This post is long over due but hopefully it will be the impetus for organising regular meetings of the group in 2010.
6 Weeks after I first suggested the idea of creating a local Scrum user group we held first meeting. People quickly joined a hastily created group on LinkedIn and started spreading the word. The first person to join the group was Nigel Baker, a Bristol based Certified Scrum Trainer, who kindly offered to sponsor the first meeting and present with another local CST, Paul Goddard.
The turnout for the meeting was good, about 19 people. This was impressive considering how difficult it was to find the lecture theatre at the University campus! Nigel and Paul presented “15 tips to do good Scrum (and more importantly, build better products!)“, which was both informative and entertaining. This gave everyone a lot to talk about when we moved to the student bar on campus, thankfully the unexpected Mexican night had pretty much finished by the time we arrived.
Everyone at the meeting was clearly enthusiastic about Scrum and Agile development, many face similar challenges. My hope is that members of the group will be able to support each other to use Scrum successfully.
There has been some discussion in the LinkedIn group since the meeting including ideas for a second meeting. I’ve included these and some of my own below:
Software to support Scrum (can they be better than a board and post-its?)
Turning your clients into Product Owners
Scrum or Lean?
Starting Scrum in a Waterfall environment
Thanks to everyone who attended the first meeting and made it a successful event. I’d welcome suggestions for speakers, venues and sponsors. Help with arranging meetings would also be very much appreciated. Check back here or the LinkedIn group for details of the next meeting, looking forward to seeing you all there.
Recently I became aware of Pecha Kucha presentations. As the format is short sharp presentations I thought it would be good to have a quick way of creating the presentation. I’ve created a greasemonkey script that creates a presentation from a page of delicious bookmarks.
The key to this is creating images of the bookmarked webpages. I found the webthumb service which has a well documented api and gives you 100 free credits a month to play with. They kindly gave me 500 credits to do some testing as well.
For the script to work you need to add your own api key from the webthumb service. I realise that having to do this is a bit of a barrier so any ideas about making this easier would be appreciated. Look for the following and paste your api key into the script:
apikey = "Paste your http://webthumb.bluga.net api key here!";
Anyway, this is the first pass so let me know what you think. The video below shows the script in action.
Since my post outlining my plans for IWMW 2009 I have taken quite a different direction. My plans to run a 15 minute Lego exercise have grown so that now we will have 4 teams using Scrum to build a farm. I didn’t expect the bulk of my preparation for this workshop to involve asking friends and colleagues if they have any Lego I can borrow. Thankfully my Mum kept my childhood Lego collection!
The IWMW organisers have asked people to consider using a Creative Commons license for their slides. This made me think, why not release all the resources I have created for this workshop? People would then be able to run the workshop themselves and demonstrate the main concepts of Scrum to development teams, managers or clients.
A workshop like this could help if you want to start using Scrum. At a glance Scrum can seem to advocate chaos in teams, but when you’ve experienced it you realise this isn’t the case. The people who have trialled this workshop have said that the exercise shows how Scrum can help you make realistic commitments and plans.
At the end of his post I have included a couple of story cards which are part of the exercise. I’ll release everything after IWMW 2009. The priority and story points are empty as the whole group will be estimating each story before the building begins.
I’m running a session at this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW). I have an outline of what Scrum: Sprints not Marathons might cover, but I am open to suggestions to make sure everyone can get as much out of it as possible. I’d like the preparation for my session to demonstrate some of the principles of Scrum:
Deliver value early
Embrace & adapt to change
Provide visibility of work
Promoting conversation
If you are attending it would be helpful if you could give me an idea of your role and what you hope to get out of the workshop.
At this stage I plan to cover the topics below and to run activities that demonstrate the Scrum framework.
Topics
Where does the term Agile come from?
What problems does Scrum solve?
Why Scrum can be valuable to Web Teams in HE
Scrum forces you to be realistic
Outline of the framework
What problems does Scrum create?
Team organisation for Scrum
Agile development practices
How to begin Scrum
Activities
Estimating work
Planning poker
Retrospectives
I’m planning the group activities and will aim to post some details early next week. I am wondering if I could run the Scrum Lego game, but I’m not sure where I can get enough Lego.
