Agile Dinner Tampere

We had another agile dinner, the theme was Product Backlog.

I did not have much time for preparations, but the evening turned out to be very good with almost full table of participants and good discussion. Thanks, everyone!

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Agile+Dinner+Tampere+20100421

Agile and Secure software development

I participated the event on agile and secure software development organized by Agile Finland and Finnish Information Security Association.


http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Agile+and+Secure+software+development+event
http://www.ttlry.fi/yhdistykset/tietoturva/tapahtumat2/?x119225762=146234864

The material (presentations and summary of group work) is available at

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Secure+software+development+and+agile+methods+-+notes

Turku Agile Day (workshops)

I participated the first day of Turku Agile Day. The day consisted of two workshop sessions. In the morning I joined the session on exploratory testing presented by Maaret Pyhäjärvi. We had a change to try out testing Freemind, which gave me several good insights on how to enjoy testing!

In the afternoon I participated in coding dojo lead by Markus Hjort. We attacked a simplified version of battleship game using TDD and pair programming. Quite a bit of the session went to discussing different styles and approaches to design, which slowed down the development but was interesting nevertheless.

Both sessions were well worth attending. It was a pity that I was only able to arrange one day for this event.

http://www.turkuagileday.fi/

Agile Dinner Tampere

Theme on the dinner was refactoring. I presented a refactoring demonstration where I refactored code together with the audience. We we able to cover basics (reorganizing, renaming, extracting parts) somewhat together with some related topics on clean code.

I think the presentation went well, as a decent first iteration. I certainly learned a lot from this dinner. However, it might be better to restrict the material to either for beginners or for people already familiar with refactoring. An hour is certainly too little for this topic, and possibility for everyone to do it on their own pace would be help, too.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Agile+Dinner+Tampere+20100316

Coding Session Tampere

We had the fourth Sprint of the Coffee Maker project. The Team delivered the two stories left unfinished last time. They also took a third story into this Sprint but were not able to finish it due to tests failing on some developer machines.

I combined the web pages into one, so the link below is to an older version of the main page.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=6062160

Coding Session Tampere

We had another coding session presenting Sprint three of the project. This time the Team selected two stories from the backlog to have work for everyone without too much overlap in the codebase. The target is still a very small piece to be divided for five developers. Unfortunately, they were not able to finish either of the stories. We should look into this when selecting the next target application.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Coding+Session+Tampere+20100223

Agile Dinner Tampere

We had an excellent dinner thanks to all the participants. I selected the theme because I have been interested in improving my productivity. We had a related theme, namely code katas, last year. While this theme touched upon that on the nitty-gritty details like shortcuts it went a lot deeper on focus, time management and such. My personal inspiration for this session was a talk by Neal Ford at Oredev last year (see the link at dinner page).

I added some links based on the evenings discussion to the dinner page.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Agile+Dinner+Tampere+20100217

Coding Session Tampere

We had the second sprint and the first story was finished. Looking fine so far.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Coding+Session+Tampere+20100209

Coding Session Tampere

We had the second session on applied Agile practices to an example problem. After the usual random walk the Team formed a Sprint Backlog and Burndown and started to work towards the first story. Pair programming was in use.

PO is eager to review the acceptance test for the first story. This time I mostly watched on the side as I had an impediment (age 3) with me. Starduck Studios proved to be equipped with enough toys, too. :)

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Coding+Session+Tampere+20100126

Guest lecture by Lars Bak (Google) at TUT

I listened to Lars Bak's (Google) talk on Google Chrome javascript engine (V8). He is famous for his work, among others, on HotSpot Java VM and CLDC HotSpot VM for Mobile Edition Java.

I understood that with V8 Google wants to drive the whole industry forward in javascript performance. Since javascript applications need to target all browsers, they must follow the constraints set by the weakest of them. By open sourcing V8 Google wants to set the standard and indicate other browser vendors on how to reach that. Very interesting strategy.

Pushing JavaScript Performance in Google Chrome
Guest lecture by Lars Bak (Google)

http://www.tut.fi/public/index.cfm?MainSel=1&Sel=78&Show=78&siteid=0&view=user_detail&ID=59791&Event=59791

Agile Dinner Tampere

I organized another Agile Dinner in Tampere. This time it was a routine task, as Pasi Kovanen and Pekka Mattila volunteered to tell us about continuous integration and build tools. Really good discussion afterwards.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Agile+Dinner+Tampere+20100119

Coding Session Tampere

We held another coding session at Starduck Studios. This time we kicked-off a project to provide an implementation for a simple (but not trivial) example problem (Robert Martin's Coffee Maker). Initial session went to forming and estimating the Product Backlog.

Looking forward to seeing this promising Team to deliver it!

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Coding+Session+Tampere+20100112