Next APLN Mtgs - Feb & March

The next APLN Orange County meetings are planned for Wednesday, February 4th and Thursday, March 5th from 6:00 -7:30 PM at Neudesic's Irvine office (map two posts below). The agenda for the meetings are below.

Wed 2/4 - "Agile Architecture - Closing the Loop"
What is the role of architecture within an agile project? How do you keep architecture engaged early and throughout in a fast-paced development effort? How do you make agile architecture work in a larger corporation? There has been a lot of conversation around agile and architecture, and February's presentation by David Bleeker will be a great springboard into deeper discussion. As an Enterprise Architect and Integration Manager at Ingram Micro, David provides leadership in SOA architecture and operations, metrics driven optimization and process development.

Wed 3/4 - "Growing and Sustaining an Offshore Scrum Engagement"
Join us in March for a chance to hear one of the sessions from the Agile2008 Conference in Toronto last year. Kelley Blue Book's Edward Uy, Director PMO & Nikos Ioannou, Director, Industry Products, will be presenting a straightforward, sensible approach to implementing Scrum combined with a well-known team building model to help KBB successfully creat offshoring teams in China and India. Nikos and Edward will illustrate how and why they applied The Five Dysfunctions of a Team model by Patrick Lencioni to provide a foundation for growing and sustaining offshore teams several time zones away. They will cover examples of how employing this model has improved KBB's offshore engagements and overcome a number of challenges to improve the delivery of the Scrum teams.

Points include:

• Making Review and Retrospective meetings more effective
  
• Maximizing learnings during cross-team site visits
  
• Determining the “best types of projects” to offshore in the early stages of offshore development
  
• Overcoming productivity plateaus after several successful sprints
  

This presentation will also describe the important role Executive Management plays in driving the Scrum adoption for KBB and setting up these offshore offices. The presenters will review the communication channels they found most useful and the how these have changed over time.


As before, there will be a pre-meeting get together at the food court at The Spectrum from 5 - 6 PM, and afterward we'll walk to the meeting.