“When I was invited to keynote at Agile Saturday VII, I nearly fell off my chair. Surely some mistake.

WTF do I know about agile development? Not a lot to be honest.
But then again I realised that this whole agile thinking thing is not, or should not be, exclusive to development. I have ideas how agile is related to sex, marketing and, of course, neuroscience…”

Is Robin an agile marketer? You decide. Whatever he is, he has been a successful salesman and (internet) marketing entrepreneur for longer than he cares to admit and has “advised” hundreds of companies around the world.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/robingurney

Closing keynote speaker confirmed for Agile Saturday VII!

Encyclopedia Waterfallica suggests that testing should be performed after the implementation completely finished. It also suggests that developers should not know the tests to be used for verification in advance at all, otherwise they would build an application that fulfills only the given test cases.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Agile Testing gives a new emphasis to testing: it contains more practical, so called agile ideas. This guide is becoming more and more popular among developers and testers nowadays. Why? First, it is slightly more exciting; and “secondly it has the words Don’t Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover”.

It’s been a while since we had our last Agile Saturday last autumn.

The wait is over, Agile Saturday VII is scheduled for 12th of May!

Book it in your calendars and stay in touch for more announcements!

— Agile Estonia crew

LESS is a network of individuals that regularly organizes conferences about Lean and Agile Product Development. This year LESS2011 has a clear focus on
management innovation and organization transformation.
The Keynotes include Lean specialists Peter Middleton and Jams Sutton as well as
radical management proponent Steven Denning and a representative of the most
promising approach to budgeting and strategy: Bjarte Bogsnes.

The LESS team wants to encourage all local communities to participate by
offering a special discount code. Agile Estonia members will get a 100Eur
discount on the price of registration if they register with the
AGILEESTONIACOMMUNITY discount code: http://less2011.leanssc.org/register/

See you in Stockholm!

Here is the live streaming from the lobby of Agile Saturday VI.

“You have heard stories about brilliant teamwork. Do you have means to lead one?

Enablers are needed for productive teamwork. Are you missing one?

Which unspoken question eats the energy of the group? What group pattern is on? Understanding of Group Dynamics gives a key also for leading a single meeting or larger organization. ”

J.B. Rainsberger is a well-known rock star speaker in the Agile community. He is the author of JUnit Recipes book and an active promoter of TDD (Test Driven Development). Apart from doing some paid trainings in Estonia, he has agreed to give a free talk on the upcoming devclub.ee meeting. Don’t miss this opportunity on September 27th.

After soaking in the Waterfall, got tortured by the Scrum You, queued by the KangBang and then stopped to Lean on something – the process is still not perfect! Here you shall hear the saga of team Artify, last three-year experiences with different startups, finding & creating value for customers and building the team. If not useful, then definitely memorable :D!

Ericsson Finland started Agile transformation in 2008 with the first Scrum Team. Since then they have scaled up to 30+ teams and set up a complete e2e setup supporting Agile. This transformation has been (and still is) profound change in organizational thinking and culture.

Henri Kivioja is delighted to share the experiences and learnings from this journey.

Opening and introduction to the day – Heldin Rikk and Stanislav Vasilyev

How to Make Tea Party Rock – Viktoria Saat

Challenging requirements – Gojko Adzic

Lean vs Scrum vs Common Sense vs Reality – Jaanus Lang

Team Leadership – Ari Tikka

Choose a Pattern! – Anton Keks

Markus Hjort and Tiina Kiuru from Reaktor Innovations will be making an appearance at Agile Saturday on October 29th:

Effective testing is an integrated part of agile development. It’s essential for a successful team to be able to combine different agile testing practices to generate a cycle of feedback and constant improvement. Finding the right balance between the amount of information gained by testing, the effort/cost of testing and the feedback time is crucial. It becomes easier when testing is a cross-functional activity engaging all team members.

Great possibility to listen and learn from Gojko Adzic who is software craftsman with a passion for new technologies, programming and writing.

Gojko (Author of the book Specification by Example)got bitten by the specification-by-example bug five years ago. Since then, he has helped numerous teams implement these practices. In October he is visiting Tallinn on the request of Devtraining where he also gives a class on the topic of From User Stories to Acceptance Tests.

On October 29th the VI Agile Saturday took place at Swedbank’s IT-building. With the maximum number of 250 tickets “sold” it was the largest Agile Saturday to date.

One of the main attractions this time was definitely the lecture by Gojko Adzic about challenging requirements. Gojko is a highly-renowned and experienced agile coach who quickly won the hearts of the audience with his energetic performance and received a load of positive feedback. In addition to him we had a number of Finnish and Estonian presenters with different topics and workshops, including Henri Kivioja from Ericsson Finland, Kitty Mamers from Skype and Hannes Lents from Garage48.

This time we really made an effort to get some feedback from participants both about the lectures and the whole event altogether, which gave us a pretty good overview of the positive and negative aspects people noticed.

The most mentioned problem in the feedback, as many of you might have already guessed, was the lack of cool air. It’s unfortunate that the ventilation system failed, but on the other hand – it is nice that the main problem of such a large-scale event is the ventilation and not the topics, presenters or overall organisation.

Photos of the event can be seen on Agile Estonia’s Facebook page, videos of lectures will be uploaded soon. The next Agile Saturday is planned for the beginning of next year with one keynote speaker already confirmed. In case you have any ideas or propositions concerning the next Agile Saturday, be sure to let us know.

Thanks and see you next year!

To serve our community better (and look more serious :-)), we decided to replace our old Confluence-based site with a WordPress one.

Hopefully, it will be easier to find information and that it will encourage all of us to post more interesting content.

Welcome!

For the period of 28.-30.10.2011 Sokos Hotel Viru has offered the participants of Agile Saturday the following special room rates: Standard SGL 57 EUR / DBL 67 EUR. In case you wish to stay there with the offered price, give the administrator the password, which is (surprise-surprise): Agile Saturday.

Hotel Viru is situated at the very heart of Tallinn and during the Soviet era it used to be a kind of a gate to the western world. It was the first really modern hotel in Tallinn, where all the important guests and celebrities stayed. Also it is well known that many of the rooms were under constant attention of the “investigatory organs”. For more information and historical facts you can visit the KGB museum at the hotel.

Here is the link to the hotel’s webpage: http://www.sokoshotels.fi/en/hotels/tallinn/. Sokos Hotel Viru, Viru väljak 4, 10111 Tallinn, Estonia. Ph. +372 6 809 308.

See you in Tallinn!

Agile has been around for quite some time. It started as underground movement and is now becoming mainstream. This means two things: it gets easier to follow agile, it gets easier to sell agile. Does it automatically mean that software development is getting more streamlined and more efficient?

Good news, everyone – the programme for the 6th Agile Saturday on October 29th 2011 is available now at https://agile.ee/agile-saturday/agile-saturday-vi/.

Take a peek and register to the event!