BDD Talk at the next Agile South Coast

 

The next Agile South Coast meeting is coming soon.  The 8th March 2010 to be exact.  Howard van Rooijen will be doing a talk on BDD.  You can find more details on the Agile South Coast website:

www.agilesouthcoast.org.uk

or

Direct Link to the Event

I look forward to seeing you there.

Agile South Coast – New Website

Since my last post the Agile South Coast website has started to take shape.  We have moved away from using Linkedin for organising the group.  The Linkedin group still has it’s place, but the new website gives us a lot more flexibility to deliver content that is relevant and interesting to the group. 

Join this new and exciting group on the below link.  Or just have a browse to see what we are all about.

http://agilesouthcoast.ning.com/

WSUG – Retrospective – 8th Feb 2010 (Agile South Coast)

 

We had an excellent WSUG meeting at the offices of iMeta on 8^th February 2010.  At the end of the meeting we had a little retrospective about the meeting and the group.  Below is a summary of the discussion.

What is holding back attendance of group?

-          “Wessex” name is not helping the group to be recognised.  Most of the group did not associate themselves with the Wessex area.

-          Lack of a website is missing an advertising opportunity. 

-          Reliance of Linkedin could be limiting our audience.

-          The aim of the group is not immediately available.

-          Need more blogs/twitter etc to communicate the activities of the group.

The group agreed to:

-          Change name of group to “Agile South Coast”

-          Create a specific twitter account for the group

-          Attendees will try to bring at least one more person to the next meeting

-          Howard to consider doing a talk at the next meeting in March.

-          Blog about the this meeting and the next meeting

-          Set-up a Ning Network for the Group.

-          Research local companies using Agile/Scrum to enlist more attendees to the group

 

Agile South Coast is a group of likeminded individuals that meeting every second Monday of the month to talk about Agile/Scrum/Lean for the improvement of the attendees and the wider community.  The group normally meets in the Southampton area with easy access from Portsmouth, Winchester, Bournemouth, Poole, Salisbury, Hampshire, Dorset, West Sussex, Wiltshire and beyond.

Charging Problems with iPod Touch and iPhone 3GS in Speaker Docks

 

It appears that Apple have removed one of the ways to charge iPods and iPhone in the latest generation (3GS iPhone and 3rd Gen iPod Touch).  Previous version have allowed charging through either the USB (5V) or Firewire (12V) connections in the standard 30 Pin cable.  Now only USB is supported.

The result is that any device that uses the Firewire to charge will no longer charge.  This includes Speaker Docks, In Car Adapters and Mains Chargers.

I have personal experience of speaker docks (Klipsch) that are advertised as supporting charging on all 30 Pin connectors that do not charge, obviously attempting to charge over Firewire!

There is a solution available from Apple.  It is called a Scosche Passport.  There are various available to fit different applications (Docks, In Car).

The Power of Body over Mind!

 

An excellent trick that Jon Salinsky showed us at the Agile Coaches Gathering is how to use your body to control the state of your mind.  If you are feeling nervous or apprehensive before a presentation you can use your body to overcome that feeling.  Try this.  Hold your head a little higher.  Hold your head still.  Hopefully this will lift your shoulders a little.  This will have the effect of changing your overall stance.  You will be holding your body in a more confident position.  Your mental state will be naturally more confident and the people around will be receptive to “status”.  Your body has had a positive impact on your mental state.

 

Try it.  This technique really works.

Improvisation for Agile Coaches Event Autumn 2009

 

On Saturday 21^st November 2009 I attended the Agile Coaches Improv session in London.  This event was truly excellent.  Those who know me, you would expect that an event involving Improv would be a challenge.  Acting or being impromptu in front of a group of peers on topics that I am not comfortable or confident with is outside my comfort zone.  It was a challenge in such a positive and rewarding way.  The child in me was released and I felt free to explore Improv.

So a big thanks to Mike Sutton and David Harvey for organising the event.  Most importantly a huge thanks to Tom Salinsky ( of the Spontaneity Shop)  for facilitating and teaching in a truly engaging and accessible way.  I cannot stress enough how liberating and open Tom’s approach is.  He is an excellent teacher, coach and facilitator.  Finally thanks to all the attendees for making the event a success.

On the train home Plamen Balkanski and I tried to summarise all that Tom had covered during the day.  There was so much.  He really made us work.  Below is a summary of the “games” we did throughout the day.  This list is not comprehensive and I may well blog a summary of the game details at a later date.  I am sure we have forgotten some of the games!  The game names are mine not Tom’s.

Word Games – Speak out when pointing to an object.

Pair Responses Games – Positive offer and partner response.

Explore Status Games – Explore the extremes of status.

Group Status Games – Further exploring extremes of status as a group.

Picture Pair – Drawing pictures in pairs.

Letter Pair – Writing letters (Dear John ....) in pairs.

Hat Games – Pluck the Hat from your opponent.  (Thanks to Plamen for almost knocking me out whilst playing this one!)

Discussion Tag Games – Just like Wrestling tag team, but with conversation!

Mime Games – Mime talking whilst someone talks for me!

Avoid the “s” – Talk using words without an “s” in.

The 3 Word Game – Talk in sentences of 3 words.

New Choice Game – My conversation isn’t good enough try again.

The Bop Games – Someone in the circle trying to get out.  For those who attended - Pair Programming J

Taken at face value the content presented was engaging, funny and well thought through.  But what is the value to an Agile Coach?  Well for me Tom showed us some excellent techniques for breaking down the barriers in a team.  To engender a relaxed and happy team who are more at ease with each other.  Tom also highlighted the concept of status and how our approach to status can have positive and negative influences.  This knowledge can be used in our day to day understanding of our teams and the individual interactions in the team to assist in the coaching of the team to higher levels of continuous improvement.

I found the day truly enlightening and I cannot recommend enough that you attend once of Tom’s workshops.

Twitter Tools

Over the last few month or so I have been enjoy using twitter.   You can follow me twitter.com/cliveskipper.

Well as with many users I quickly found the Twitter web UI difficult to use.  So in my investigating the tools that surround Twitter I found a number of useful tools that I thought I would share.

TweekDeck is my current tool of choice for reading and tweeting.  I love the facility to group the people you are following.  It has some quirks, but in my view the tool is much better than many of the competition.

Wefollow is another great tool for understanding the use of hash tags.  It can offer a interesting insight into the hash tags in use and the ranking of individuals with those tags.

tweeteffect has the potential to be a great tool, if you are looking to analyse you tweets and the impact they have on your following.