Australian Scrum Community

At the second BarCampSydney event yesterday there was a very small (4 person) gathering on Agile/Lean software development. As part of this, Ben Hogan pointed out a few of the more interesting sessions he attended at the Agile2007 conference in Washington recently. There were a huge number of very interesting sessions there and the good news is that all the presentation slides, papers and hand-outs are available to all of us online.

The presentations we discussed at BarCamp were:

• Succeeding with Agile: A Guide to Transitioning
• From User Story to User Interface
• Agile adoption at Google: Potential and challenges of a true bottom-up organization

Agile transitioning is a very relevant topic for many of us and Mike’s presentation includes pros and cons on each of several different strategies for transitioning. I’m told that agile transitions is also the topic of Mike’s next book. If that one is anywhere near as readable as his last couple then this will be a great read.

It appears that there is often a tension between User Interaction designers and agile processes as UIC designers generally prefer do whole-of-system design work up-front in a waterfall-style process. This isn’t the only way to do things though of course. The User Story to User Interface papers provides some real agile tools for user interface and user interaction design. These tools can be as simple as a paper prototyping but can greatly enhance the usability of the software developed.

Mark Striebeck’s paper from last year titled Ssh! We Are Adding a Process… revealed some great techniques for getting buy-in from a people in an engineering culture that generally doesn’t think highly of any sort of formalised process. Mark’s Agile2007 presentation outlines how they have stirred up buzz on agile via “Grouplets” with a particular focus on testing. Some of the more amusing techniques here include “Testing on the Toilet” (posting testing information on the back of toilet doors) and test certification programme with Star Wars figurines rewarding different levels of achievement!

Anyway, there is loads more to learn from the Agile2007 presentation materials. I’ll post here again soon about other presentations specifically relating to Scrum.