Agileee, Agile & Scrum in the Eastern Europe

Carrying on publishing video materials: now watch and enjoy Jurgen Appelo.

BTW, Jurgen has been invited to be speaking at Agileee 2010 which happens Oct, 8-9 in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Publishing a new video clip from a keynote on Cooking the Product Stew by Robin Dymond and Jürgen De Smet

And now we are starting to put live the video clips.

Jutta Eckstein opened the conference with her keynote on Proximity over Distance, where she shared her rich experience of making distributed agile work.

Enjoy and watch for our updates as more video will be put live within the next days.

Speaker: Dmitri Baeli

Talk:  “An Agile Coach to start Scrum widely in a company”

Dimitri Baeli

France, @eXo Platform

Computer Science engineer for 10 years in distinct software editors, passionate about “Development, testing and release Processes”, “Open Source development”, “Software Factories”, “Usability”.

I’m CSM since 2006, convinced by Scrum since 2004. Working with agile tools in mind for many years. I’ve presented a session in AgileTour in France about the productivity tools for Java Developers (from TotalCommander to TeamCity, Eclipse + Mylyn, …) and I really interested in Lean Software Development, Kanban, Scrum, Software Factories (Maven, Ant, …), Developers Productivity, Usability (8 years of UI development), … everything that helps a company to build a better software with the help of great coders !

Dimitri’s at eXo is VP Quality, to drive the overall dynamic of eXo Platform to improve its organisation and processes to build a better software.

Talk “An Agile Coach to start Scrum widely in a company”

Starting Scrum in one team is not always easy, you have to teach and involve the whole team to adopt new principles and a new way of working and communicating. Starting Scrum for 20+ teams in 4 countries is really not simple and involves some strategies that are not explained in Scrum certification program.

• Where to start?
• How to explain and avoid confusion across the teams?
• How to be supported by the hierarchy?
• How long will it take?

I’ll detail the way eXo Platform fully implemented Scrum in the past months, sharing our experiences and feedbacks.

Speaker: J.B. Rainsberger
Talk: “An Introduction to Agile Through the Theory of Constraints”

J. B. Rainsberger, “Theory of Constraints”, Agileee conference, 2009 from Alexey Krivitsky on Vimeo.

J.B. Rainsberger
Canada, independent

J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger (jbrains.ca/) helps software organizations better satisfy their customers and the businesses they support. Expert at delivering successful software, he writes, teaches and speaks about why delivering better software is important, but not enough. He helps clients improve their bottom line by coaching teams as well as leading change programs. He helps software organizations off the treadmill of over-commitment and under-delivery, addressing all aspects of software delivery including understanding the business, gelling the team and even writing great code. Learn more about how Joe will inspire your software organization at get.started@jbrains.ca.

“An Introduction to Agile Through the Theory of Constraints”

Agile has all these weird, expensive-looking practices: pair programming, test-driven development, regular planning meetings, moving the programmers and business people closer together, focusing people on a single project, multi-disciplinary teams. We can’t afford to go agile!

In this session, J. B. Rainsberger introduces agile practices by relating them to core business matters: compounding early earned value and reducing unnecessary costs. Learn why practice and learning are really profit centers. Maybe you can’t afford not to go agile!

Process/Mechanics

This is a straight chalk talk. Me, a whiteboard, a marker, an audience, and intermittent Q&A. You can find an excerpt from this presentation at XP Day Manhattan 2007 at YouTube.

It’s different every time, and it works every time. First presented in May 2005 at the XP/Agile Toronto user group.

Learning outcomes

• Understand how agile practices relate directly to core business concerns
• Feel more comfortable with agile practices as an investment, rather than a sunk cost
• Understand how to present agile practices in a compelling way to business people
• See a more concrete, relevant justification for agile practices than “you’ll like it, and people will feel better”

Speaker: Zuzana Sochova
Talk: “Scrum process under specific extremely short conditions”

Zuzana Sochova
Czech Republic, @CertiCon

I am experienced in leading projects for European/American customers, designing efficient and innovative processes. Master degree at Czech Technical University, Computer Science, studying MBA at Masaryk Institute of Advanced Studies, Prague.

Talk: Scrum process under specific extremely short conditions

The presentation shows the usage of the agile and Scrum methods for SW projects in highly dynamic and fast changing environment. It describes how to adapt Scrum process to extremely short delivery times counted for days. Such Scrum process was practically used and proved on small web-based application development. Typical delivery time is 3-5days.

The speaker: Jurgen Appelo
The talk: “So Now You’re an Agilist. What’s Next?”

Jurgen Appelo, “So Now You’re an Agilist. What’s Next?”, Agileee conference, 2009 from Alexey Krivitsky on Vimeo.

Jurgen Appelo
The Netherlands, @ISM eCompany

Jurgen Appelo is Chief Information Officer at ISM eCompany (www.ism.nl), recently rated as the #1 fastest growing technology company in The Netherlands. He leads a horde of 50 software developers, development managers, project managers, consultants, quality assurance managers, service managers and kangaroos, some of which he hired accidentally.

Jurgen is primarily interested in software engineering, quality improvement and complexity theory, from a manager’s perspective. He is trying to write a book about this, and he keeps track of it on his blog (www.noop.nl). He has already published a number of papers and articles in several magazines, like Dr. Dobb’s, Software Quality Professional, Methods & Tools, The Software Practitioner, StickyMinds, Software Development Network, Computable and Automatisering Gids. However, sometimes he puts it all aside to do some intensive programming himself, or to spend some time on his ever-growing collection of science fiction and fantasy literature. Jurgen lives in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) — and sometimes in Brussels (Belgium) — with his partner Raoul. He has two kids, and an imaginary hamster called George.

Talk: So Now You’re an Agilist. What’s Next?

Doing projects better doesn’t stop at agile. In this session I attempt to distill new advances in software development from the field of complexity science.

Complexity science is the study of complex systems, like ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, etc. “Complexity science” is the scientific approach to “systems thinking”. It can be used to understand and explain why complex systems behave the way they do. Ken Schwaber, Jim Highsmith and other experts have explained in their books that a lot of agile concepts have been copied from the study of complex systems. However, agile software development has not covered all there is to learn.

I will show why practices must be agile (self-organized) *and* formal (controlled), why any software development method is doomed to fail, why managing scope is a too simplistic interpretation of the principle of “embracing change”, why most process improvement initiatives are linear and wrong, and why some sets of practices will be show chaotic behavior when combined.

I will go a step further than what has already been described in mainstream literature, linking some of complexity theory with down-to-earth experience from the trenches in my role as chief information officer for a software development company.

The session is intended for those who already know many (agile and formal) concepts and practices, and want to hear some additional ideas that they can try to translate to their own projects.

The speaker: Vasco Duarte
The talk: “Agile Scales, Waterfall doesn’t”

Vasco Duarte
Finland, @Nokia

Currently an Agile Coach in Nokia, Vasco Duarte is an experienced product and project manager, having worked in the software industry since 1997. Vasco has also been an Agile practicioner since 2004, he is one of the leaders and a catalyst in the adoption of Agile methods and an Agile culture at Nokia and previously at F-Secure.

The talk: “Agile Scales, Waterfall doesn’t”

A tale about how, for many years, we were sold the idea that Agile
does not scale when it is actually Waterfall and plan-driven are the
approaches that do not scale. In this talk we will also introduce how
a large company (3000+ developers) works in an agile mode even for the
largest projects: 1000’s of developers in an Agile project is not
Utopia, it’s business as usual at one of the largest software
companies in the world.

The speakers:

• Robin Dymond
• Jürgen De Smet

The talk “Cooking the Product Stew”.

Robin Dymond

Robin Dymond is a proven leader and innovator in training for Scrum, Agile, and Lean methods. He regularly achieves 100% increase in productivity of teams he trains and supports. These results are achieved by a deep understanding of Lean and Agile principles, team dynamics, and many Agile change experiences. Dymond developed Scrum, Lean, and Agile training for teams and trained hundreds of “new to Scrum” team members. At Agile 2008 Dymond co-presented an innovative new class for Scrum Product Owners that lead many to re-think their role and how business value is achieved.A frequent speaker and organizer in the Agile community, Dymond co-organized and facilitated both the APLN National Leadership summit and the Agile Executive Consortium in 2007. He is a co-founder and board member of APLN Richmond, organizing Agile events. Dymond was assistant producer of Learning and Education stage at Agile 2008. This year Robin is a producer of the main stage at Agile 2009.

Dymond was a key member of a team that led the largest enterprise adoption of Scrum in financial services to date. This lean/agile initiative resulted in a time-to-market reduction of over 40% and process execution time savings of 70%. He worked as trainer and mentor to teams, coaches, and management for over 20 teams.

In 2002 2003 He lead the first large enterprise application development that used Agile and Microsoft .NET in Canada. Since then Dymond implemented Agile in service of multi-national retail companies, startups, and Fortune 500 clients.

Jürgen De Smet

I am working within Healthcare IT for over 13 years, starting out as a service engineer (installations, upgrades, bug fixing & integration development) which is one of the better ways to customer driven development. From there on we went to software engineer, team lead, group lead to production manager, isn’t this typical waterfall?

Anyway, back to the agile world … there we take up the role as Product Owner for 3 scrum teams as well as fulfilling the role of Scrum Coach within a 4 headed scrum coaching or rather scrum help desk team. As I see things I have been working Agile since … always but only started to tune it to a real proven implementation (Scrum) since beginning 2007. During this process we are trying to lower the typical waterfall pyramids in the organization as well as educate people outside the R&D organization like sales for example, a tough but rewarding quest.

Even though I was not intending to follow a certification course I did it anyway for the reasons that it was extended with a cooking event and it was given by Jeff Sutherland. I probably learned more during the cooking event than the course itself, especially from Jeff since he has a lot of experience within the Healthcare domain.

Visit Jurgen’s agilefun.com

The talk: “Cooking the Product Stew“

This is not a recipe. Most of the time a stew is made from various ingredients you have around, left overs, new ingredients that go together well, and others that are filling but not good unless there is lots of sauce. The enterprise software market is made up of products that are a stew of software on many legacy platforms that have evolved over a long period by many hands. Taking an enterprise software product to Agile methods is a challenge. There are technological, political, and organizational barriers. With distributed organizations we can add in cultural differences as well. In a uniquely European context, this presentation will draw from the ongoing experiences of multi-location multi-team enterprise product development effort with teams in 3 countries and 5 locations.

Ingredients include:

• very large tough customer with many needs and a strong tendency to waterfall
• 1 sales team that is not accountable in any way for the promises made
• 12 analysts trying to figure out what is needed and each is telling the teams what to do
• 1 PMO creating use cases on their own
• Remove 1 recently fired QA manager
• 26 teams in 5 locations across Europe
• 460 developers
• Top it off with a Chief Product Owner who has no direct line to the customer

Directions:
Mix ingredients well with confused priorities, then add large requirements docs whole
Strain through a tight budget
Process with high heat and pressure using the “do or die” setting.
Then add Agile and Scrum, simmer till over budget.

Our chefs will describe the interesting fun they are having with this product stew, and how they are working with all the cooks in the kitchen to make a more tasty product from the stew we have today.