CT-SPIN #68: Production Support – if it’s visible, it’s manageable

Posted on 6 June 2011 by Christian Oloff

Tons of bugs, a gloomy support team, and new features always being more important than fixes; this is how Austin Fagan describes the beginning of his quest to help improve the production support processes at a leading UK broad band supplier. He will tell us more about the starting point, improvements achieved and lessons learned along the way.

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Snacks kindly sponsored by Unboxed Consulting. Wine kindly sponsored by Yila Consulting.

Wednesday, 15th June 2011, 18h15
Events Room,
5th floor,
Bandwidth Barn,
125 Buitengracht Street,
Cape Town
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CT-SPIN #67: Learning From Failure Overpowers Fear

Posted on 4 May 2011 by Jan Pool
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Implementing change is never easy and pain, fear and failure is often part of the process. Samantha Laing will provide some insights on how to use failures to overcome the inherent fears associated with switching to a new process development methodology.

Snacks kindly sponsored by Alacrity.

Wednesday, 11th May 2011, 18h15
Events Room,
5th floor,
Bandwidth Barn,
125 Buitengracht Street,
Cape Town

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CT-SPIN #66: Breaking down silos: Lessons in building better software through collaboration

Posted on 6 April 2011 by Annu Augustine
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Why do we so often see web applications that are visually displeasing, and more importantly, usability nightmares? Why do designers often get stuck being asked to “make the design pop a little more,” with no room or incentive to innovate? Why do some developers feel demotivated and unable to break out of doing things the way they’ve always been done?

Snack kindly sponsored by Twenty57.

Wednesday, 13th April 2011, 18h15
Events Room, 5th floor, Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

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CT-SPIN #65: Critical success factors for implementing a Data Warehouse solution

Posted on 9 March 2011 by Hendrik
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Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing are issues that many companies in South Africa struggle with. Karen van der Walt and Clint Vosloo will provide us with some insight into their implementation of data warehousing at Momentum.

Snacks kindly sponsored by Alacrity.

Slides: Karen’s notes

Wednesday, 16th March 2011, 18h15
Events Room, 5th floor, Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

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CT-SPIN #64: Taming the customer support queue: A Kanban Experience Report

Posted on 8 February 2011 by Herman Lintvelt
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Update: This talk by Karen Greaves has been accepted for the Agile 2011 Conference, August in Utah. Be the first to hear it at CT-SPIN in February.

In Aug 2010 we reduced the size of our development team. We needed to handle customer support issues and new development with the 3 remaining teams. We had over 600 open defects and the list was growing daily. On top of that our first clients were going live. Clearly some radical change was needed. We implemented Kanban.

The result? In Dec 2010 we had no open severity 1 issues. Our queue was down to 54 issues. SLAs are met in most cases, and our resolution rate exceeds our incoming rate.

I’d like to share our story, and inspire you to tame your support queue too!

Snacks kindly sponsored by ScrumSense.

Slides: A Kanban Experience Report

Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 18h15
Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

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CT-SPIN #63: Object Oriented Design

Posted on 12 January 2011 by Annu Augustine
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OO is the first development technology that really has the potential to deliver against business needs, i.e., to produce systems that are flexible, robust, reliable, reusable and extendable. There are a range of concepts, ideas, rules, guidelines and patterns to be considered during OO Design. Tony Yunnie from FTI will briefly touch on some of these points and show how they work together to deliver flexible, robust, reliable, reusable and extendable systems.

Snacks kindly sponsored by FTI.

Wednesday, 19th January 2011, 18h15
Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

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CT-SPIN #62: Introduction to Ruby on Rails 3.0

Posted on 10 November 2010 by Jan Pool
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Version 3 of the popular Ruby on Rails web application framework has been released in late August. Robert Crida and Stuart Corbishley of Clue Technologies will provide an overview of the latest version’s capabilities that makes it a great choice for rapid online application development.

Snacks kindly sponsored by Alacrity.

Slides: Ruby on Rails 3

Wednesday, 17th November 2010, 18h15
Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

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CT-SPIN #61: Declarative UIs – The Promised Land?

Posted on 26 October 2010 by Jan Pool
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Graphical user interfaces (GUI) form an integral part of a large portion of the programs we write, but GUIs are not always easy or fun to build. Herman Lintvelt, founder of Polymorph Software, will speak about declarative user interfaces and how it may change the way we create GUIs.

Snacks kindly sponsored by Polymorph Systems.

Slides: Declarative User Interfaces

Wednesday, 20th October 2010, 18h15
Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

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CT-SPIN #60: Thinking in Patterns

Posted on 9 September 2010 by Jan Pool
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Pattern thinking is not just for architects. Aslam Khan will present a workshop to demonstrate how to “Thinking in Patterns”. You will walk away with a new skill in your toolbox.

Snacks kindly sponsored by Alacrity.

Slides: Thinking in Patterns

Wednesday, 15th September 2010, 18h15
Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

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CT-SPIN #59: Kanban for Software Engineering in a Nutshell

Posted on 12 August 2010 by Jan Pool

The Kanban principles are nothing new, but applying them in software projects is a relatively recent phenomenon. Jaco van der Merwe, from Electromagnetic Software and Systems, will introduce us to the Kanban principles and explain how they fit into the world of the many software processes around.

Slides: Kanban for Software Engineering in a Nutshell (Part 1)

Wednesday, 18th August 2010, 18h15
Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

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