Continuous Integration and CruiseControl history

Luiza Pagliari and I, Paulo Caroli, gave a talk on the history of Continuous Integration (CI) and CruiseControl at the 2010 FISL conference (International Free Software Forum).

We talked to Martin Fowler and other colleagues at Thoughtworks and to gather (and validate) data on CI and CruiSeControl history. Below is short presentation with this data.

Continuous Integration and CruiseControl history

Please contact me if you are interested in the CI history topic and blog about it. I will add your links to this blog post.

SID (Scrum In Depth) First Run

As mentioned in my earlier blog entry, I gave my first SID training in Bern, Switzerland on June 5th/6th.

The two days were exciting in many aspects. The audience compiled of ten managers, programmers and analysts from different domains was already well on its way to become agile. This meant that I had to answer a couple of tough questions. But hey, this is the spice I really like to add to my professional life, especially if the outcome is right. Also, I was concerned that I might run too fast through all the material. But, the opposite occurred – there were still slides left at the end of the first day. I was about one hour behind. The class was very forthcoming and gave me additional time on either day to catch up. So, next time I will have a closer look at the time to make sure that I keep my time box. Isn’t Scrum all about time boxing!
So overall, I am very pleased with how the first run went. I managed to communicate the meaning of being a ScrumMaster and what to expect when you roll it out. I got feed back from a couple of attendees that they passed the test. Again, this is like a high five for me as the test is not trivial and requires a deep understanding of Scrum basics and principles.

Best, I got tons of of great feed back -- mostly positive ;) -- which I will incorporate into future runs (Inspect and Adapt). In August I will meet with Ken Schwaber to address and clarify a couple of points.

For me, everything is working out great right now. Scrum.org is an excellent organization which is absolutely committed to high standards and quality. Working with Ken turns out to be great fun and best, I really love to spread the Agile/Scrum gospel.

You can check out my upcoming trainings at http://courses.scrum.org/about/ralph-jocham
or drop me an email for special arrangements ralph (at) jocham (dot) net

Continuous Integration adoption path

Luiza Pagliari (my colleague at Thoughtworks Brazil) and I, Paulo caroli, will be giving a talk on the history of Continuous Integration and CruiseControl at the 2010 FISL conference (International Free Software Forum) held in Brazil.

Caio Kinzel, another colleague at Thoughtworks Brazil, have shared a blog entry with me that I find really useful. It is the Continuous Integration Maturity Model created at last year’s CITCON (Continuous Integration and Testing Conference).

My friend and co-worker Patrick Kua have presented a similar topic in the XP 2009 conference: XP2009 – Climbing the Dreyfus Ladder of Agile Practices.

I am not sure I will use these for the session to be presented at the FISL conference. But these models are definitely helpful for Agile teams to understand the Continuous Integration adoption path.

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.

Café Ágil em Recife

This weekend event in Recife was superb!

The Café Ágil em Recife happened this Saturday May 15 at Recife. Thoughtworks Brazil and UFPE put together a, Agile morning in Recife.

I was happy to go to the North East of Brazil and meet so many good people. Congratulations to the Recife Agile community!

This was the agenda for the event:

8h30 to 9h, Café e recepção
9h to 10h, O XP não é contra Design com Paulo Caroli (ThoughtWorks Brasil)
10h to 11h, TDD direto das trincheiras com Luiz Borba (Cesar) 11h to12:15h, REST in Practice com Dr Jim Webber (ThoughtWorks UK) (Palestra em inglês)
12h15 to 13h, Mesa Redonda com com Alexandre de Vasconcelos (UFPE), Cristine Gusmão (UFPE), Luciano Felix (Provider Sistemas), Luiz Borba (Pitang), e Paulo Caroli (ThoughtWorks Brasil)

Below is the presentation I gave at this event, and a few photos from it.

O XP não é contra Design com Paulo Caroli, Café Ágil em Recife

Some photos: