Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Agility

Workshops in Finland and Sweden this Fall

Public Workshops at Mystes in Helsinki, Finland

Along with Llewellyn Falco and Vasco Duarte I’ll be participating in 4 half-day workshops on the 23rd and 24th of October.

Mob Programming: If you are interested in participating in a Mob Programming workshop, where you can experience our Teamwork attitude and many ideas related to Teaming and collaboration, please join me for a half day hands on workshop.

NoEstimates: Explore with us our current thinking and experience on NoEstimates decision-making. In this workshop we will review and analyze why we do estimates and how we can improve software and product development while reducing the time and money invested in estimating.

Hands-On introduction to ApprovalTests: ApprovalTests make it easy to create descriptive, expressive, easy to write and debug unit tests. In this workshop you’ll experience how to use ApprovalTests to accelerate test-driven development for everything from simple strings to arrays, GUIs, and complex objects. ApprovalTests is free and currently available for C#, Java, PHP, and Ruby.

Practical Refactoring:  In this workshop we are going to work on a 300 line ball of mud, and experience some new approaches and techniques that will enable you to easily and safely revitalize your legacy code into a thing of beauty little by little. After this workshop you will have a practical, hands-on understanding of how small daily improvements improve large-scale projects over a few months. You will see how much your own project at work could benefit from continuous improvement.

Helsinki, Finland – October 23rd

Mystes Presents
STATE OF THE ART PRACTICES
IN AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Woody Zuill, Vasco Duarte & Llewellyn Falco
October 23rd & 24th, 2014

Tampere Goes Agile, Tampere Finland

I am really looking forward to Tampere Goes Agile, October 25th http://bit.ly/1vXa4sb

I’ll be presenting on Mob Programming, and likely doing a workshop on it as well.  I’ll probably be speaking about NoEstimates, and who knows what else.  As I understand it, this is a free event – which is pretty cool!

Øredev Developer Conference

Malmo, Sweden – Oredev 2014 – November 4th

I am very pleased to be returning to Malmo and the FANTASTIC Oredev conference!

Experience a full day of Mob Programming and learn the mechanics of how to work together as a “Mob”, and explore the underlying concepts that make this form of development so effective for my team.

Throughout the day we will be tackling a sample project and working on it using a full “extreme programming” approach – User stories, prioritization, test-driven development, refactoring, and retrospectives.

I will also do a session on Continuous Discovery,  The Power of Pure Agile, and I’ll share the stage with Vasco Duarte for a converstation called “#NoEstimates Unplugged – A Conversation About Agile As If You Meant It”.

And of course – I’ll be there and in Malmo for the whole week and I would love to have a chance to meet you and talk about Agile, #MobProgramming, #NoEstimates, or just about anything interesting.

I have made plans to speak at several upcoming conferences and events.  If you are attending any of these, I’d love to meet up with you and talk about Agile, Mob Programming, #NoEstimates, #BeyondProjects, or just about anything please look me up!

• Agile Open Southern California 2014 – UC Irvine, Irvine, California – Sept 11 and 12
• Java One 2014 – San Francisco, California – September 28 through October 2
• Stockholm Software Craftsmanship Community – October 14th
• Mystes – State of the Art Practices in Agile Software Development  – Helsinki, Finland – October 23 and 24
• Tampere Goes Agile 2014 – Tampere, Finland – October 25
• Oredev 2014 – Malmo, Sweden – November 3 through 7

• Santa Barbara – January
• Mitchell DevCon 2014, San Diego, CA
• Twitter – February
• Tagged – February
• Mach One @Missoula – Missoula, Montana – April 11 and 12, 2014 – Lightning Keynote, Mob Programming, Beyond Estimates, Beyond Projects
• Winnipeg Agile Users Group – May – Continuous Discovery, The Value of Pure Agile
• Winnipeg Mob Programming Workshop
• Agile Games 2014 – Boston, Massachusetts – June 2, 3 and 4, 2014 – Mob Programming Workshop
• Agile New England – Mob Programming and Leadership – Enabling the Self-Organizing Team
• Scrum Day San Diego – San Diego, California – June 13, 2014 –
• Agile Roots – South Jordan, Utah – June 19 and 20 (and bonus day on 21) 
• Agile 2014 – Orlando, Florida – July 28 through August 1, 2014
• San Diego PMI – Mob Programming -I’ll get the details when I can.

Advanced Practices for Leading Agile Retrospectives: New Techniques and Activities

with Diana Larsen

When: Thursday, March 6, 2014 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM (PST)

Where: Marina Village, San Diego, CA

Visit the Eventbrite page for this event at http://dianalarsenworkshop.eventbrite.com

Spend an entire day with Diana Larsen exploring, learning, and practicing Advanced Practices for Leading Agile Retrospectives.  Agile Retrospectives improve any project or process — building on a team’s immediate past experience of success and failure. Smart teams and organizations hold Retrospective meetings iteratively, throughout the work cycle and at important release milestones.

In this workshop, Diana Larsen will introduce advanced uses of the Flexible Framework for Retrospectives and show how to incorporate the Five Rules for Team Learning in your Retrospective designs. Participants will share new team activities to enlarge your repertoire and gain practice in designing and facilitating effective Agile Retrospectives.

The Day:

1. Introductions – including practice with new activities to “Set the Stage”
2. Agile Retrospective Purpose & Group Learning, Thinking, and Collaborating on Improvement Actions
3. Applying Five Rules for Learning in Retrospectives
4. Explore and practice new activities to “”Gather Data”, Generate Insights”, “Decide What to Do”, and “Close the Retrospective”
5. Retrospectives as Adaptive Action for “Responding to Change”
6. Designing Agile Retrospectives for Continuous Learning and Improvement
7. Next Steps

Our Facilitator, Diana Larson: 

Diana is a founding partner of FutureWorks Consulting. She is considered an international authority in the areas of Agile software development, team leadership, and Agile transitions.  She co-authored “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great”; “Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams and Projects”; “Quickstart Guide to Five Rules for Accelerated Learning”; and most recently the Path Through Agile Fluency model, described in the article, “Your Path Through Agile Fluency: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile” at www.agilefluency.com

Tickets Available on Eventbrite: 

We are keeping the price for this event as low as we possibly can.  You can attend for only $99 for a “Bring your own lunch” ticket, or $114 and we’ll provide a Box Lunch.  Also, we have set up a “5 for the price of 4” discount if you have a group from your company who would like to attend. 

Visit the Eventbrite page for this event at http://dianalarsenworkshop.eventbrite.com