JVM. The agility event will be interesting on a completely different level. We will discuss how to pull through projects with agile methods, how those can be introduced in companies large and small and make them stick, and how that affects the teamwork. Additionally we offer a training to become “Certified Scrum Product Owner”. The Product Owner role is continuously tagged as the most difficult one to do right in Scrum, interestingly there are only few trainings available. So we are very happy that we could win Simon Robers as competent partner and expert for that training.
So this is the agenda for the Meet the Experts on Agility:
Simon Roberts will explain to a limited set of participants (max 20 persons!), what makes a good Product Owner, and where are perils and pitfalls (and of course also how to avoid or handle them). He will cover important topics like: Agile Foundations, Product Vision and Backlog, Agile Estimations, User Stories, Release Planning, Controlling and Reporting, Scaling Scrum and Retrospectives. Details can be found on the Meet the Experts Homepage under Trainings, where you can immediatly register (training is in German!).
The Meet the Experts will take place like last time, with first-class setup, sessions and an open space to enable the participants to place topics, which are dear to their heart or currently aching in their project, but are missing on the agenda. The agenda from our experts is:
Despite the English session titles, all talks will be held in German. The registration is enabled. I’m looking forward to that day and our guests. Maybe we even see the week before at the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago?
category: Agile, meet the experts | no comment
This post is written on 24. July 2009 by Andreas Ebbert-Karroum.
