February APLN Mtg Notes

Due to a Kaiser policy, there was no presentation, but good conversation around several topics ensued around large agile adoption.

One recommendation was to use coaches and train all team members, as noted in a post on Yahoo's Scrum adoption. See Lessons from Yahoo Scrum Adoption for more.

Also, some talked about on large, complex projects, that getting good, thin slices of end-to-end feature/functionality is crtical, and difficult. See Elephant Carpaccio and Walking Skeleton.

Another topic brought up was what a snarky Scrum, where the ScrumMaster and team are prideful and arrogant in their interaction with the rest of the organization because the Scrum team are the elightened ones doing what's right, and everyone else is not smart enough to understand.

Others also described, and warned those looking to adopt Scrum, of the problems with ScrumBut.

Also, for environments of continuous changes, such as product support or operations, Kanban might be a good approach.


A question, and spirited debate, occurred around what is pair programming, what is the value and how do you sell it to management?

We also discussed the improvement (60–90% drop in defect density for some teams) from using Test Driven Development (TDD) documented in a Microsoft paper.

Agile project management tools were touched on, including Rally, Mingle, ScrumWorks, VersionOne, SeeNowDo and Microsoft TFS.

Also, the Scrum Gathering in Orlando is coming up - March 8-10.