Archive for the ‘agilenorth’ Category
AgileNorth 08
Filed under: agile, agilenorth | Tags: agile, agilenorth, project management
Comments (5) If you’re in the UK this November you’ll be very welcome at this year’s AgileNorth 1-day conference. There’s always a very interesting mix of agile experts and newbies, and it’s a great opportunity to network for those of us based in the Greater Manchester area. It’s November 13th at UCLan, the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.
This year I’ve dropped out of the organising committee (which will probably help make this event better than ever :). I will be running a session though — a think-tank on the topic of “Do project managers have a role in agile software development?“. If you have an opinion on that, or if you want to know what others think, please do come along!
the next AgileNorth event
Sketchy information is beginning to emerge about a new half-day AgileNorth event that’s scheduled for a Saturday around the end of April. It will be free to attend, it will be hosted at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK, and it will feature sessions on “agile methods”.
If it turns out to be on April 26th, perhaps one or more of the attendees could turn up to the naked agilists event that evening and describe the highlights…?
AgileNorth ‘07 programme announced
The full conference programme for AgileNorth ‘07 is now available.
This year’s conference promises to be our best yet, and has attracted an international cast of speakers from leading agile organisations including Thoughtworks and the DSDM Consortium. The programme is packed with sessions on “business” and “technical” aspects of agile software development, together with keynotes, plenary sessions and plenty of opportunities to socialise with like-minded people. The whole event emphasises delegate participation, and is the key networking opportunity for agile newcomers and experts in the Manchester area.
So come on down to the Palace Hotel, Manchester on November 29th and be part of your local agile community!
For full details, and to register, visit http://agilenorth.net.
3rd AgileNorth conference, 29-nov-07
For this year’s AgileNorth 1-day conference we’re moving to a new venue – the Palace Hotel in the centre of Manchester. We’re putting the finishing touches to the programme this week, and we’ve managed to keep the delegate rate frozen at 95 GBP, an absolute bargain!
This year’s event will feature session tracks on “business” and “technical” aspects of agile software development, together with keynotes, plenary sessions and plenty of networking opportunities. If you’re in the North of England and you’re interested in agile, AgileNorth ‘07 is the place to be!
For details of the event visit http://agilenorth.net. And join our mailing list to hear further announcements, including details of the full conference programme as they become available.
the naked agilists have a blog
Clarke has created a blog for the Naked Agilists skypecasts and podcasts. There’s a whole series of virtual meetings in the pipeline, including podcasted interviews and agile success stories. They will all be announced on and downloadable from the new blog. Subscribe today!
skypecast to podcast
Clarke recorded this week’s agile skypecast, and he’s now made it available as a podcast. Including the bit where he nips out for some lasagne and burns his tongue…
first agile skypecast a great success
Filed under: agilenorth, conference, nakedagilists, skypecast |
Leave a Comment The first joint AgileScotland / AgileNorth mini-conference via skypecast happened last night (April 16th) and was a great success! We had 12-15 attendees for the whole two hours, and we were entertained by seven short and very varied sessions, four of which were supported by “slides” via HTML.
Aspects I liked:
- Some sessions provided visuals by means of HTML “slides” hosted by Paul Wilson; this was a good format, easily accessible to all, and helped to overcome the lack of other visual cues.
- The presenters put their photo on their first slide, which really helped me visualise who was speaking.
- Having a number of very short sessions made for a lively and varied evening.
- Leigh Mullin did a great job of chairing the evening’s activities, and sent encouraging chat messages to the presenters during our sessions.
- Everyone put themselves on mute during the presentations; the levels of discipline and courtesy were extremely high.
- During and after each session the group sent questions over Skype chat to the speaker, which the speaker could field as he wished; I kept mine in a queue and answered them at the end, but others did differently, and both approaches worked well.
- Charles Weir opened his session up as a discussion, and that worked surprisingly well too.
Some areas in which we might learn from the experience:
- Some speakers (me in particular) took a lot longer than their advertised time; next time it might be worth trying fixed-size 5-minute slots, plus 5-minutes for discussion, and rigorously enforcing that timetable.
- Two hours is a long time, particularly when one has no non-verbal feedback; perhaps 90 minutes would be long enough.
- It was hard to follow those speakers who hadn’t provided visuals; we should probably make them mandatory.
- During the planning stages we had floated the idea of holding open some kind of chat room, but in the end we relied solely on one-to-one chat messages; in future it might be beneficial to enable all attendees to see the questions being asked.
(You can read other attendees’ comments on our mailing list – NakedAgilists)
Overall this was a very enjoyable evening, and I’m very much looking forward to our next one. Hats off to Clarke, Adrian, Paul and Leigh for brilliant organisation.
agilenorth / agilescotland skypecast tomorrow
Filed under: agilenorth, conference, nakedagilists, skypecast |
Leave a Comment Tomorrow night sees the very first joint AgileScotland / AgileNorth mini-conference via skypecast! We have almost a dozen short 2-10 minute presentations in a packed 90-minutes – including my retelling of a testing dilemma and developing a sense of urgency from this blog. See the NakedAgilists Yahoo group for joining instructions.
agile consultancy discussed at agilenorth
Andy Beacock has posted a thorough write-up of this month’s AgileNorth meeting, in which Simon Monk led a discussion of his company’s new agile approach to consultancy projects. Well worth a read.
breaking the ice
A new project and a new pile of legacy code always presents me with a large psychological barrier: where should I begin testing, and where should I begin trying to understand what’s where?
Bill Wake, in the Planning Game Simulator chapter of his Refactoring Workbook
I saw this effect for real recently on a client project, and we also experienced it at this month’s AgileNorth coding dojo. We wanted to refactor a smell away from some of the “GUI” code in Wake’s planning game simulator exercise, and someone suggested we needed to make the refactoring safe by writing a test first. But this was GUI code, so the temptation was to shrug and claim it was impossible. Undeterred, Guy wrote a couple of lines that created the window, pushed a button and checked the resulting number of cards in the backlog, and suddenly we were off and running. The refactoring we had in mind was now safe, and the code now seemed like it was ours.
At that point another interesting effect occurred. We looked at the few tests we now had, and we saw smells in the product code – smells we hadn’t seen when we reviewed it at the start of the evening. The test code was revealing usability smells in the class’ interfaces, and our understanding of what to do and where the code wanted to go deepened.
Even a two-line test can have a dramatic impact on the stress of dealing with “untamed” code.
