Knoxville Agile

The Knoxville Agile Practitioner's Group meets to have some fun while sharing agile (and some not-so-agile) experiences, 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.

When was the last time you played with Legos? How about Legos and Agile together? This could be your chance. Don Gray will lead this session which gives a hands on introduction to iterative Agile development with... Legos! This will give participants hands on experience to 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 will demonstrate how these guiding principles can be achieved using Legos to build a simple project Agile style.

It doesn't matter if you are a Developer, BA, Tester or PM you will be able to participate. The aim is to give participants exposure to each of the stages listed above, something people don't ordinarily gain day-to-day in their projects. In Agile projects it is important that team members understand what others do and how they, as an individual interact, with other individuals to deliver business value early and often and have fun doing so.

Don Gray coaches software development organizations to higher levels of productivity. His background in machine and process automation provides the foundation for working with organizational systems and change. Better Software Magazine, STQE, and Dorset House Publishing have published his essays. His workshops focus on communication, change, and systems thinking and are featured at the annual Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference, which he co-founded and hosts.

In addition to the pizza provided by RecruitWise, we'll also give away software from JetBrains.

6:00-6:15 Pizza and Networking
6:15-7:30 Announcements, Meeting

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.