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Agile remains a hot topic. This week we will hear about adoption of Scrum in making large, complex products at Intec, an internationally successful South African business. At last month's presentation, mention of executable, customer readable requirements drew quite some discussion. Aslam presents more about that topic and other related techniques.

• Lessons learned in an Enterprise Scrum roll-out - Karen Greaves
  presentation slides
• Agile Requirements: Beyond Stickmen, Bubbles and Sticky Notes - Aslam Khan
  presentation slides

Wednesday, 15 April 2009, 18h15
Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

RSVP

Anyone is free to attend. Please RSVP by emailing YES or MAYBE via our contact form.

Venue

Bandwidth Barn
125 Buitengracht Street
Cape Town
Click here for a map

Agenda

18:15 Welcoming and Introduction
   Johan Nilsson
18:20 Lessons learned in an Enterprise Scrum roll-out
   Karen Greaves
19:00 Agile Requirements: Beyond Stickmen, Bubbles and Sticky Notes
   Aslam Khan
19:40 Closing and Thanks
   Johan Nilsson
19:45 Networking, Discussion & Snacks

Abstracts

Lessons learned in an Enterprise Scrum roll-out

Intec decided to adopt scrum to address a number of issues in the Cape Town R&D division in June 2008. After rolling out the basic scrum practises to all teams in the division of 85 people fairly quickly, Intec is now facing some complex challenges. This talk will address the issues that have been encountered as well as discussing solutions that have been implemented. There will be an opportunity to discuss issues you have experienced in your scrum adoption to find commonalities and discuss potential solutions.

Agile Requirements: Beyond Stickmen, Bubbles and Sticky Notes

Regardless of the flavor of SDLC that you use, the largest gap is always between describing the need and executable code. And the number of artifacts that are created just to fill the gap are numerous (requirements documents, specifications, acceptance test documents, non-functional, etc.). What if we took a different approach to solving the problem. Instead of filling the vast expanse between requirements and executable code, let us simply close the gap itself. The aim is then to make requirements executable. If that happens, then there is only one artifact - the requirement which is the source code which is the requirement.

Even though it's an Easter SPIN, we still can't create software engineering miracles. Rather, we will look at how to inch closer to executable requirements and reduce the obstructions in the agile feedback loop. And the side effect benefits are huge: better conceptual understanding, cleaner design, more readable code and improved communication with a common ubiquitous language, and more.

In this session, we will look beyond traditional use cases, XP Stories and in-your-head specs and focus on creating unambiguous requirements - the kind that business analysts can write and developers can read and computers can execute.

Speaker Profiles

Karen Greaves

Karen Greaves is the Project office Manager at Intec Billing. She is currently responsible for rolling out scrum to the Cape Town R&D team of 85 people. Karen has a BSc Honours in Computer Science from UCT. She has worked in software for over 10 years in a number of different roles, including developer, tester, project/program manager, and implementation manager.

Karen has worked in a number of different environments: from working as part of a 3000 person team for Microsoft on Windows 2000, to being part of starting up new product with an eXtreme Programming (XP) team and taking the product to sales exceeding 100,000 seats. She has also program managed complex offshore delivery of multiple projects to a global blue chip shipping and logistics company.

She is passionate about building good software, and creating a work environment which enables technology professionals to be creative, motivated and productive. She believes agile software development is the key to acheiving this. She is a certified scrum master and product owner.

Aslam Khan

Aslam Khan is a software architect and coach at factor10 (http://www.factor10.com). He is passionate about creating simple solutions for complex problems and strives to explain complex concepts as simply as possible. He is a pragmatist that believes the the only truthful implementation of an architecture is the code that gets executed. Aslam spends his time helping teams build better software and have fun at the same time. You can read his blog at http://aslamkhan.net and tweet him at http://twitter.com/aslamkhn.