Agile Brazil 2010 – notes and my ppt

The Agile Brazil 2010 conference was a huge success. The positive feedback was eminent during the event (tweets and conversations), and is now reflected in many blog entries describing the positive experience by so many people.

I am proud for the following reasons:

1. I was part of the conference organization team. In fact this is one of the best teams I have been part of. The synergy amongst the team members were noticeable and IMO it reflected the collaborative nature of Agile.
2. My tutorial was very well received. "Throw your cards at the wall: effective use of the Agile Card Wall" was a 1 and ½ hour tutorial on the Agile Card Wall. People liked it because it showed XP, Scrum and Kanban concepts in a very practical way, based on my experience on several Agile flavored projects.
   
3. ThoughtWorks (TW) Brazil was a great contributor for the event! The TWers in the conference were: presenting (7 speakers), attending sessions, having fun, and chatting with people. And the TW booth was really fun! There was no marketing stuff; instead a bunch of cool people chatting, playing Wii, or watching the world cup games.
4. The Agile Brazil community is really cool! It feels like there are no stars, but a lot of cool people sharing experiences, talking about agile, and hanging out together.

Below is the uploaded version of my session. I have trimmed it a little.

Ponha as cartas na parede, o uso eficaz do "Agile Card Wall"

Martin in Rio

Martin Fowler did his first talk in South America. It happened this Monday, June 14^th in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Martin is the keynote speaker for the Agile Brazil 2010 conference (June 22^nd to 25^th in Porto Alegre). Before reaching the South of Brazil, Martin spent a few days in Rio de Janeiro where he enjoyed the city, met a few friends from Thoughtworks Brazil, and spoke at the 3 hour event held at Puc-Rio. Although the event’s official name was “Software development in the 21^st century”, it got known by its nickname: Martin’n Rio.

Rodrigo Toledo and Paulo Caroli opened the event with the talk: "Como Agile tem transformado a área de TI"; then Martin gave a series of three twenty-minutes talks: (1) DSL, (2) Richardson maturity model for REST, and (3) Continuous Delivery.

Como Agile tem transformado a área de TI

Martin’s links on the subjects covered on his talks:

http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/DomainSpecificLanguage.html

http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html

http://martinfowler.com/snips/201006021426.html

PSD (Java) First Run

Most Scrum implementations fail or have limited success for one reason. The team is not able to really deliver a potential shippable product increment according to the definition of done. This causes all kinds of problems down the road. One of the main manifestations is that the the sprint cadence goes over board. By loosing this, you loose one of the main points of transparency.

This problem was described by Martin Fowler in his Flaccid Scrum article and by Ken Schwaber in an interview. Ken, then left the ScrumAlliance to found Scrum.org so that he can address exactly this problem. Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) is the result. There are two tracks, one for .Net in C# and one for Java. I co-developed the Java course which is build 100% on open source tools. It is an intense five day class in which the developers are exposed to a real live scenario, in which they have to deliver working software according to the definition of done in 4 mini sprints. It includes all aspects of Scrum like, sprint planning meeting, daily scrum, review and retrospective. The five days are very intense. My goal is to provide each participants with the feeling and experience what real Scrum feels like. Once, you have experienced this, you know exactly what you should aim for. You want that feeling again!

The first Java PSD was held in Zürich, Switzerland from June 4th-10th. Ken Schwaber attended the first day and really liked what he saw. The overall feed-back was very positive and I am happy to know that there a eight more 'real' agile developers in the field. I believe that the earlier you get a change to work with programmers the more they get out of it. Therefore, I am wondering if it would be possible to even integrate that training into the curriculum of computer science studies.

If this sounds interesting, then go to Scrum.org and check out the available training side. Also, I will be giving a Scrum in Depth (SID) class in Bern, Switzerland on June 5th-6th.