Please RSVP at our Meetup event and get the Zoom connection info: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/256511527/

Has traffic or location prevented you from joining an agile discussion group? Not close to PDX or SEA Then a virtual "pub lunch" may be the answer!

This agile lunch discussion is a collaborative effort between Seattle and Portland agile minds, and we're hoping it won't stop there. The event is held on a zoom conference line. We've learned using video is best, and you might consider your environment before joining -- find a quiet space where you won't be interrupted or feel self conscious. We're monitoring chat as a back channel, so if you can't find a spot in the discussion, add your question in chat and our hosts will try to work it in.

This week's topic:

Agile Tools: what are the best "agile tools"? Our world is filled with apps and programs to help us with our jobs, from work management, communication, white-boarding, prototyping, source control, IDEs, to virtual pairing systems and beyond. Some are very useful, ensuring we communicate and work effectively. And sometimes tools are in the way, and we get stuck in a labyrinth of features & functions.

Our agile tool discussion will lead with the manifesto value of "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." Join the discussion to tell us what your favorite tools are to support individuals & interactions. Come and hear what your colleagues think and share your own experiences with tools that have supported you. We are not endorsing any specific tools as part of this chat, but likely many different ones will be discussed.

Have traffic and work schedules prevented you from joining an agile event on a topic which could help you or your teams? Then a virtual "pub lunch" may be the answer!

This agile lunch discussion is a collaborative effort between Seattle and Portland agile minds, and we're hoping it won't stop there. The event is held on a zoom conference line. We've learned using video is best, and you might consider your environment before joining -- find a quiet space where you won't be interrupted or feel self conscious. We're monitoring chat as a back channel, so if you can't find a spot in the discussion, add your question in chat and our hosts will try to work it in.

This weeks topic: Value Stream Mapping: this Toyota technique is often associated with lean manufacturing - and it can be a powerful tool applied to agile software development processes: Visualizing your workflow and inspecting it for "waste" to delivery more value fluently. But there are many questions: what is the definition of waste (or value)? When is this technique best applied? Join us to talk about your experience mapping value, and hear how others have worked with this process to what effect.

Please RSVP at our Meetup event and get the Zoom connection info: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/255678927/

Book summary: https://pragprog.com/book/dblegacy/beyond-legacy-code

We read technical and business books to educate and improve ourselves. But learning goes through many stages and deepens as we explain our learning to each other, analyze our thinking, evaluate our understanding and apply our learning.

Beyond Legacy Code provides practical information and valuable insight for both engineers and non-engineers. And, don’t skip a good discussion and beer if you’ve just started reading the book or had to put it down. Since this isn’t a who-done-it mystery, a discussion won’t spoil the ending.

Come join us for a lively conversation. Share your thoughts and new ideas with like-minded folks. Meet new smart people and old friends you never knew were so smart! Deepen your understanding and hear new arguments and observations through this book discussion.

Effectively conveying information and knowledge to others is a critical skill. But how do we, as humans, learn best? When do people start to lose focus on our message? How can you as a coach, facilitator, trainer, teacher (one who wants to help others learn), or presenter use the latest in brain-based learning to help those you are teaching to learn? This brief overview of the content in Sharon Bowman's Training from the Back of the Room! is an invitation to see who is doing the most talking, moving, and writing in all of your communications. You will also get a glimpse of the 6 learning principles and 6 memory vehicles that you might use in your next presentation, training, or coaching session. This interactive session is an invitation to look at how we traditionally teach and how we naturally learn. It expresses the evolution of training from the traditional hierarchical norm to an emergent partnership norm.

Christine Brautigam presents this opportunity to learn how you can be most effective when transferring knowledge to others!

PRE-WORK

This is an opportunity to PRIME your brain by doing a little pre-work in preparation for our time together.

Click below for Sharon's write up on the 4C's = Connections, Concepts, Concrete Practice, Conclusions:

THE 4CS MAP: A BRAIN-BASED INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN AND DELIVERY MODEL

Check this out also as you will be learning about Sharon's famous six learning principles (slideshare):

THE SIX TRUMPS: Six Learning Principles that Trump Traditional Teaching

Also check out a primary body of research upon which Sharon Bowman draws her content and inspiration = John Medina's BRAIN%20RULES

Bio

Christine Brautigam founded Inspired Agility (inspiredagility.com) in 2015 to offer training programs for meaningful work and healthy environments.  Her extensive career experience has been focused on the software industry and is now evolving to bring Agile practices to other industries.  Her current path is through brain-based learning techniques, mindful change management, and deliberately developmental organizations. Christine is a dynamic trainer dedicated to your development. Christine's focus is on tealforteal.com and responsive.org and her education includes: MS in Information Technology Management from Carnegie Mellon University • BS in Industrial and Operations Engineering from University of Michigan • Certified Scrum Master (CSM) • Certified Integral Embodied Practitioner (EPC1).

Do you see your organization confusing velocity with value? Is velocity being emphasized while value is not scrutinized? Do you find teams under pressure to execute against a rigid backlog and when they ask questions about value--there just aren't any answers?

This may appear to be a subtle problem, but some would say the ramifications are significant and far reaching.

Due to the freezing rain forecast for tomorrow, we at AgilePDX have decided to move our Pub Lunch to a virtual meeting. This will allow everybody to stay safe and still participate. Link arms with your Product Owner or Product Manager and login to our virtual, ice free meetup.

Please RSVP via meetup here: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/236954772/

Katherine Radeka walks us through how the Rapid Learning Cycles framework has emerged as a repeatable method for adopting Agile Development practices for tangible products. It overcomes many of the challenges that companies have had when they have tried to adopt Agile Development, by addressing the mismatches between the software / IT development environment and the challenges faced by scientists and engineers when the product involves physics, chemistry and/or biology.

The Rapid Learning Cycles framework is a synthesis of Agile Development and Lean Product Development practices that works within a company's existing phase gate PDP. It is concrete and actionable for program managers, technical leads and their sponsors so that they can use the framework with confidence after a small amount of training and coaching.

Teams that use the Rapid Learning Cycles framework exhibit the desired changes that people want from Agile Development: fast cycles of development, early engagement from customers and other stakeholders, the ability to respond to change in a dynamic environment, and adapt as new information develops.

They also build scientific knowledge to make better decisions instead of running through build-test-fix loops, capture knowledge real-time instead of reinventing solutions, and make better decisions up front instead of getting stuck with late-found defects and schedule delays.

Session Learning Objectives:

1) What the Rapid Learning Cycles framework is, and how it fits in with Agile Development.

2) What practices from Agile Development get used in the Rapid Learning Cycles framework.

3) What makes the Rapid Learning Cycles framework spread within a product development organization, even one that is resistant to Agile, or seems to be a poor fit.

Bio:

Katherine Radeka has a rare combination of business acumen, scientific depth and ability to untangle the organizational knots to remove the barriers to change. Since 2005, Whittier Consulting Group, Inc. has helped some of the world's leading companies get their products to market faster. She currently supports more than 100 active implementations of the Rapid Learning Cycles framework through the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute (rapidlearningcycles.com)

Katherine is the author of two books. Her first book, The Mastery of Innovation: A Field Guide to Lean Product Development won the Shingo Research Award in 2014. This book contains 19 case studies of companies who have used lean product development to get their ideas to market faster.

Katherine's second book is The Shortest Distance Between You and Your New Product: How Innovators Use Rapid Learning Cycles to Get Their Best Ideas to Market Faster. This book summarizes Katherine's ground-breaking work to integrate Agile Development and Lean Product Development into the Rapid Learning Cycles Framework, a proven method for accelerating innovation.

Katherine has climbed seven of the tallest peaks in the Cascade Mountains and spent ten days alone on the Pacific Crest Trail until an encounter with a bear convinced her that she needed a change in strategic direction.

Let's kick off the new year and dig down in some great discussion around Agile topics! Last month we voted to discuss "Why a scrum master is not a secretary! (what a scrum master does and does not do)"

Have you ever known a Scrum Master who is the secretary to a team? Maybe even yourself? While this can save other team members time initially and may create a sort of glue or thread for the team, is it positive energy for the team or can it be detrimental? Does it affect our goals to guiding self-organized teams? Bring your stories and experiences, positive or negative. Help other teams, and your own, identify possible problems with Scrum Master implementations and solutions for them.

In September, 2012 Banfield Pet Hospital implemented a Kanban system for software development. The system has been a great success and has resulted in substantial value for the business. Learn about the decision making leading to the implementation; how Lean-Agile principles and practices were used to guide the development of the Kanban system; lessons learned and successes. This talk will also cover real metrics analysis including cycle time, lead time, wait time, and an analysis of the all-powerful Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD).

Speaker: Rob Ferguson

Have you ever tried to negotiate the priorities of multiple stakeholders into a workable sprint release schedule, while at the same time satisfying technical prerequisites and maintaining potentially shippable increments?

Come join us at Agile PDX­Westside and help refine a new facilitation technique that has proven successful. This will be an active, on-your-feet activity! You'll be assigned a role on the project team (no experience required) and will help to build a release plan for a fun, hypothetical product that will be revealed during the session.

Hosts: Dave Gipp, Subeer Sinha, Eric Chen and Omar Ali

Our Speaker, Andrew Premvardhan will use a presentation to talk about his experiences and encourage discussion among the participants.

He will cover the Characteristics of a Scrum Master

o Servant Leader

o Communicative and social

o Facilitate

o Assertive

o Situation Awareness

o Continual improvement

o Attitude of empowerment

o Conflict resolution

o Attitude of transparency

Andrew Premvardhan a Certified Scrum Master, has 20+ years of experience in the software industry and has worked in multiple IT roles as a consultant. He has been with GE Healthcare - APS for the last four years and has worked in the role of scrum master for a performance improvement scrum team. Andrew believes that "agile truly empowers teams and the scrum master is central to that empowerment."

Postponed because of weather last month, we have rescheduled this event.

Description: Being an agile organization was always the goal (right?). The idea of "business agility" is certainly older than agile software development and many of us have struggled with the pain of an agile development team in an organization that doesn't understand how we work. Finding ways to scale agility from development to the rest of the organization has been a bit of a rocky road so far. Many development teams use Scrum and I'm not sure that's a good fit for some business areas -- I for one wouldn't want HR time-boxing the hiring of a new developer, delivering the best one they could find in 2 weeks. So just scaling what development does to a larger, different audience isn't the answer.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provides, er, a framework for how the larger organization can operate more effectively together. Rather than provide new ways of working, it synthesizes important aspects of Scrum, XP, Lean, Product Development Flow and other agile notions into a sensible fabric for organizational effectiveness, optimizing the whole. The list of companies finding value in SAFe continues to grow.

In something under an hour, I plan to deliver enough information about SAFe that you can have a reasonable elevator conversation about it and leave with an understanding of how much more you want to learn (and where to go find that information). Even if you don't work for a large organization with multiple levels of program and portfolio management, the concepts SAFe is built on and how they interact should spark ideas for how you can grow agile ways of working within your own environment.

Bio: After deciding against a career in journalism halfway through college, Millard Ellingsworth has been developing software ever since. He currently works for IBM and was part of a small team of facilitators that led IBM Software Group's agile transformation efforts, training many teams, serving them as an agile coach and working as a scrum master within his own development organization. He has presented on agile topics at internal and external IBM conferences and has written a variety of articles for IBM developerWorks where he is a contributing author and a member of the steering committee. You can follow him on Twitter as @millard3 (https://twitter.com/millard3) and on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MillardEllingsworth). He happily accepts invitations to play golf and talk tech.

In February, due to popular demand, we are revisiting retrospectives with our local (and noted international) authority on the topic, Diana Larsen.

Retrospectives improve any project or process--building on a team’s immediate past experience of success and failure. Smart teams and organizations hold Retrospectives iteratively, throughout the work cycle and at important milestones. In Retrospectives, teams systematically evaluate their own performance, explore their lessons learned, expand their capacity and capability, and forge ways to continuously improve their work and deliverables. Teams can’t truly call themselves Agile if they don’t include Retrospectives among their regular work practices.

However, over time as Retrospectives become routine, they can also become stale and boring, delivering less value to the team. Or teams may hold pro forma Retrospectives that don't result in real improvements. How can you prevent this? Keep your Retrospective practice fresh through a renewed emphasis on team learning, collective analysis, and collaborative decision making. Bring new activities and group processes to the meeting that will stimulate better thinking and improvements. In this session, Diana Larsen will introduce the Flexible Framework for Retrospectives and how to incorporate the Five Rules for Team Learning in your Retrospective designs. She'll lead a discussion of new team activities to enlarge your repertoire, so bring your favorites to share.

Bio: Diana Larsen, founding partner of FutureWorks Consulting, is considered an international authority in the areas of Agile software development, team leadership, and Agile transitions. Diana works with organizations around the world to design work systems, improve project performance, and support Agile leaders and enterprises. Deeply in tune with how work teams grow, adapt, and develop, she co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams and Projects, Quickstart Guide to Five Rules for Accelerated Learning, and articles about the Agile Fluency model at www.agilefluency.com and http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-fluency-fit-purpose Follow Diana on Twitter (@DianaOfPortland).

We’ll be waiting for you at Ringler’s under the Crystal Ballroom on Burnside but will start on time at 12p and end on time at 1p. We’re in the back room. If you miss this opportunity, you miss an opportunity to learn, network, and drink McMenamin’s beer in the middle of day with new friends.

Adopting, improving, and scaling agile practices often calls for building a broader understanding outside of the development team(s), particularly in organizations where other approaches are well accepted. Agile advocacy covers a range of activity that can be used to help facilitate organizational change and support agile as a means to deliver value.

How can we increase support and facilitate effective engagement with agile development? What models are there for effective advocacy and what are some common pitfalls? When and how do we engage with organizational leadership and other stakeholders? Is this always necessary – and are there times when advocacy is not the right approach? And what about advocacy within the technical part of our organizations – when is this needed or warranted?

This topic will be handled as a group discussion supported by presentation notes to encourage thinking and dialogue. Attendees are encouraged to bring examples or questions from their own experience and to think about scenarios where advocacy is effective.

Jim Ure will serve as facilitator for this discussion. Jim has a diverse background in IT leadership and project management and has served in roles in three organizations where he made the decision to adopt agile practices. His real world experience reflects circumstances where agile advocacy was both effective and times where advocacy encountered unanticipated challenges. “I am one who was strongly attracted to the agile approach and believe that it can be utilized in powerful ways to help organizations create and add value. But I have also learned (sometimes the hard way!) that implementing good agile practices can be difficult. It takes planning, commitment, and a keen awareness of situational factors and people.”

This is a deepening of the conversation we had last month on "The Manager's Role in an Agile Environment." We're focusing this month on how agile-aligned managers currently working in non-agile-aligned organizations can best function to help move agile forward. Last month, the following references were cited:

--- /The Future of Management/ by Gary Hamel --- /Management 3.0/ by Jurgen Appelo --- /The Leader's Guide to Radical Management/ by Stephen Denning --- /Wiki Management/ by Rod Collins

If you are such a manage, expect great (and occasionally irreverent) support in this discussion group. If you know one, bring him or her along. "Your people are at Ringler's on January 3rd."

We start at 12p and end at 1p. Strive to be on time: we do. RSVP's appreciated but not required.

Since we're back on the first Friday, we should be able to be back in the back room.

See you there!

PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE FOR DECEMBER.

This next month, we’ll be meeting on the second Friday. The hot topic that emerged last month is what to do with managers—or what are managers to do—when the team and the organization—goes agile. There are people who are in favor of assigning the Scrum Master role to functional managers. (I’m not sure any were in attendance last month.) There are people who believe that, now that we’re agile we don’t need any managers. Some folks have spent a fair amount of time explaining what managers should do to maintain the organization around the team, and those arguments sometimes raise the specter of bureaucracy and hierarchy. But, it’s also true that large organizations are drifting toward agile, and therein tend to be lots of layers and policies to be maintained and reporting up and rolling up and down to be done.

Some people believe there’s an entirely new role for managers—stronger on leadership and vision/context setting and lighter on “following up” and controlling individual actions. Some managers—even those who are agile advocates—struggle with where their job went when the teams get a shot of “empowerment.”

This next month’s topic looks like it will be juicy, doesn’t it? So, on Friday, December 13, link arms with your favorite manager and toddle on down to Ringler’s on Burnside under the Crystal Ballroom. We’ll be in the backroom and the beer will be flowing. We start at 12p and end at 1p, but you can stay as long as you want afterward to debate (I mean “dialogue”) about the nature and virtues of authoritarianism and whether a benevolent monarchy is the best form of government for humankind.

What is the role of QA team members on Agile teams? Should they be full team members and take on non-testing tasks? Can it work well if they're "loaned out" from a central QA organization? Should they be there on Planning Day?

Or, should there be specialized QA team members, at all? Is it more responsible if everyone tests? Is automated testing more costly than it's worth?

What do you look for when recruiting for QA skills on an Agile team? And where are all those Agile testers, anyway?

This Friday, 11/1, we'll be hashing this out over beer and pub grub at the usual time and place. Be there and bring along your Agile QA buddies.

It’s first Friday again, so the AgilePDX downtown pub lunchers will be meeting, eating, drinking, and talking about DevOps for Agile teams. This topic was chosen by attendees at last month’s pub lunch, and it seems we’ve hit a nerve. DevOps is never easy but definitely critical. In an Agile environment some people think it’s particularly hard while others believe they have it all figured out.

Apparently, it’s so gripping a topic that it generated a novel: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford.
Anyone read this, yet? (Anyone realize that TAO Executive Leadership Exchange is bringing Gene Kim to a podium to talk on 10/22 to talk more about DevOps?)

Please RSVP to the Agile PDX list or [email protected] so we know whether we have to rearrange the furniture and so we can give the restaurant a head’s up on numbers.

This month we'll do a roundtable of current issues. Our starting topic will be "what is required to make Portland an agile software development mecca?" All agile-related topics are welcome.

Quite a bit is happening with agile in Portland as the pub lunchers know. But where are we going with all this agile experimentation, this retrospecting and iterating? Are we making progress, stuck in a rut, evolving new forms of agility?

On 8/21 the evening Agile PDX gathering will be all about the future of Agile PDX and what we hope for the future of agile in Portland. This month the pub lunchers will be talking about whether we’re getting what we hoped for out of agile principles and practices, whether we’re getting what we need from Agile PDX, and what we hope for the future. Whether you plan to be at Puppet Labs on 8/21 or not, come this Friday and have your say.

We’ll also open by polling the group for special issues anyone needs help with or connections anyone is trying to make.

After months of speakers, we agreed last month that it would be nice to do a round table discussion again, the format on which this group was founded.

So, bring your thorny problems, your triumphs, and your favorite soapbox on down to Ringler's on Burnside this Friday at lunch. Each month we fill the room with expert pontification, moral support, and agilista vibe fit to refuel your depleted vim.

We'll oil the conversational joints with a discussion of an upcoming Agile PDX special event designed to help us figure out if we've lost our way or are appropriately breaking new ground.

Come hear quick stories from the community of Agile Highs and Agile lows.

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

Description: To facilitate the highest levels of team performance, your practices need to transcend the ordinary. This includes performance review practices. When you use team-based performance reviews, rather than individual-based, you boost collaboration and coherence in a team, which leads to higher performance. Join us for a discussion on how one Fortune 500 Information Technology group used these practices to help solve complicated technical challenges.

The Speaker: Jackie Barretta is a successful business change agent. She’s built groundbreaking organizational cultures as a Fortune 500 executive, she’s won a reputation as a leading edge thought leader with her writing and speaking, and, as the Founding Partner of Nura Group, she’s pioneered new ways to conduct business through consulting and training. She is the author of an upcoming book, Primal Teams, which describes the emotional energy of elite teams and helps readers create it in their own teams. She is the former senior vice president and chief information officer for Con way Inc.

This month at our evening meeting we will be hearing from another local exec who champions agile in his organization. Rony Lerner, VP of Engineering at Tripwire, will share how he stumbled upon Scrum and will argue that a top down approach is more effective than a bottom up approach to agile adoptions.

Don’t be shy. Bring your toughest questions and your management team. Rony can take it.

Bio: When Aaron (Rony) Lerner joined Tripwire as Vice President of Engineering he brought years of product development and management experience to Tripwire’s recognized team of industry experts. Rony is responsible for growing and extending the company’s market-leading software products across a wide range of industries to help customers meet compliance regulations, improve security and drive IT efficiency. Prior to joining Tripwire, Rony was Vice President of Research and Development for the Database Management Business Unit of Quest Software Inc., where he led the development and release of more than 40 products, with 250 engineers distributed in 20 locations across four continents. Rony earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Rony also served eight years in the Israeli Air Force, where he received intensive technical and officer's leadership training. He retired with the rank of Major.

Well-functioning agile teams often reach a point where continued improvement requires change in the organization beyond their team. As a team member or change agent, how can you best engage with key figures in the larger organization?

Adam Light will lead a dialog that examines agile from the perspective of various roles outside the agile team including the CIO (or other IT leader), the leader of Product Management, and the leader of the PMO. Our discussion will consider each role in turn, discussing what people in that role see, hear, and think about, how best to engage the role, and what specific protocols can be effective in each case. Read his related blog post at http://www.sotechadvisors.com/resources/chasing_the_constraint/

Adam Light is Management Consultant and Principal at SoTech Advisors where he helps managers and teams apply lean and agile methods to unlock greater value from software development. Adam works with enterprise clients to adopt and scale agile methods, design and operate agile work systems, plan and deliver critical projects, and build the knowledge foundation necessary to sustain continuous improvement.

This month we'll be revisiting the ever popular topic of tools to manage our work. What are they? How well do they work? How expensive are they? Are they worth it? Do we need anything more than a good wall and a never ending supply of post it notes and pens?

This topics packed out our previous venue at Paddy's last year. Come and bring your friends. We have more space now, and even more beer and pub grub.

See you there! Oh, and hey, if you're coming it helps if you ping me at [email protected] so I can warn the pub to bring on wait staff reinforcements if we're going to be a horde. This gets you your food faster and adds minutes, if not years, to my lifespan.

Over the last decade, agile practices continued to gain a foothold in many companies. Many of the practices were first tried on a smaller scale, and tailored to green-field projects. But, as agile practices are adopted at multi-site, larger companies, with complex back office projects, they bring with them additional and unique challenges. Take for example, Cambia Health Solutions, a not-for-profit, health Solutions Company. Cambia has a relatively large IT group, which develops its own software solutions and integrates software from other vendors. It has a distributed workforce that spans four states with many work-at-home employees. Cambia’s mainline business is regulated by various state entities and national agencies. Many of Cambia’s projects are large, mandated compliance projects that have a fixed time box and a set scope. Missing either the deadline or scope could potentially mean losing a significant portion of its business or facing monetary penalties. Can agile practices work and scale to solve business problems facing the company? What if you also operate within an IT organization that is structured with functional silos? And what if you have reluctant business partners who define software requirements and perform final verification of software solutions? To tackle these challenges, Cambia organized an Enterprise Transition Community to lead the transition from a patchwork of agile practices to a large-scale agile implementation. Find out how we carried out this transition, what we have learned along the way, and how that might help organizations of all sizes take on a similar challenge.

Aashish co-presented a related paper with other Cambia staff at last year's PNSQC. You can find the paper here by searching on Aashish's name on the page: http://www.pnsqc.org/past-conferences/2012-conference/paper-and-presentations/#papers

Aashish Vaidya is a Technology Manager leading Specialized Teams at Cambia Health Solutions. He is a founding member of Cambia’s Enterprise Transition Community, and other Best Practices Exchanges. He also serves as an internal coach on Agile and QA practices. Aashish has over 20+ years working in technology development and leadership positions for companies such as Compaq, Intel, and Kronos Incorporation. In 2012, Aashish was a Co-Author and presenter at PNSQC. In 2011, Aashish was a panelist on Technology Association of Oregon’s panel discussion: QA’s Role in Agile. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University, with a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering.

Mark Lawler on Why He Loves and Hates Agile

One of our local madmen is coming to talk to AgilePDX at Puppet Labs on February 20 at 6:30p. Having clawed his way up from the ranks of programmer, Mark Lawler now sits on top of 40 agile teams at Cambia Health Solutions (formerly Regence Blue Cross/Blue Shield). Barreling his way through yet another enterprise agile transition the last couple of years, Lawler occasionally shouts out the world what he loves and hates about agile to any of us who are willing to listen. Carrying around the title of Chief Technical Officer for one of the largest employers in the Portland metro area doesn’t slow him down one bit. Come prepared to listen to an agile executive talk about why agile is the best way to drive an organization to thrive.

As Lawler says on his blog, “I love Agile; I also hate Agile. I love how it can free teams to truly delight customers while delivering high quality products on time. I hate how Agile zealots can use the Tower of Agile Babble to confuse the heck out of teams trying Agile on for size. My goal is to help new teams actually embrace and become Agile without having to learn all of the pomp and circumstance in one big fat swallow.”

Mark Lawler is the VP and Chief Technology Officer of Cambia Health Solutions, responsible for transformative IT strategies, technologies and efforts for its portfolio companies. With over 30 Agile teams the group delivers and supports solutions across the business spectrum, including award winning products that are sold and hosted in a SaaS model to other leading health insurance payers. A Portland, Oregon based technology executive with over 20 years of experience of delivering software products, Mark believes strongly in the mantra of delivering high quality products on time while delighting customers.

You can find Mark sharing his opinions on technology, software development and quality, as well as Agile methodologies as @mark_lawler on Twitter and through his blog at: http://markslawler.wordpress.com/

About Cambia Health Solutions Cambia Health Solutions is a nonprofit total health solutions company based in the Pacific Northwest/Intermountain region, serving consumers and communities for nearly 100 years. Cambia companies provide a wide range of products and services, including health care information technology and software development, retail health care, health insurance, life insurance, pharmacy benefit management, consumer engagement and wellness.

Estimating stories, sprint commitments, and releases--estimating in general--remains a real bugaboo for all teams. Agile teams have different approaches to estimating. What's worked best for your team?

Has your team come to consider estimating "waste?" How do you make that work in your environment? What's your rationale and how does it test out in practice?

Come share your techniques, tactics, strategies, and war stories with colleagues over lunch. Same bat time, same bat station. See you there.

And, hey, we're about to bust our seams again. If you ping [email protected] or the AgilePDX list that you're coming, it can help us help the restaurant to provide fast service and the best possible layout for the tables. RSVP's appreciated NOT required.

This month’s topic is how to build trust with executives when you’re working with immature teams. This is likely to raise questions such as: • What is an immature Team? • What do we mean by “immaturity?” • How do you help a Team move toward greater maturity? • When we say “executives” do we mean anyone beyond the first level of supervision? Anyone in management? Anyone outside the Team? • Is Team immaturity a valid excuse for missing commitments, and does the responsibility lie with the Team?

As well as: • Just how do you “build trust,” anyway? • Is building trust even possible if there is no trust to begin with? • How much of my job is about trust building?

Come stumble in after your holiday revels and have lunch and a beer with like-minded colleagues. Someone please bring an “executive” along so we can hear their point of view, as well.