The next Agile Edmonton user group meeting will be on Monday, May 27th 2013 at 18:00.

Learn Story Mapping through exercises

Story Mapping is a tool to help us see the big picture from a user’s point of view. User Stories freed the Agile community from heavy weight requirements documents, but in the process sometimes we lose sight of the big picture. Story Mapping is a tool that helps see the bigger picture of our products from the point of view of the end user.

Story Mapping provides another view of the product backlog and can potentially replace it.

In this session participants will collaborate to build the backlog for the “Worlds Smallest Online Bookstore”: “Smallestonlinebookstore.com caters to the view that Amazon is wrong, an infinite supply of books is too much. Readers don’t want an infinite supply just right choice for their next book. They don’t want to spend hours agonizing, instead they want to spend that time reading.”

Mark Levison is an independent Certified Scrum Trainer since 2011 and Agile coach. Mark brings over 10 years of Agile experience with an emphasis on Certified ScrumMaster Training, Agile Coaching, Project Assessments, and Team Launch Workshops

In 2009, Mark founded Agile Pain Relief with the mission of providing consulting and training for organizations seeking the benefits of Agile methods. As its principal, Mark has introduced and mentored developers, managers, and executives in organizations throughout the US and Canada on Scrum, Lean, and Agile methods through hands-on training.

Mark is active in the Agile community and participates as Agile Editor at InfoQ and writes extensively on Agile topics in his blog Notes from a Tool User. Follow him on twitter @mlevison.

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This meeting will be held in the Western boardroom in the basement of the Canadian Western Bank building, located at 10303 Jasper Ave.

If possible, try to show up a bit beforehand so that we can get started on time. Be sure to forward this information to anybody that would be interested.

The next Agile Edmonton user group meeting will be on Wednesday, June 6th at noon.

Agile Testing Practices

On agile teams, testing is an activity, not a phase or a role and many teams struggle with this concept. In this development model, where do testers fit in agile teams? Janet Gregory explains how testing activities are included throughout the agile process, and what value a tester can add to the agile team. Sharing her extensive experiences, she describes the importance of collaboration and simplicity in activities such as automation, ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development), and exploratory testing. Models such as the agile testing quadrants give a framework to identify testing needs for not only every story, but for features and the project. Janet presents an overview of agile testing practices and delegates will have an opportunity through discussions and exercises to understand how agile practices fit together and allow teams to complete story testing within an iteration, and deliver quality products that satisfy business needs.

An agile testing coach and practitioner, Janet Gregory is the co-author of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams and a contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Janet specializes in showing agile teams how testers can add value in areas beyond critiquing the product; for example, guiding development with business-facing tests. For the past ten years, Janet has been working with teams to transition to agile development, and teaches agile testing courses and tutorials worldwide. Janet contributes articles to publications such as Better Software, Software Test & Performance Magazine and Agile Journal, and enjoys sharing her experiences at conferences and user group meetings around the world. Janet was named one of the 13 Women of Influence in testing by Software Test & Performance magazine – January 2010 issue.

For more about Janet’s work, visit http://www.janetgregory.ca or visit her blog at http://janetgregory.blogspot.com.

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This meeting will be held at Startup Edmonton in the Mercer Warehouse 3rd Floor, 10363 – 104 Street.

If possible, try to show up a bit before noon so that we can get started on time. Be sure to forward this information to anybody that would be interested.

The next Agile Edmonton user group meeting will be on Thursday, May 17th at noon.

Adopting Agile in Government

As Agile is seeing widespread adoption in many industry sectors, what about within government (public sector) organizations? Can Agile work within governments? What are some challenges and risks to watch out for? This presentation aims to answer these questions and provide guidance based on a number of case studies involving Agile government projects. Along the way we will cover various perspectives on what Agile is, shatter some common misconceptions, and see some compelling evidence for why your next software development effort should use Agile.

Basil Vandegriend is an experienced software architect who is passionate about creating high quality software and inspiring others to do likewise. In addition to his architect activities Basil frequently consults, teaches, and writes about how individuals and organizations can become more effective at software development. Basil shares his insights and experiences with the I.T. community through his website at http://www.basilv.com/psd.

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This meeting will be held at Startup Edmonton in the Mercer Warehouse 3rd Floor, 10363 – 104 Street.

If possible, try to show up a bit before noon so that we can get started on time. Be sure to forward this information to anybody that would be interested.

April meeting is cancelled. Will notify if we can reschedule the presentation

The next Agile Edmonton user group meeting will be on Wednesday, April 4th at noon.

TDD/BDD with RSpec and Cucumber

RSpec and Cucumber are the bread and butter of Ruby development. Learn how to write Cucumber features to drive out high level system behaviour. Then jump down into RSpec specifications to test-drive out the actual implementation of the system. See how outside-in development can improve your code and keep you focused on the problem at hand.

James is a Technical Evangelist for JetBrains. He is passionate in sharing his knowledge about OO, SOLID, TDD/BDD, testing, object-relational mapping, dependency injection, refactoring, continuous integration, and related techniques.

For more about James check out his site.

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This meeting will be held in the IBM Innovation Center at 10044-108th Street. You can find more event information on our website at agileedmonton.org.

If possible, try to show up a bit before noon so that we can get started on time. Be sure to forward this information to anybody that would be interested.

Fishbowl conversation

We are trying something a bit different for this meeting, a fishbowl conversation.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Fishbowl conversations.

What we need from you are topics. You can raise them at
Facebook
Google Groups
LinkedIn
Twitter

We have swag from Hansoft for each topic raised.
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This meeting will be held in the IBM Innovation Center at 10044-108th Street. You can find more event information on our website at agileedmonton.org.

If possible, try to show up a bit before noon so that we can get started on time. Be sure to forward this information to anybody that would be interested.

November 2011 – Distributed agile

Thanks for the great presentation Mark!