{"id":102,"date":"2011-07-01T20:03:07","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T20:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.agilityfeat.com\/?p=102"},"modified":"2011-07-01T20:03:07","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T20:03:07","slug":"agilecville-recap-agile-for-newbies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/blog\/2011\/07\/agilecville-recap-agile-for-newbies\/","title":{"rendered":"#AgileCville recap: Agile for Newbies"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past Tuesday at AgileCville we had a series of lightning talks on \u00abAgile for Newbies.\u00bb\u00a0 The meeting went very well, and I’ll provide a brief recap of it here.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks go to RallySoftware, who sponsored the meeting this month and provided pizza, and also provided their Iteration Planning guides as handouts.\u00a0 Their guides were a perfect freebie for our audience of 29 local IT and business professionals, about half of whom are new to agile methods.<\/p>\n

Seven local Agile pros gave an overview of various agile topics in a \u00ablightning talk\u00bb format.\u00a0 Each speaker had 10 minutes, and then a few minutes after that for Q&A.\u00a0 So it was a pretty fast paced meeting (2 hours total), and we packed a lot of information in.<\/p>\n

Here are some of my notes on each lightning talk:<\/p>\n

A Newbie\u2019s questions about agile, John Berryman<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>John was very kind to offer himself as a sacrificial \u00abNewbie\u00bb at the beginning of the meeting, and he gave a short talk on why he was interested in Agile, and the various rumors and preconceptions that he has about Agile based on the hype.\u00a0 He has just recently started some work on a scrum team and loves the pair programming aspects, but still raised many excellent questions.<\/p>\n

Agile Processes and Team Roles, Arin Sime<\/strong><\/p>\n

I spoke next, and I tried to provide a foundation for the subsequent lightning talks.\u00a0 After a quick reminder of why traditional methods fail, I described a typical agile process flow based on the following steps:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Backlog preparation<\/li>\n
  2. Iteration planning<\/li>\n
  3. Daily Iterations of Test\/Develop\/Integrate\/Commit, and Daily Standups<\/li>\n
  4. Demo\/Review<\/li>\n
  5. Retrospectives<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Next I quickly discussed the differences between two main flavors of Agile:\u00a0 Scrum and Kanban.\u00a0 My recommendation is that if your software development can be easily grouped together into releases, then you should look at Scrum first.\u00a0 If your team is focused more on maintenance issues, or something where \u00abflow\u00bb is more important than releases, you should start with Kanban.\u00a0 But either are excellent methods if you have built a good team and have strong customer input.<\/p>\n

    How to write good user stories, John Feminella<\/strong><\/p>\n

    John then spoke about how to write user stories.\u00a0 He discussed the \u00abAs a .. I want to … so that\u00bb format of user stories, and why agile encourages this format of user-focused stories.\u00a0 John also introduced everyone to the INVEST acronym for traits of a well-written user story (I’ve added in my summaries of each principle, which may not match exactly what John said):<\/p>\n