Agile Saturday

Agile product development in public sector

“Agile” and “public sector contracts” are often considered to be mutually exclusive terms. However, it is possible to make it work and reap the associated cost savings. We are currently using about 80% of “handbook Scrum” doing public sector work, and we consider this an optimal level.
In addition, we are doing active development for multiple simultaneous customers with their own independent budgets and individual crazy wish-lists while maintaining a common core product.
The talk describes our journey and the current situation: how did we get here and why did we make these particular choices? What did we choose to keep of Scrum and what are we leaving out? How do we juggle and unify the multitude of requirements, plan our work and deliver the results? Also mentioned: the importance of good tools, customer relationship management, and clear technical vision.

BIO:

Targo has been involved in the software industry for 18 years, working in both technical and management roles, and on projects involving from just a handful to up to thousands of people. He is currently working as a software architect in Nortal, inventing more efficient methods for public sector information management.

You can read his thoughts on software and other related matters at http://www.targotennisberg.com/tarkvara/ (in Estonian).

Development process that works

Stanislav will talk about how they crafted their development process at Desk Rock taking the best from different agile development methodologies. He would like to share their experience and talk about how they managed to achieve better performance and quality through the experiments with the process and tools.

BIO: Stanislav is a software developer at Desk Rock – young but very ambitions software development company. He primarily works with Ruby on Rails and develops modern web apps for Desk Rock’s customers.

Agile Saturday took place on 25th of October, 2014 at Tallinn University of Technology.

Check out the pictures on our public Facebook album and don’t forget to like Agile Estonia!

As in every year, when leaves fall there is Agile Saturday to destroy your plans to pick up the potatoes, it happened again 🙂

See you soon, 25th of October, in new location – Tallinn University of Technology.

Agenda will be up soon!

Register ASAP and if you find out that you can not join us – cancel and let ushers come instead of you!

https://agile-saturday-xi.eventbrite.com

Imagine this – Your startup at launch got a handful of users who are ”innovators”. You are moving further and saw that the users you are dealing with now are “early visionaries”. Later, after you with ease jumped over the chasm, you found yourself living and talking with “early majority”. And again, one small jump and you are pleasantly in the midst of “late majority”. One nice transition and even “laggards” becoming your good friends. Every one loves you – you are famous, rich and respected. Plea of “Airport’s business books” – to never give in in dreaming of building a great company and product – worked for you well! Very nice and happy story.

But life full of things that you don’t want to hear and my late experience forced me to agree with Steve Blank who was saying – “most startups [Alek: companies] fail because they didn’t develop their market [Alek: customers], not because the didn’t develop their product”.

I will share some of my observations of a common pitfalls of untested assumptions and the blisses of work with the tested hypotheses and validated knowledge. Value of this session is heard story that is “easy to retell” and will covered practical tools critical for success and useful for organisation of any size – startup or enterprise.

How to make automated test bots play 3D games

When playing a video game have you ever wondered how its tests can be automated? Or how agile principles can be applied to big scale game development?

Expect to see less dull talking and more real stuff and coding with Unity3d engine.

Right tools matter: why not to use JIRA, but PivotalTracker

When you are (at least thinking of) doing your project in the Agile way, you need the right tools to help you.

Of course, traditional understanding is that you need to have a physical board and put sticky notes on it. That’s probably is the best option when your team is co-located.

When you team is spread (or at least your customer has their own office), you need to have your user stories online, so you can collaborate remotely. However, people tend to choose incorrect software for that, which makes their story telling and tracking harder and less transparent instead. Remember, Agile story tracker is very different from a bug tracker.

Come to the session to learn how a proper tool can really get out of the way and let you work on your project effectively. I will also talk about proper story telling in general.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the tool vendors that will be mentioned.

Keynote from previous Agile Saturday: From Buzz to Reality: Online bank from scratch in 5 months

The 10 th Agile Saturday event is scheduled to take place on 15th of February, 2014 in RADISSON BLU HOTEL OLÜMPIA, right in the center of Tallinn.

Register here

As a teaser, here is the blog post from Codeborne, on how we created an online bank in Russia in 5 months. The same article is also available in Russian.

Of course, great deal of this success is because of the Agile methods that were applied right from the beginning, both managerial and technical. The second part is, of course, the people. From both sides: developers and customer’s representatives.

During the upcoming Agile Saturday I am going to share some “secrets” of how it was possible, especially in Russia. For now, read the blog post and have your questions ready!

Coderetreat

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of ‘getting things done’, the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.

Please take your computer with you

Hi guys, we have good news 🙂 Next Agile Saturday will happen 28. September 2013.
You can register here

Hi everyone, we have a date 🙂 Next Agile Saturday will happen 2. February 2013. Save the date and be there.