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.

WSUG – Wessex Scrum User Group August Meeting – Geoff Watts

We are planning for Geoff Watts to attend the August Wessex SUG meeting (24/08/2009). The topic is the "fear associated with an agile transformation"

Given that this is in the middle of the holiday season, we need to know if it will be worthwhile asking Geoff to come to the meeting. If you are interested in coming along, please respond to teh discussion on LinkedIn.  We can then gauge numbers and arrange the event if enough people are interested.

Brighton ScrumFest July 2009 – Quick Review

Well I had a great time at the first ever UK ScrumFest in Brighton.  Thanks to the organisers (Plamen, Ollie and Mike) for making the event happen.

The first part of the event was to create a product backlog of ideas for the Open Space sessions.  Some really interesting sessions where suggested including:

• Scaling Scrum for an Enterprise
• Using Scrum for competitive advantage
• Scrum 101
• Group Cohesion
• Managing your family with Scrum.
• Child birth as a Scrum Project

The group then moved onto a Live Scrum project to create a number of fashion items from old stock of clothes.  In the first sprint my team tried to create a sarong.  With our combined experience (read none) we attempted sewing etc.    We failed to complete the objective of the sprint. :-(  We even had a Scrum trainer on our team, so we shouldn’t have had any excuses!

On the second day we split the day into Open Space and Goldfish bowl sessions. 

• OpenSpace sessions #1
• Goldfish Bowl: Life as a Product Owner
• OpenSpace sessions #2
• GoldFish Bowl: The Scrum Development Team
• OpenSpace sessions #3
• Goldfish Bowl: The Effective Scrum Master
• OpenSpace sessions #4
• Retrospective

Nigel Baker did a particularly interesting OpenSpace session on introducing Scrum.   I enjoyed the way in which Nigel explained the principle without the need to explicitly note software project examples.  At the same time keeping the concept closely aligned to development project process.

I also enjoyed the OpenSpace session that Cesar Idrovo did on Group Cohesion where he presented research that has been conducted into the elements that create a highly productive team.  I believe that Cesar will be officially presenting the findings at one of the coming Scrum events.  Keep your eyes open for that one!

The goldfish bowl that created the most interest was the Product Owner session.  This is not surprising as this role is at the very heart of any project.  There was a very health debate about whether a Product Owner should be present at the Retrospective.   The attendees debated for some time between two positions:  1) Absolutely not and 2) it depends, but mostly yes.  I personally feel that the product owner should be part of the meeting.  Without the PO in attendance you are creating a barrier, a them and us situation.  The PO is part of the team and there is not need to hide information from him/her.  If you feel you can not invite the PO then you have a dysfunctional team and this needs to be resolved.

The goldfish bowl sessions have been recorded so keep visiting the ScrumFest website, as they will be published in the near future.

ScrumFest July 2009 in Brighton

Well I am really looking forward to going to ScrumFest later on today.  I know there are some very interesting and well respected attendees.  So I am hopeful that I will gain further in depth understand of Scrum from the experts.  It will definitely be a learning experience for me.  Every day is a school day!

My intention is that my next blog post will be a reflection on some interesting observations from Scrumfest on Scrum and leading software development teams.

Whilst I am at Scrumfest I will be updating twitter with the occasional tweet of interesting titbits.  You can follow me here:  http://twitter.com/cliveskipper

South UK Scrum User Group (Wessex) – 22nd June 2009

Well it was great to see a number of familiar faces at the South Scrum User Group meeting on the 22nd June 2009.  As always we had a very interesting discussion.

 

We covered a number of items before starting the main discussion.  Firstly the name of the group.  Plamen has been in discussion with the Scrum Alliance (SA) to have the groups details included in the SA website.  SA had suggested that the title of South UK was too broad ranging and we should adopt a more local title.  The discussion ensued on what name would be appropriate for a group that covers Southampton, Bournemouth, Poole, Salisbury and beyond.  We decided that the group we be renamed Wessex Scrum User Group.  After the meeting Plamen has arranged for the group to be visible on the SA website here.

 

Plamen has also arranged for Geoff Watts to come to the group in the near future.  Watch the group’s linkedin group for more information.

 

The main topic of the meeting was “Continuous Integration – How Far Do You Go?”.   Again we used a Mind Map approach to documenting the discussion and thoughts from the group.  Below is the resulting Mind Map.  Interestingly the topic is not necessarily a Scrum topic, but we were very careful to tie back Agile principles to the concept that were discussed.

 

South UK Scrum User Group 22nd June 2009

Just a quick reminder that the next South UK Scrum User Group will be held on Monday 22nd June 2009 at the Inn on the Furlong, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK. The event is free! So please come along.

For more information please go to the Linkedin Group here.

Videos – Toyota Production System, Just In Time (JIT) and Kanban

I am current doing a lot of research and reading around the whole application of Lean Principles and Kanban to software development.  At the moment this is a hot topic in the software development arena.

As a result I came across some very interesting videos on the Toyota website explaining the Just In Time and Kanban card process.  These have certainly added some context to my understanding, so I thought I would post a link here in the hope it will be of use to my blog readers.

http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/vision/production_system/video.html