Fwd: Test Message - HTML Format:What's Going On At Agile Austin

[Walter Bodwell]

Here's a first cut at the newsletter containing February events.  It will go out on Friday night.  Let me know of you have any changes / additions.

Thanks,

Walter

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http://www.walterbodwell.com
http://www.planigle.com (Planigle, the way to Plan Agile)

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From: Agile Austin <Agile_...@mail.vresp.com>
Date: Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 8:27 AM
Subject: Test Message - HTML Format:What's Going On At Agile Austin
To: wbod...@gmail.com

Welcome to Agile Austin's monthly newsletter.  In it, we'll publicize what's new at Agile Austin, upcoming events, blog entries from the local community and anything you need to know about Agile Austin.

What's New At Agile Austin

 

Conference updates.  The conferences is only 7 weeks away!  Sign up while there are still spots left at: https://keepaustinagile2014.eventbrite.com/.

Board meeting.  For those who were unable to attend our January board meeting and are interested in what we talked about, you can see the notes here: https://docs.google.com/a/agileaustin.org/document/d/1HxhrHN2gqsHCAmHQR8UsAtTe1krLOKndCT1CfvU4p9I/edit.

 

Meetings

 

Feb 4 (6:00 - 9:00 pm)	Monthly Meeting - Lean Startup + Story Mapping = Awesome Products Faster! BancVue, 4516 Seton Center Pkwy, Suite 300, Austin, TX 78759 Hands-on workshop: Use Lean Startup, Lean Canvas & Story Mapping to validate quickly you’re building the right product. Too many companies focus on maximizing output and often miss delivering the right features. Studies show over 60% of features built in our industry are rarely or never used. You might deliver a lot of features, but if they are rarely or never used, does it matter how fast you do it? To deliver the right outcomes, you need to learn your customers needs and validate your assumptions as early as possible. This means getting an early version of your product completed to start testing, validating and improving. We will demonstrate how to combine Lean Startup and User Story Mapping techniques to determine where to start and how to learn early and often. In this hands-on workshop, your team will start with a partially completed Lean Canvas to flesh out and then define a roadmap by building a User Story Map for your product. We will introduce the concepts of Lean Startup, Minimal Viable Product (MVP), Outcome over Output and Validated Learning. Upon completion, you will learn the following techniques: Lean Canvas and User Story Mapping. Speaker: Brad Swanson To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10103107667
Feb 5 (noon - 1:00 pm)	QA SIG Downtown - A Gentle Introduction to Outside-In Development HomeAway, 1011 W. Fifth Street, Austin, TX 78703 Tim Tyrrell has graciously agreed to present the same topic at the February QA SIG Downtown that he presented in January at the North SIG. Hope you can make it out!  Writing software can be a confusing and complicated process. Where do you begin? Behavior-Driven Development is a way to identify business goals and then drill down into the features that deliver those goals. This is intended to be a “code heavy” talk that will show you a useful workflow for developing well-tested software with Cucumber and RSpec. Speaker: Tim Tyrrell To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10378543503
Feb 6 (6:00 - 8:30 pm)	Book Club - Book: Continuous Delivery (1 of 3 or 4) Planview, 8300 N Mopac Expy, Austin, TX 78759 Next Book: Humble and Farley, "Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation." Schedule (tentative; group will lock in subsequent commitments at first session)  2/6 - Chapters 1-3  2/20 - TBD  3/6 - TBD  3/20 - if needed, else next book.  Amazon links:  Hardcover: http://amzn.to/1hJiEDL  Kindle: http://amzn.to/1f8rsD1  To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10398043829
Feb 7 (noon - 1:00 pm)	Agile Leaders SIG - How To Improve Forecasting And Planning On Complex Dev Projects CA Technologies, 5001 Plaza on the Lake, Third floor, Austin, TX 78746 Monte Carlo simulation is a modern technique used to enable probabilistic forecasting and planning of complex software development projects.  The session will provide an introduction to Monte Carlo simulation and risk modeling as a means of improving reliability in project portfolio planning and providing an effective alternative to speculative estimation of IT and software development projects. Speaker: Eric Green - Founder/CEO Zenkata IO To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10230769507
Feb 10 (6:30 - 8:30 pm)	Conference Planning - Keep Austin Agile 2014 - A skit is born BancVue, 4516 Seton Center Pkwy, Suite 300, Austin, TX 78759 Join us in helping to plan the next "Keep Austin Agile" conference, to be held March 21, 2014 at The Renaissance hotel.  To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10407046757
Feb 11 (noon - 1:00 pm)	Kanban SIG Planview, 8300 N Mopac Expy, Austin, TX 78759 More information will be sent to the Agile Austin notify mailing list as it becomes available.
Feb 11 (6:00 - 9:00 pm)	Select Speaker Series - Assessing the Value of Agile Engineering Practices Silicon Labs, 400 W Cesar Chavez St, (6th Floor), Austin, TX 78701 Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices (first seen together in Extreme Programming, and later adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the "Scrum Developer Practices"): They're difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. For an engineering practice to provide real organizational value, it must effectively address real throughput constraints.  Rob Myers describes two techniques that help evaluate the impact of any change to the organizational system: Lean's Value-Stream Mapping, and the Theory of Constraints "Five Focusing Steps." Rob describes the most common set of Agile Engineering Practices from the standpoint of how they provide a return on investment, including their costs, and how they often work in tandem to multiply the effect. Rob draws extensively from his hands-on experience with these practices, and shares data from well-established sources. He briefly discusses TDD, pair programming, and continuous integration; and then he and participants evaluate whichever practice the whole group chooses for consideration. Speaker: Rob Myers To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10192073767
Feb 13 (11:30 - 1:00 pm)	Executive Luncheon - Agile Executives Luncheon – Q1 2014 North by Northwest, 10010 North Capital Of Texas Highway, Austin, TX 78759 This luncheon is convened to help senior leaders with agile software development teams of a dozen or more solve practical problems. Guests should consider themselves “executives”, which generally means that they are a VP, CxO, or a Director or similar in a larger organization. Registration will be closed at 10 pm on the Sunday before the event or at 40 people, whichever comes first. Please respect that, if you RSVP and do not attend, you may deny a seat to another and force us to incur unnecessary expense. Please direct questions to pres...@agileaustin.org in advance of the event. Also, please use this address to let us know of any special dietary needs. Agile Austin is pleased to present this luncheon as one component of a wider program to support agility in software development in the Central Texas community. We are happy to offer you this opportunity to leverage the experience of others to the benefit of your own firm. To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10332343317
Feb 19 (noon - 1:00 pm)	QA SIG North - How does a QA manager fit into an agile organization? Planview, 8300 N Mopac Expy, Austin, TX 78759 Many organizations adopting agile methods strive to get teams to work together and to break down walls that can inhibit the development of the goods and services they produce. This typically means, in the software development arena, that we want cross functional teams. We want our developers to work closely with our QA engineers and our UI designers and business analysts as well as our stakeholders. So, do we model our organization after these cross functional teams? Not everyone does. The various disciplines we find along the development pipeline are often still represented by a silo of individuals reporting to a manager for that discipline and team members are assigned to arbitrary teams. So, we might see an organization with a business analysis group reporting to a BA manager/director; and a development group reporting to one or more development managers; and a QA group reporting to a QA manager....each of these manager would assign some of their people to a team. How well does this work for everyone?  Conway's Law tells is that the design of a product tends to mirror the communication and organizational structure of a company. That is, if you have development shops in Denver, Austin, Bangladesh, and London; you are apt to see that your application will consist of modules developed exclusively in each of those centers. Eric Raymond once restated Conway's Law by saying, "If you have 4 groups working on a compiler, you'll end up with a 4 pass compiler." Don't these silos of disciplines reporting to separate managers also run the risk of being the process version of Conway's Law. Imagine the scenario where high level direction from the Development group involves setting policy for something that makes quality assurance difficult or vice versa. This could be a matter of tooling or process. Either way, we end up with pods of activity within a development pipeline that don't always work well together. What would suffer in that event is the overall effectiveness of the organization.  To be fair, this topic could easily be titled "How does a development manager fit into an agile organization?" or "How does an UI Manager fit into an agile organization?" In this discussion, we will ask, "How does a QA manager fit into an agile organization?" because, well....it's the QA SIG. However, we should be able to discuss concepts that we can use to help improve the effectiveness of our siloed organizations regardless of discipline.  So, please bring your descriptions of how your organizations are structured. What challenges does the provide for your group? What are the benefits? Has anyone transitioned from an siloed organization to one based on cross-functional groups (or the other way around)? We would love to hear all stories in this discussion. Speaker: Lee Fox To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10385714953
Feb 20 (6:30-8:30 pm)	Board Meeting - February Meeting Bridge360 / Agile Velocity, 10415 Morado Cir, Bldg I, #350, Austin, TX 78759 Join the board in discussing how things are going with Agile Austin. See here for the current agenda / notes (it will be updated during the meeting). To add to it, send an email to bo...@agileaustin.org. The first thing we do in board meetings is ask for additional topics / prioritize the topics at hand. As a result, the agenda will change. The best way to encourage discussion of a particular topic is to attend. Note: If you arrive late, call David on his cell phone at (512) 771-9171. To Register (and for more info): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/10293280479
Feb 25 (6:30 - 8:30 pm)	Conference Planning - Keep Austin Agile 2014 - A skit is born BancVue, 4516 Seton Center Pkwy, Suite 300, Austin, TX 78759 Join us in helping to plan the next "Keep Austin Agile" conference, to be held March 21, 2014 at The Renaissance hotel.  More information will be sent to the Agile Austin notify mailing list as it becomes available.

That's it for this month (check the web site for late breaking news).  As always, we welcome your feedback.  How can we help you solve the problems you face in becoming more agile?

The Agile Austin Board

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[Matt Roberts]

Wow, great to see so many events going on!  Great job team!

Thanks so much Walter for putting this together--it's so helpful at work to share it all in one document. 

Matt

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