How we went AGILE in Nigeria?

For the last two and a half years Nortal ICT specialists have been flying between their homeland and Nigeria. One might wonder what are those guys and an Estonian ICT Company doing so far away from home in the middle of Africa.

In fact, Nortal has a team of experienced PFM-experts who are building up the Public Finance Management for Federal Government of Nigeria together with Hewlett Packard. The project has lasted a bit over two years now.

Although we had a ready-made software package (Nortal PFM) that covered most of the customer´s needs we still had to do a lot of customization work in a challenging and totally different environment compared to our home markets.

My presentation is mostly about our experience in Nigeria as well as interesting hints and tips on how to survive as a software engineer (Agile Management, Agile Software Development) in that part of the world.

Kristjan Haavik
Nortal AS
Responsible for Business Development in Africa

How to setup a 100 people IT company in one year

If you were asked in July 2012: “would you be able to recruit 100 IT specialists in Estonia in 1 year?”, what would’ve been your answer? Kühne+Nagel hired first employee to its IT Service center in Tallinn on 1st of August 2012. By the end of August 2013 number of employees reached 103.

Kühne + Nagel is a global logistics provider operating today in more than 100 countries, offering seafreight, airfreight, rail & road as well as contract logistics solutions for the industry segments FMCG, Industrial Goods, High Tech, Automotive, Retail, Oil & Gas and Pharma.

Communication grooming

Highly effective. Qualitative.  Incredibly fast. Transparent. These are the buzzwords that you usually hear when someone tries to sell you a “better” communication method. Instead of only throwing buzzwords towards you, we actually reveal the wisdom behind them.

During our talk we are going to tell you a couple of stories which share the same beginning but due to choices made along the way stories end up in totally different destinations. The stories are from everyday work environment where a bunch of people are coworking while sitting in different rooms. However, which tool creates a basis for communication that allows you to concentrate on your task at hand?  And also prevents from you becoming a call centre lady? In our company, Proekspert, we use Atlassian tools to rule our communication –  JIRA  issue tracker and Confluence wiki.
We award active participants with license packs which include 10 Atlassian Tools, so you can try these out yourself.

Advanced topics in Agile: Implementing Scrum in a project-based company

Some of the main Scrum goals are to be able to prioritize often and have less paperwork done. This contradicts with the project-based software development where project scope and deadlines are pre-defined and signed-off by customer. This session presents how Videobet has implemented Scrum in such an environment.
Agenda

• Agile Enterprise Patterns
• Project definition and how it collides with Scrum/Agile values
• The role of the Product Owner in a project-based environment
• The role of the Scrum Master in a project-based environment
• Scrum of Scrums!? Multiple concurrent projects management
• User stories, point estimation and velocity charts – are they relevant at all?
• In-sprint testers role vs. QA role
• Tools and infrastructure to support Agile transformation
• Q&A

Bio

Ethan Ram is the chief architect of Videobet, the Tallinn division of Playtech, developing one of the most advanced gaming platforms in the gaming market. Among his recent project he has led the Agile transformation of Videobet development and operations groups to work in Scrum. The project started late last year and is now past its climax. Before Videobet Ethan was working as the R&D manager of a web-based gaming startup where he transformed the development group to work in Kanban with Continuous Deployment environment.

Accelerating business growth by improving the Agile delivery of change.

The talk will appeal to delegates who work within an Agile environment, but want to understand more about the bigger picture of a company and how their contribution collectively moves a business forward. It will also be good for delegates who are new to Agile, or those who are thinking of introducing an Agile way of working and what to start off in the best possible shape.
The talk will be given by Clive Smith who is the Group CTO at MYJAR. Clive is experienced in delivering transformation to major financial services companies, such as Deutsche Bank, ING and Gazprom Marketing and Trading. The challenge in place at MYJAR is to lift the bar in Agile capability for this new way of working. It is needed to deliver the systems and process to grow the business by improving the customer experience and creating even more happy customers. Clive will discuss ‘why’ and ‘how’ you go about aligning the people and delivery engine with the vision and strategy of the company. This will then flow into ‘how’ you go about improving all aspects of Agile Project Management over a relatively short period of time to improve efficiency and quality of the deliverables.
MYJAR is a rapidly expanding company who ” responsibly provides small amounts of credit to a UK customer base”.. With a talented pool of enthusiastic and already successful people in Estonia, MYJAR is looking to further develop the company to be a leader in the short term loan market by keeping ‘customer centric’.

Enterprise Agility – do you really want this pain? …Why?

Common sense is not so common – last year I have noticed that agile methodology is becoming a mainstream. Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Cisco, or any other – just name it. All are saying that to be agile is important. Can you point at any of these big player that is still courage enough to say that they are doing waterfall? I haven’t seen these dinosaurs lately. So using the agile approach is a common sense, but is it really so common with these Big players? How they had embraced it? I don’t have much to report here. Last 3 years I’ve been very deeply involved as coach and trainer in Agile transition program at Skype. Global and fairly big organization been transformed from project focused organization to the product organization with 60 at the beginning and later around 140 component-based products, from more than 1,5 year product release cycle to 1 month release cycle. And I have to report that it was a pain… Pain of Birth! In this session you will not learn how to escape the pain of agile birth (if you are pregnant with the idea), but you can learn simple and common sense things that can surprise you unpleasantly if you have never heard about them. We will go through the mistakes we did, but also what helped us to win some (important, Enterprise wide) agile battles and to deliver great products. And we will have Q&A session to cover questions important to you. As a result you will be trained when to breathe and stay relaxed until your organization is really ready and all have to push to deliver proper Enterprise Agile.

Extend HTML, CSS and JS with AngularJS

Slow application reload makes for lagging frontend development. JSF rendering is clunky and no one wants to maintain the code. On the other hand pure HTML/JS/CSS written in a maintainable way is a pipe dream.

We need a MV* (Model View Whatever) that is testable and plays well with others. We filtered TodoMVC MV* frameworks down to two, and put them head to head.

AngularJS prevailed one sprint later. On the way, we ran into some pretty fabulous tooling and created some of our own. I’ll share best practices on how to extend the big three (HTML/CSS/JS) with AngularJS. Take a step towards frontend superheroism and maybe avoid stepping on your cape like we did.

Agile on Mars!

You are an expert in TDD & Pair Programming, hold a Scrum Master certificate and know the Agile Manifesto from heart? Then this talk is probably too basic for you! Everyone else in invited to jump head-first into a journey through space, learning about many core agile methods and concepts on the way, like: Iterations, User Stories, Planning Poker, Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Collective Code Ownership, Continuous Integration and more! Our journey will end on Mars where we will use SCRUM to conceive, build and continually improve the first Mars Station of mankind! Well, at least sort off..

Level: Beginner

Beyond Value Streams: Experimental Evolution in Action

In their desperate search for a viable business model, Lean Startup entrepreneurs treat “learning” as a true measure of progress, well above the number of features they develop or even the amount of customers they initially acquire.In their path to continuous improvement, skilled A3 thinkers treat “learning” as a primary value too, well above the problems they try to solve.As a change management approach, the Kanban Method creates the conditions for many learning opportunities as well. It specifically encourages to “Improve Collaboratively and Evolve Experimentally”, a practice also fully embraced by what is now known as “Lean Change”.
In this session, Claudio will share stories, workflows and practical thinking tools that illustrate how the act of deliberately capturing and evolving “learning streams” (as opposed to – or rather in addition to – the more conventional value streams) can lead to surprising consequences.

If you are serious about continuous improvement aim for a Single DoD

Your developers tell you: “My job is done!”, but we cannot release it to customers, or every component works great and passes all tests, but when we test the full product as a whole we find huge amount of problems. Do you have an organization where you have several DoDs(Definition of Done), for example for User Stories, Features and Epics? Have you ever heard people in your organisation saying they are waiting for other people to finish their job? Have they ever failed to deliver because of this? Does all of this sound familiar to you? I would like to discuss how important it is for a company to aim for a single DoD. Having a single DoD makes us to think about all tasks that are needed in order to release the product to our customers without entering a waterfall mode. I see many companies with different levels of  DoD; this makes companies slower and not serious about continuous improvement. In my presentation, I want to explain how a company gets slower when they choose the path of having several DoDs. In order to help companies to solve this issue, I will to present an improvement roadmap that companies can follow and achieve a single DoD for all work. This will help you deliver software faster and with less effort. Join us to learn from our failures as well as our successes! Learn how you may increase the throughput of your team and achieve more with the same people.

Turku Agile Day, the coziest agile software development conference, will be back on 14th & 15th of May 2013.

Attend and learn about inspiring new possibilities in field of agile methods! The themes this year include agile management, soft skills and development techniques. The event is famous for it’s cozy and authentic atmosphere – and of course the coffee. The conference is brought to you by enthusiastic volunteers from all over the field of IT and has always something new to offer!

Don’t miss your chance to attend the inspiring talks and workshop at Turku Agile Day 2013. Sign in today at http://turkuagileday.fi

Watch a TED talk about using Agile for your family, also contains nice simple explanation of what agile is a about:

Bruce Feiler: Agile programming for your family

Agile Saturday VIII is over and was the biggest event so far.

Big thanks to all the speakers, organizers and the attendees!

We are already thinking about organizing a next event, but this time we would benefit from some help.

WANTED: Volunteers, Track hosts and Speakers!

Please let us know if you would like to either help with the small things during the event, ready to keep track of some track (and at one point we had as many as 6 last time!) or have an experience to share with the community.

And, last but not least, let us know if you could sponsor our future events. Venue, coffee, prizes, etc are not cheap, but we would like to keep the event free of charge!

Together we can make it even better, keep in touch!

The Dangers of Organizational Change. Especially Agile

“Report from the field. We will be discussing with whiteboard, marker, my observations, your questions and thoughts.

When you are changing the way your team/company/community is working you will be dealing with people’s commitments, fears, courage, motivation, team’s dynamics, culture and much much more other issues. If you are unprepared then you are pushing your people into pain and confusion. In worst case scenario they can end up in a worse than they been before this change. That is not good.

I will cover some basic topics that can help you to be prepared (or at least to be aware) when you are facing organisational change related challenges.”

Extreme Startup Competition

Antti Rintala and Antti Kirjavainen from Houston Inc. will organize an Extreme Startup Competition at the Agile Saturday event. Sign up and get a chance to show your coding skills and win a prize!

If you want to participate, please bring your laptop. You can code in the language most familiar to you. You an download a starting point for your extreme startup server from GitHub to get started super quickly: https://github.com/steria/extreme_startup_servers

For more information about the Extreme Startup see the other blog post

The competition starts at 15:00 at room “kesk-euroopa” and lasts until 17:00. Welcome!