Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Agility

Agile San Diego Meeting November 1st

It’s been exactly a year since I last  presented at the Agile San Diego Group.

First, a word about the Agile San Diego group:

This group was founded by Carlton Nettleton and June Clarke – over 10 years ago, I believe.  At least I think it was.  Regardless, they currently organize the group and make sure there are meetings just about every month.  It’s a great group, with wonderfully dedicated Agile folks of all experience levels.

I started attending the meetings in late 2006 or early 2007, and did my first presentation to this group in March 2007.

I have been asked to give a talk on my Agile Success, My Agile Maxims, and … gasp … ESTIMATES…

But first, here is a list of the talks I’ve done, just to prove that even though I’ve presented there before, they still ask me back.  That is a good thing, right?

• 2007 – Feb – Agile Thinking in a Legacy Maintenance Effort
• 2008 – Feb – NMock2 Tutorial and Forensic Mocking
• 2009 – June – Code Excellence for the Average Programmer
• 2010 – Did I NOT do a talk this year?  Hm.
• 2011 – Agile Success – why not me too?

Here is the blurb for this years talk ‘Agile Success : The Maxims I Follow’

Many organizations have adopted an Agile approach but have not seen the results they were hoping for.

Agile exists because enough people recognized serious failures in the typical phased (waterfall and other) approaches.  However, in switching to Agile, many have brought along the same old thinking, expectations, and way of doing things that caused those failures.  ‘Agile’ is not a new way to do the old things.  It’s a way to create software that requires abandoning those old ways and thinking.  What was once ‘important’ is now recognized as blocking progress.

In this advanced talk we’ll explore some of the issues that block Agile success.

For example, regardless of how desperately we desire to know the future, we can’t know it until it is in the past.  Getting good (or even less than harmful) at estimating and planning just might be impossible.  Even worse, planning out what we ‘think’ we want is most likely causing our failure to produce something of value. Agile is about discovery, not prediction.

We’ll also discuss the 8 Maxims I follow that have made success possible for the teams I’ve coached and worked with. I don’t have a lot of answers, but I do have a lot of questions.

Please spread the news

I would appreciate it if you could spread the news, and let a few people know about this.

Meeting Location and info:

Link: http://www.agilesandiego.org/monthly-meeting/

We meet at 6:30pm on the first Thursday of every month at The Linkery in North Park.

All meetings are free and open to all.

The Linkery is a restaurant/bar in North Park that has a meeting room for us in the back. Craft beer is available from the bar during the monthly presentation and you are welcome to join us in enjoying some of their top notch food after the meeting.

The Linkery is in a large purple building on the corner of 30th Street and North Park Way, close to the 805. You should easily find free street parking, but there is also a multi-story parking garage across the street that costs $5.

I hope to see you there

I will try to show up early so we can have more arguing time.

Thanks!