Last days to get discounted tickets for Agiles 2011!

Next October the most important Agile event in Latin-America will have its fourth edition, this time going back to Buenos Aires, as it was in 2008. In this opportunity it promises to continue the success of the previous editions with the presence of top-level speakers.

Keynote Speakers

Jeff Patton will be opening the event on October 11th and will also conduct a workshop named “Product Discovery with User Story Mapping “, the second day. Early that morning James Shore (writer of “The Art Of Agile Development “) will be in charge of the opening Keynote. The third day will be dedicated to open space activities and will be closed with a Keynote by Juan Gabardini.

The two initial days will be divided into different session types where you will find:

• Tutorials: interactive classes designed to provide participants with practical knowledge they can use right away on Agile projects

• Workshops: sessions highly interactive and participative, allowing the attendees to develop knowledge in a practical way.

• Talks: Presentations: aimed at those people who are looking for a topic to increase their knowledge about the Agile methodologies and the best practices used by the Agile community.

• Experience Report: applications in real agile projects, summarizing what happened with its application and the key learning points.

Buenos Aires is really close so if you are planning to take this great opportunity check the agenda and make your reservation. Those registering in August will get discounted tickets.

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el portal de TCM

Collaborative Applications@TCM

In order to promote and facilitate collaborative work at TCM different applications were incorporated in our daily tasks. All of them are free web applications that are simple and intuitive, which reduce the time needed to use them and help us focusing on the important tasks.
Following you will find some of these applications.

WORDPRESS
WordPress is an open source blog tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It’s often customized into a Content Management System (CMS)[4]. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites.
At TCM we are using Wordpess as the platform for our new Portal. It easy to install and to maintain helping us to focus on the content of the site.

BETTERMEANS – http://bettermeans.com/
Basing the platform on a system of equality, Better Means allows teams to collaborate on projects in a fair, honest environment. A democratic voting system ensures everyone who wants to contribute to a project is able to have their voice heard. Contributors outside of the core team can also vote and comment on projects, allowing the wider community opinion to be heard, whilst not affecting the progression of projects.
More info at: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/11/04/try-this-better-means-a-democratic-open-approach-to-teamwork/

SCRUMY – http://scrumy.com
Scrumy is a simple and intuitive virtual task board based on some concepts of Scrum that helps organize and manage your projects. You can create tasks organized by story, assign them to one person and follow the status from pending to done.

EMAIL ME FORM – www.emailmeform.com/
Email Me Form is a free online form generator service that helps you create HTML forms for your website, with no programming required.
You can create a variety of online forms using our easy form builder. Design and build surveys, contact forms, and lead generation forms. Seamlessly integrate our HTML contact forms on your website.

DOODLE – http://www.doodle.com/
Doodle helps scheduling meetings and other appointments. Doodle is simple, quick , free and requires no registration. Simply set up a poll, send a link to complete the schedule.

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el portal de TCM

Ágiles 2011 en Buenos Aires

Las cuartas Jornadas Latinoamericanas de Metodologías Ágiles llegan a Buenos Aires y queremos invitarlos a ser parte de de esta nueva edición.

Ágiles 2011 tendrá lugar del 11 al 13 de Octubre, en la Universidad de Palermo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, y esperamos recibir a más de 500 personas provenientes de diversos países de Latinoamérica y del resto del mundo, que quieran compartir experiencia y conocimientos en los temas más sobresalientes de la agenda internacional del desarrollo ágil de software.

Durante la conferencia estarán presentes como oradores principales Jeff Patton y James Shore, referentes de renombre internacional que tendrán a cargo dos exposiciones magistrales y talleres especiales. Como todos los años, en esta edición también habrá debates, disertaciones de expertos en diferentes materias, actividades y una rica interacción entre colegas de toda la región.
@agiles2011 - Seguinos en Twitter y en Facebook, y conocé las últimas novedades de la conferencia.

Keynote Speakers

James Shore	Jeff Patton
James Shore adoptó el desarrollo ágil tempranamente y continúa liderando, enseñando, escribiendo y brindando consultoría sobre este estilo de desarrollo. En 2005 recibió el prestigioso premio Gordon Pask por sus aportes a las prácticas ágiles. Es un popular orador y co-autor de The Art Of Agile Development (O’Reilly, 2007).	Jeff Patton trabaja actualmente como consultor independiente, es el fundador y moderador del foro de discusión agile-usability en Yahoo, columnista de StickyMinds.com y de IEEE Software, y ganador del premio Gordon Pask otorgado por la Agile Alliance en 2007 por sus aportes al desarrollo ágil.

Registración

Prepara tu agenda, reservate la semana del 11 al 13 de Octubre de 2011. Durante Abril estará abierta la registración.

Call for Papers

Prepara tus charlas y sesiones. Durante Abril estaremos abriendo la recepción de propuestas.

ÁGILES 2011

Visitanos para más información

Agile Week @ TCS

Buscando dar un nuevo empuje a la adopción de metodologías ágiles en TCS estamos organizando la Agile Week.

Dentro de las presentaciones buscamos dar una introducción a estas metodologías pero principalmente compartir varias experiencias prácticas de como están siendo adoptadas ya en algunos proyectos y los resultados que hemos tenido.

Si bien este evento es cerrado esperamos que salga bien y en un futuro se pueda organizar algo abierto.

Are we closer to the end of the “CMMI vs Agile” discussion?

During the last years a recurring topic of discussion was if CMMI and Agile were not like oil and water. Many people consider that both have things to learn from the other and in many cases they could complement each other being followed together.
An interesting signal of the possibility of embracing both at the same time came up recently.

The SEI has released this month the “CMMI for Development” document in its Version 1.3. The version 1.2 was released con 2006 and among the significant improvements I will focus on the following: “Informative material was improved, including revising the engineering practices to reflect industry best practice and adding guidance for organizations that use Agile methods. “
This document, which can be downloaded from here has a new section called “Interpreting CMMI When Using Agile Approaches”. This section gives details about the changes done including notes with the words “In Agile environments”, with examples of how to interpret practices. Also use the following characteristics to describe agile approaches:

• Direct involvement of the customer in product development
• Use of multiple development iterations to learn about and evolve the product
• Customer willingness to share in the responsibility for decisions and risk

As an example of these notes we have in the configuration management section: “In Agile environments, configuration management (CM) is important because of the need to support frequent change, frequent builds (typically daily), multiple baselines, and multiple CM supported workspaces (e.g., for individuals, teams, and even for pair-programming). Agile teams may get bogged down if the organization doesn’t: 1) automate CM (e.g., build scripts, status accounting, integrity checking) and 2) implement CM as a single set of standard services.”

In the “Product integration” section we will find:
“In Agile environments, product integration is a frequent, often daily, activity. For example, for software, working code is continuously added to the code base in a process called continuous integration.”

As these there are more than ten notes with clarifications with regard to Agile environments with clear explanations about aspects to be considered when making evaluations.

This significant step is not surprising, as the SEI released the document “CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both”  on 2008, but it is undoubtedly a considerable step.

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM @Knowmax

Ágiles 2010 Report #06: Event closure

As anticipated in a previous post the end of this event was different from the previous editions of this Latin-American Agile Event. The usual panel when key note speakers discuss about tendencies was replaced by a Latin-American panel where present and future of Agility in Latinamerica was discussed. One representative of each country talked about their agile communities and I had the opportunity to represent Uruguay there.

 Closure Panel

This panel helped empowering the community, something I find of extreme importance. We could find in all agile presentations different principles, values, frameworks but there is something everyone states: there is no silver bullet. Every different context needs to adapt the frameworks, select the set of practices that best feet and the learning and adapting stages will improve the processes.

Sharing experiences about how agile methodologies were followed in each context are then of great importance.

 Closure Panel

I liked this year when, one year after having obtained our Certified Scrum Master degree, we organized an event at the UDELAR University and some participants presented the experience they had following agile methodologies during that year. There were experiences in great companies like TCS and in small Pymes. It was interesting to see how the audience felt identified with different presentations finding similarities with their context and seeing practices they could take to improve their work.

So, having a strong Latin American community and local communities in each country seems to be vital. In Uruguay this is lead by the Scrum community. If you are interested in participating just enter here and be alert as new events are being scheduled.

 Event Closure

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM @Knowmax. Fotos tomadas por Abner Ballardo y Pablo Tortorella

Ágiles 2010 Report #05: Open Space

In Ágiles2010 not only there were presentations but also there was discussion about topics of interest. In order to organize this the agenda had about an hour dedicated to “Open Space”. The system was the same followed in the Agile Open Space in Montevideo, on September, and more details about this can be found here.

 Open Space at Ágiles 2010

Basically participants present the topics they want to talk about, they do not need to have a presentation prepared, they just need to be interested in discussing the topic and should be responsible of conducting the discussion. Then people vote the most interesting topics and according to the time and space available a limited number of topics are selected. Then those topics are assigned to different spaces and people go to their discussion of preference to participate there.

According to the user guide created by Harrison Owen there are only four principles and one law:

• Whoever comes is the right people
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• When it's over, it's over

The law is known as the "Law of Two Feet": If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go someplace else.

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM @Knowmax. Foto de Evelyn Veliz