Details

1) The Bee Colony – creating a hive of activity for Agile teams
By Stevan Zivanovic

2) Test Automation – Tools and Methodologies at Spotify
By Kristian Karl

The Bee Colony – creating a hive of activity for Agile teams

The use of metaphors to better understand our everyday activities is well understood. To help question what we do and how we behave, particularly in Agile teams, the speaker will use his experience of working in Agile teams and compare this with his other passion, that of bee keeping.

Using videos of the speakers own bee colony and extrapolating the social model of a beehive, the speaker will relate these to the structure and behaviour of an Agile team.

The result is that you, as a professional tester, will have a better understanding of the dynamics of an Agile team, what behaviours you need to demonstrate and the expected outcomes and how not to get you or your team stung. In addition you will also gain a better understanding of bees!

Bio
Stevan loves to support people to achieve their best. His long career in the IT industry has taken him from a practitioner in the discipline of software testing to a management consultant; advising, supporting and enabling individuals and teams to change. He has used Agile practices to successfully deliver projects and translated these experiences to facilitate others to achieve. Other interests include Systems Thinking, Decision Theory and use of modelling techniques. Stevan now provides facilitation, training and consultancy services to a wide range of organisations enabling them to make real, sustainable and beneficial change. Stevan’s other great passion, other then his wife of course, is in beekeeping – a self-organising system that provides huge sustainable benefits to others around it. You can contact Stevan via LinkedIn.

Test Automation – Tools and Methodologies at Spotify

Test automation is a great challenge. The return of investment is often null. It can be expensive. It’s sure to hard to handle. But why do we try to do it, despite all troubles? Because, it can prove itself to be a real time saver. If done correctly.
Kristian will share his and Spotify’s experiences in the field of test tooling and methodologies. It will be all about open source tools, and Model-based testing as key success factors.

Bio

Kristian Karl has 18 years of experience in the testing business, and has during that time been given the chance to work in Telecom, Finance, Government and Startups. Even though Kristian has done White Box Testing, Functional Testing, System and Integration Testing, Acceptance Testing, his heart beats strongest for Test Automation using Model-based Testing and Performance Testing. Founder of graphwalker.org and Test manager at Spotify since 2010.

Over the last few years, we have helped many organizations use Lean Thinking and the Kanban approach to drive continuous improvement, agility, and waste reduction in software development and IT Operations. Now AgileInnovation has developed the Kanban Bootstrap^® service to guide organisations in their Lean Journey, providing a framework including executive and team training and coaching. Further details…

The premier community Agile event in Ireland will be sponsored for the third year running by AgileInnovation. Keep the date 10th October in your diary for expert presentations, experience reports, workshops and networking opportunities. More details to be announced shortly.

Skillnets is subsidising the cost of a two day intensive Kanban course in Galway at the start of July – incredible introductory value for this new, premium course delivered by AgileInnovation! Details…

I’m getting an increasing number of queries on how agile can work with ‘traditional’ fixed price fixed scope contracts for software development services – I’ve summarised some introductory concepts in a whitepaper – you can also download a template agile contract developed in Norway called PS2000S – but at a cost of about €500! Anyone got any experiences in building agile concepts of iterative delivery, customer feedback, etc into real commercial engagements – comments welcome.

Enterprise Irelands ‘Lean Competitiveness Fund‘ is available to fund up to 50% of costs of training and coaching Scrum, Kanban or other Agile/Lean methods. AgileInnovation is a registered supplier of services to EI so if you are an EI customer, talk to us about getting funding to support your move to agile and lean software development.

Agileinnovation will be running the following courses in Dublin, Cork and Galway over the coming months:
See our Training Page for more details. To register email training@agileinnovation.ie.

Public Courses Schedule April to September 2013

To register for any of the training above, email training@agileinnovation.ie. Group discounts available.

Follow this link to register: http://linkd.in/10YOUMl

Kanban applies the Lean principles developed over decades in manufacturing to the Software Development and IT Operations worlds. It aims for Continuous Improvement, Waste Reduction and Value Maximization throughout your value stream. Although Kanban has 6 simple principles and advocates evolutionary change with low disruption and minimal conflict, many of its underlying concepts are counter-intuitive. Successfully adopting Kanban requires an understanding of the science behind it and embracing a set of axioms and values which depart significantly from traditional project and enterprise management orthodoxy. Training and coaching from people who have done this before is essential to making Kanban ‘stick’.

Kanban is not an alternative to Agile methods such as Scrum or XP. Neither does it require that you re-engineer the existing way you work, your roles and responsibilities, your tools and practices. Instead, it creates an environment where impediments to getting valuable work done are exposed. It encourages collaborations to improve across teams, functions and departments. It leads to radical reductions in wasted effort, reduces leads times, improves predictability and gives better quality. It can be applied at any and all levels in the organisation, from individuals to teams to business units, across software development, project management, portfolio management, infrastructure operations and even customer support.

Speaker
With over 25 years in software development, Colm has been applying agile and lean approaches for over 10 years. In the last four years as a trainer, coach and consultant, Colm has supported large scale agile adoptions in over 20 organisations including global multi-nationals and indigenous Irish firms across ICT, Finance and Telecoms. Colm is founder and principle of AgileInnovation – his company name reflects his research into the interplay of agile and lean development approaches and product and process innovation.

Colms’ interest in Lean Thinking began when automating Just-In-Time production lines in the 1980s. Implementing early agile software methods in 2001, Colm has extensive hands-on experiences across teams, organisations and technologies. In varied roles of developer, architect, ScrumMaster and Director, he has seen Lean and Agile from a variety of perspectives. These include the use of agile in the development of enterprise systems, embedded software, high-innovation research environments and in product organisations.

Colm delivers on-site and public courses such as Agile for Executives, ScrumMaster and Product Owner training and Lean/Kanban product and software development. He supports companies adopting these methods through assessments, consulting and team coaching.
Colm O’hEocha
Twitter @ColmOhEocha
colm@agileinnovation.eu
http://www.agileinnovation.eu

Product Camp Dublin 13 June 2013

Product Camp Dublin

Thursday, June 13, 2013 from 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM (BST)