Agile

An Introduction To Agile Software Development - Feb 15th 2010

Nick McKenna — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:11:58 GMT

Just a quick heads up to the Agile community in Yorkshire!

There is another one day course on "An Introduction To Agile Software Development" at NTI in Leeds on February 15th 2010. The course is full of practical advice and aimed at teams who are just adopting Agile or who are thinking about adopting Agile.

The course is suitable for developers, testers, managers, business analysts, directors, product owners and anyone else involved in the Agile process.

For more information about this course, visit the NTI web site.

Agile Yorkshire - 9th Dec - Old Broadcasting House, David Joyce, Kanban for Software Engineering

Nick McKenna — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:07:06 GMT

Details

Kanban focuses on becoming successful, which may lead to being Agile. Lean is a set of principles that are being applied to software engineering by a growing number of practitioners. Kanban is a true pull system implementation in software engineering. The five pillars of Lean, which Kanban fully implements are pull, continuous flow, customer value, waste elimination and continuous improvement. The Principles of Kanban are: to agree a team capacity, to limit WIP (Work in Process) to that capacity, to pull value through the value stream, and to make both work and workflow visible. It has proven easy to adopt and lowers resistance to change. The result is a gradual, incremental approach to change that is empowering for everyone.

This meeting will be a special end of year event held at Old Broadcasting House (http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/old-broadcasting-house/).

Speaker

David is an agile development manager and coach with 12 years technical team management and coaching experience, and 20 years software development experience. In recent years, using Scrum and XP, David has coached onshore and offshore development teams and successfully launched an internet video startup from inception to launch. David currently works for BBC Worldwide as a Development Manager, coaching teams on Scrum, Lean and Kanban. David is a certified Scrum Master and Lean practitioner.

Google Wave For Agile

Nick McKenna — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:00:54 GMT

Now that my Google Wave beta account has been activated I am starting to explore the possibilities! The first thing that came into my head was that Wave could be a great collaboration tool for exploring requirements / User Stories. You can have an ongoing conversation about the requirements that is documented. You can also have people join and leave the conversation as often as you need. You can upload video, photos etc that show details of a bug or a required feature. It is also ready to run and does not need any customisation work.

I think that Wave would be pretty awful for recording the final spec (maybe Google Docs for that), but for the ongoing exploration of requirements, I think it is good. Obviously, there is not substitute for a face-to-face conversation, but where that is not possible, this could be the answer!

Any thoughts?

Agile Training Course Funded By Train To Gain

Nick McKenna — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:10:36 GMT

From November, I am teaching a new Agile software development course for NTI (NTI is part of Leeds Metropolitan University’s Innovation North faculty). If your employer is in Yorkshire or Humber, then you will qualify for the Train To Gain funding which reduces the cost of the course from £290 to only £120.

The course is great for people who are new to Agile (thinking about adopting or in the process of adopting). Attendees include:

Developers
Testers
Product Owners
Business Analysts
Project Managers
Executives

Topics covered include:

Problems With Waterfall
What Is Agile?
Who Is Who?
Agile Teams
Agile Artefacts
Agile Process
Agile Tools
Scaling Up Agile
Agile Client Relationships

If you are interested in finding out more, please visit:

Yorkshire And Humber NTI Agile Course Description

Scrum User Group And Course

Nick McKenna — Sun, 10 May 2009 13:13:27 GMT

A buddy of mine Geoff Watts has been involved in Scrum for many years
(I actually did my Certified Scrum Master course with him). He is
organising a couple of events that will be of interest to our
community.

First off, he is organising an event for the London Scrum User Group
at which Ken Schwaber and Jim Cundiff will be speaking. This will be a
great event as they are both lively speakers!

Additionally he has two Scrum courses coming up on 8th and 9th June
and 13th and 14th July. Geoff is a great teacher and I would recommend
these to anyone who is thinking of doing the Certified Scrum Master
course. In particular, Ken Schwaber will be at the second course on
13th / 14th July which will be a great opportunity to question the man
himself! I'm sure you can get a good price if you mention my name!

You can get more details on Geoff's site at www.inspectandadapt.com.

AgileYorkshire@ThePub May 13th - Ralph Williams: Exploratory TestingDetails

Nick McKenna — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:43:57 GMT

In this session, Ralph will provide an overview of some techniques that
bring Agility into the world of testing. (The world of testing is a strange
place: regarded by most people as a nice place to visit but you wouldn't
want to live there, it is an unmapped wilderness where the waterfall
methodology still roams unfettered.)

The main focus will be on one such technique, Exploratory Testing. It is
defined by many as "simultaneous learning, test design and test execution",
but Ralph will attempt to be more helpful. After the presentation many of
you will claim this is what you have been doing all along, but now it has a
fancy name you can use it without shame and companies can sell you
high-priced consultancy in it.
SpeakerRalph Williams is a Test Consultant at the Yorkshire Building
Society, based in Bradford. The Society develops much of the application
software used throughout its 140 branches and offices, and Ralph is
responsible for managing the testing for some of these systems. He has
previously worked in various management, testing and development roles at
Erudine, Wanadoo and British Telecom, and specialises in Agile Testing and
chocolate.

Venue: Victoria Hotel, Central Leeds
Date/Time: Wednesday, 13th May, 6.30pm for a 7.00pm start.
More details: http://www.agileyorkshire.org/

Anyone welcome.

Alt.Net In The North April 2009

Nick McKenna — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:48:49 GMT

I've just got back from the fantastic Alt.Net conference which was held at the offices of Black Marble in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The entire day was very well organised by Richard Fennell. There were lots of different topics on the agenda including:

Microsoft MVC
Silverlight
Agile Project Mangement
Inversion Of Control
Domain Specific Languages and Fluent Interfaces
What Happened To Design?
Which ORM?
Azure and The Cloud

I started the day looking for inspiration and I certainly found it! Whenever I attend conferences I am not looking for detailed information on a topic, I am predominantly looking for new ideas and directions I had not thought of.

The things I learned about that I am going to tke further are:

Azure
Inversion Of Control
Domain Specific Languages and Fluent Interfaces
Microsoft MVC

The discussions were all lively, but courteous and respectful, even when the contentious issue of Which ORM was discussed!

Anyone wishing to follow up on any of the issues raised at Alt.Net are welcome to contact me or come along to Agile Yorkshire and find out more!

How Much TDD?

Nick McKenna — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:22:47 GMT

For the last couple of years I have been zealous in my TDD discipline. By zealous I mean that when I write "public" on a method, I write a test. I was fortunate enough to attend a session on Testing Patterns (see previous blog entry). I had a question for the speaker about how he would handle testing a particular simple method. In this case the method was something like AddNewJob(xxx). To my suprise the recommendation was that I should not bother unit testing it as it was too simple and I should leave it up to the testers to cover it off in their testing activities!

This was a real eye-opener for me, so now I am in a bit of a quandry. Lots of the code I right for mid-range applications is very similar to this method. The AddNewJob(xxx) method inserts data into a few related tables. My tests have historically queried the SQL tables to ensure that the insert was completed correctly. I had noticed a significant reduction in error rates following this approach.

As an experiment, I have recently ( a few weeks ago) stopped writing unit tests for all "public" methods and I am just writing tests for more complex methods. I have made a few observations as a result of this experiment:

I don't think my error rate has gone up
I do not believe that my coding speed has improved
I am writing almost no tests (most of my code is very simple - which is a good thing I suppose)
I don't feel virtuous any more

In the short-term then, I seem to have retained the benefits of TDD even though I am not doing it as much! I suspect in the long term that my "untested" code will suffer a little as I do not have automated tests around it. I think that this means I will not spot side-effects of code changes as early as I will on tested code.

I suspect that my retention of quality is a direct result of the extra coding discipline that TDD has instilled in me. I find my self being much more careful about parameter checking etc these days. I think that the longer I go without writing tests, the more lax I will become in my coding and my error rate will begin to creep up again.

So, the result of my experiment is pretty inconclusive (largely because I have not formally collected data) and I think I will retain to my more zealous approach, if for no other reason than it makes me feel more confident and more virtuous about my code!

Alt.Net In The North

Nick McKenna — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:09:22 GMT

I am one of the organisers for the Alt.Net in the North Open Spaces event which will be held in Bradford, West Yorkshire on Saturday 18th April. Planning for the session will take place on Friday (17th April) evening. The event is limited to 50 attendees and is filling rapidly.

An Open Spaces event is a sort of anti-conference. Rather than advertise speakers and topics in advance, the speakers and topics are organised the night before based on the desires of the attendees. Anyone can present and anyone can attend any session.

The event is free to attend and is kindly being sponsored by Black Marble, Seed Software, Skills Matter and Agile Yorkshire.

I am really looking forward to the event and hearing from some leading industry figures as well as some great "from the trenches" stuff!

Agile Yorkshire Crystal Clear

Nick McKenna — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:03:42 GMT

Just a reminder to everyone that Richard Fennel of Black Marble will be presenting on Crystal Clear at Agile Yorkshire on Wednesday 8th April 2009. This will be a beginner's introduction to the Crystal Clear Agile method.

Further details here.