Hi all!!! To both of you - may the future be bright, happy and filled with continued blessings from above gold I've just been sitting around waiting for something to happen. gold element, gold, I just don't have anything to say.

In October, SolutionsIQ organized an entertaining, educational, and well-attended panel on Incremental Architecture.

In November, Michael Kelly will present our next evening meeting topic, Agile Methodologies: A Matter of Survival.

Metaphorically, we frequently think of things as surviving where there's no real threat to life. Companies survive. Products, and the teams that produce them, survive. Individual members of the team continue to be a member of the team by virtue of their ability to survive. In all these activities we see the same lively dance of competition and cooperation, of adaptation and evolution, within a constantly changing environment.

Michael Kelly, a survivor of numerous software campaigns, will bring together the insights of famed survival writer Laurence Gonzales, some rather surprising research into the neuroscience of decision making, and some hair-raising personal experiences to illuminate the importance of agile methodologies and suggest some potential new directions.

This is our usual monthly meeting for the month of November. Remember the location and time for future meetings! Third Wed of the month, at CubeSpace.

Lean methods in software development have progressed from conceptual understanding to practical techniques that people are using to solve problems and ship software today. The Lean toolkit augments or enhances the practices that are available to today's Agile practitioner. Lean expands the organizational scope of Agile and provides a rich and robust set of methods for process improvement.

Corey Ladas is a Lean Software Development consultant and practitioner who focuses on evolving local development processes through systematic self-organization and continuous improvement. He will discuss and demonstrate some of the techniques from his new book, Scrumban: Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development.

Pizza at 6:30pm, talk at 7pm, beer after. Pizza is sponsored by YesMail. As ever, we will follow the meeting with a chat and hang out at a local pub.

Join other XP and agile methdology practitioners and enthusiasts for a lunchtime discussion.

XPDX is group of IT professionals in the Portland, Oregon area that are interested in Extreme Programming and Agile software development methodologies.

Elisabeth Hendrickson will be coming to facilitate our February meeting. Here's her description:

UPDATE: SolutionsIQ are sponsoring pizza for twenty - arriving at 6:30 <<<

"It will essentially be a shorter preview of the Agile2009 demo I proposed at http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/node/641

Here's the blurb:

Agile teams practicing Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) define acceptance tests collaboratively while discussing each story. This practice helps uncover assumptions and confirm that everyone has a shared understanding of what “done” looks like. During implementation, the technical team automates the natural-language Acceptance Tests by writing code to wire them up to the emerging software. In this way, ATDD tests become executable requirements. This session is a demonstration of the full ATDD workflow from initial discussions through final demo, and everything in between."

Monthly late lunch at a pub featuring, food, beers, and casual conversation to share our experiences with Agile methods/practices/approaches/events. A time for more discussion of the speaker meeting topic (or not) from Wednesday night.

Pair Programming has many benefits for a team above and beyond coding, yet it's still one of the hardest XP practices to get into. Ping Pong pairing is a lot of fun and is my favourite way to pair. It has a game-like style that instils good pairing and TDD practices. So come along to the next XPDX meeting to try it out. It doesn't matter if you've been pairing for years or want to try it for the first time. This will be a chance to learn from each other. We'll spend a little time getting to know the mechanics of Ping Pong pairing, do a brief demonstration, and then all pair up for over an hour of practice.

Absolutely positively bring a laptop with you. We'll be using Java, JUnit, and Eclipse. A big time saver will be to ensure that you have the Java SDK installed beforehand.

Thanks to VersionOne there'll be pizza for thirty! <<<

Be there at 6:30pm for the pizza. We'll start at 7pm. At 9pm we'll move on to a local bar.

Monthly pub lunch featuring our stories about "doing" & "being" Agile; i.e., using XP, Scrum, Lean, et al, for software development. Seasoned practitioners and new-to-Agile welcome. We're usually at one (or more) of the long tables in the middle.

Chris Sterling and Michael Tardiff are coming to Portland and will be running April's XPDX session:

"We know about items on the product backlog, and getting them to “Done.” We know about impediments, and removing them as soon as possible. And agile methods lead us toward shipping software with zero defects, we hope. But bugs remain, for now, and we think of and treat them quite differently from stories, tasks, and other work items—perhaps to our, and our project’s, detriment. Buy why? We need your help finding an answer, or posing better questions.

In this interactive session, we’ll explore the wealth of thoughts, opinions, and especially the strong feelings behind the things we call bugs."

Pizza is sponsored by YesMail <<<

Pizza arrives at 6:30pm, the session starts at 7pm, and at 9pm we move on to a local bar.

The first wave of Agile software development challenged waterfall project management methodologies and traditional Quality Assurance. The next wave of Agile challenges on-premise software through what is known as Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS).

Using Sun Tzu's timeless classic "The Art of War" as a framework, Founder/CEO of Cubic Compass, Mike Leach, presents principles and practices for creating an Agile SaaS organization that challenges the status quo of software development and delivery.

Pizza thanks to John Wilger at 6:30pm <<<

Casual conversation over no-host lunch about all things relevant to Agile software development. Sometimes a few of us show up to talk, more often a dozen (or more) practitioners join the fun.

• If your business card says programmer, tester, project manager, product manager or coach (or would if you had one)
• If you use Agile methods, practices, principles or approaches
• If you seek opportunities to keep working for companies that prefer an Agile approach
• If you want to recruit dev team members who know how to work in an Agile environment
• If you're curious about any the above Come on over for lunch.

We welcome practitioners from all Agile flavors--Scrum, XP, DSDM, Crystal, FDD, AUP, Adaptive, EVO, etc.

Casual conversation over no-host lunch about all things relevant to Agile software development. Sometimes a few of us show up to talk, more often a dozen (or more) practitioners join the fun.

• If your business card says programmer, tester, project manager, product manager or coach (or would if you had one)
• If you use Agile methods, practices, principles or approaches
• If you seek opportunities to keep working for companies that prefer an Agile approach
• If you want to recruit dev team members who know how to work in an Agile environment
• If you're curious about any the above Come on over for lunch.

We welcome practitioners from all Agile flavors--Scrum, XP, DSDM, Crystal, FDD, AUP, Adaptive, EVO, etc.

We're going to talk about some of the best new stuff to come out at the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago. Oh, and drink beer, which is why we're setting the meeting at a brewpub.

Depending on the interests of those who show, those of us who went may reprise parts of the talks we gave that worked, sections of other peoples' sessions in which we learned something cool, or quick info-dumps about new thoughts expressed in hallway conversations. Certainly, we'll spur conversations - this won't be a 90-minute talking head. Topcis could include testing (end-to-end and otherwise), real options (and feature pricing), kanban planning, metrics, or really just about anything.

David Wheeler will be giving his "Unit Test Your Database" talk. It was well-received at Open Source Bridge; now he's giving it to an audience of Agile practitioners.

We’re all used to unit testing our applications by now. The Extreme and Agile programming movements have done a great deal to promote unit testing, to the extent that many of us are now dependent on tests to assure that our applications work reliably. But how often do we test the database underlying our applications? Given that the database, as the repository for all of the knowledge and data for an application, just might be the single most important part of that application, the time for standardized database unit testing has come.

This talk promotes the practice of writing and running unit tests that directly test the schema, storage, and functionality of application databases. Following a review of the available PostgreSQL unit testing frameworks, we’ll review examples of testing tables, views, columns, constraints, indexes, triggers, and functions. The idea is to promote complete test coverage every aspect of a database, independent of application unit tests, to ensure reliably canonical data integrity.

Pizza and networking at 6:30pm, 7pm talk, beer afterwards.

We'll have a discussion on one of the people issues associated with agile software development: how do you turn a bad situation around?

Just as legacy code is a set of problems that take special techniques to overcome, legacy interpersonal interactions are too. I'm pretty sure that unit tests aren't the answer for most interpersonal problems, either. :)

More seriously, it's pretty common to join a company or team with existing trust and communication (and yes, tech) issues. Come share ways of turning those into successes.

Pizza and networking at 6:30pm, 7pm talk, beer afterwards.

(Note: location is hard to get to via GPS or map service. Use directions here instead.)

This is the informal complement to the more formal XPDX meetings. Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer.

Announcing Agile Open Northwest 2010! This Agile Open Space event will be held February 9th and 10th, 2010, in the Seattle Center Northwest Rooms. Please see http://www.agileopennorthwest.org for registration information and further details.

We invite you to our fourth annual Agile Open Northwest conference. Alternating each year between Portland and Seattle, AONW conferences bring together practicing members of the Northwest Agile communities to explore the latest developments in agile software development. We held our third annual event last year in Portland and enjoyed another great success. Registration is $125.00 for both days, including light breakfast and lunch. This low-cost regional conference is a great opportunity to connect with the local agile community, experts and novices alike.

Please join us this year as we host 125 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest U.S. (and beyond) in tackling the issues around our recurring theme "Agile for Real." As in past years, attendance is limited to a predetermined number in order retain the many advantages a small conference has to offer.

Here is a comment from a previous attendee:

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair

More information can be found at http://www.agileopennorthwest.org. Registration is open now. We look forward to seeing you there.

We're happy to announce that Elisabeth Hendrickson will be speaking to the Portland Agile Users Group on Wednesday the 17th. She's an energetic and informative member of the greater agile community who periodically comes up from the Bay Area to share her knowledge with us. Her talk on ATDD[*] last year at CubeSpace was great fun and well-received.

This year she'll be taking us through an interactive simulation of an agile transition. When she ran this simulation at Agile 2009, it replicated a number of problems I've seen take months and years to play out on real software teams. Bring your team members! It's far less stressful to talk about problems in the context of an evening's simulation than in the context of three years of product development.

Pizza is sponsored by YesMail of InfoGroup Interactive. Pizza and networking start at 6:30; presentation starts at 7. If there's enough interest, we'll go to a pub afterward for further discussion.

[*] Acceptance-Test-Driven Development

This is the informal complement to the more formal agile users group meetings. Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer.

This is the informal complement to the more formal agile users group meetings. Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer.

This is the informal complement to the more formal agile users group meetings. Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer.

Join us for a discussion of topics related to agile software development! Audience participation strongly encouraged. Pizza is at 6:30; discussion starts at 7.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a fishbowl discussion works like fishbowl coding: there are a small number of people who are up front and allowed to speak at any given time. If you want to ask a question or say something, swap in for one of the people up front. If you're up front and done speaking, sit back down in the audience.

Potential discussion topics include mock objects in testing; balancing ideology with reality; certification; no/low bugs in a codebase; contracting without being able to give a fixed bid. Or bring your own! We'll decide what we're discussing at the beginning of the meeting, but expect the conversation to wander.

This is the informal complement to the more formal agile users group meetings. Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer.

This is the informal complement to the more formal agile users group meetings. Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer.

Delivered by SolutionsIQ’s world-renowned Certified ScrumMaster Trainers, this course shares time-tested practices for managing Product Backlogs, planning your releases and iterations (Sprints), and tracking and reporting progress. You’ll learn how to lead Sprint Planning meetings, Daily Scrum meetings, Sprint Review meetings, Sprint Retrospectives, and much more.

Agenda:

* Introduction to Agile
* Origins of Scrum
* The Scrum process
* Roles and responsibilities
* Product Backlog
* Estimating Product Backlog items
* Scaling Scrum
* Scrum in detail
* Sprints
* Sprint planning meeting
* Daily standup meeting
* Burndown charts and project reporting
* Sprint review and retrospective
* Getting started with Scrum
* Graduation and closing

This course gives you the hands-on experience and builds the skill set you will require to thoroughly understand and then utilize the real-world fundamentals of agile delivery. You also will learn to accelerate and enhance your adoption and practice of agile development within your organization.

Training Objectives: What You Will Learn

* Build and ship weekly increments of software using iterations/Sprints
* Create nearly bug-free code using test-driven development, refactoring, and exploratory testing
* Understand and accommodate stakeholders and their diverse opinions
* Work in a cross-functional team with on-site customers, testers, and programmers
* Prevent build failures with continuous integration
* Incrementally build technical infrastructure alongside features

Agenda:

In a class that emphasizes doing; you will form cross-functional teams and deliver actual software in four 90-minute iterations, in a real-world environment that includes version control, automated builds, and continuous integration. That’s right: you’ll design, build, test, and ship software, as well as build out your technical infrastructure, all in 90 minutes. If that sounds impossible, you must take this course.

Does everyone at your company respond to change as fast as your agile team? Or do you have critical partners who simply can't move as fast as your team? Are you required to provide detailed estimates in order to get enough resources to start uncertain and complex projects? How do you even build enough buy-in to avoid death by a thousand cuts? In this presentation, Nancy Van Schooenderwoert will explore practical, proven ways to address these questions.

Who should attend: Anyone trying to build enough buy-in for their company to give Agile methods a genuine try. Embedded systems developers and project leaders who need to envision the concrete workings of Agile practices in their domain, as a first step to making it happen.

Speaker: Nancy Van Schooenderwoert is an Agile Enterprise coach with over a decade of experience applying Agile practices as an engineer, manager, and consultant. She has led Agile change initiatives in safety-critical, highly regulated industries, and coached clients in the art of Agile technical and management leadership. Nancy's experience spans embedded software development and applications in aerospace, factory automation, medical devices, defense systems, as well as in financial services. In 1998 Nancy introduced agile techniques to embedded software, including safety- critical applications. She was among the first to publish advice on the techniques that work in real world embedded projects. She has introduced agile ideas and practices to another field where it was thought to be impossible – data warehousing and large data migrations. Coaches she mentored are now the leaders in this new field applying lean-agile principles to applications where data quality is central. Nancy Van Schooenderwoert is Principal Coach at Lean-Agile Partners Inc. www.LeanAgilePartners.com

Pizza sponsored by PNSQC starts at 6:30 p.m. Program starts at 7:00 p.m.

The Hawthorne Farm MAX station stops right next to Intel. See this map for the correct location:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Intel+Corporation,+hawthorne+farm,+hillsboro,+or&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=54.401733,61.523437&ie=UTF8&hq=Intel+Corporation,+hawthorne+farm,&hnear=Hillsboro,+Washington,+Oregon&t=h&ll=45.532372,-122.927656&spn=0.01189,0.01502&z=16&iwloc=A

Directions: From Cornell, head South on NE Elam Young Pkwy (near Costco). Take the first left to turn into the Intel parking lot. The HF3 campus will be directly in front of you. Parking is available on both sides of the building. Note: There are two NE Elam Young Pkwy streets that connect with Cornell. Go south on the street closest to Brookwood and Costco (between Brookwood and 51st).

We're meeting after the SAO day-long event,"Blurring the Lines between QA & Dev in an Agile Environment." Local Agilists will reflect on what we heard or said in presentations at the event, then we'll apply "personal kanban" to create table topic lists for the evening.

You don't have to have attended the SAO event to join us.

• If your business card says programmer, tester, project manager, product manager or coach (or would if you had one)
• If you use Agile methods, practices, principles or approaches
• If you seek opportunities to keep working for companies that prefer an Agile approach
• If you want to recruit team members who know how to work in an Agile environment
• If you're curious about any the above, Come on over.

We welcome practitioners from all Agile-related frameworks--Scrum, XP, Adaptive, EVO, Lean, Kanban, Scrumban, Crystal, FDD, AUP, DSDM, etc. And people who want to learn about same.

Agile PDX convenes a monthly 1st Friday practitioner's no-host lunch in central/eastside Portland Metro area as an informal complement to the more formal Agile PDX users group meetings (3rd Wednesday).

Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer, and people interested in all flavors of Agile - XP, scrum, crystal, evo, lean/kanban, FDD, build-your-own, etc.

There's also a 3rd Friday westside lunch. Watch for it too!

Agile PDX convenes a monthly 1st Friday practitioner's no-host lunch in central/eastside Portland Metro area as an informal complement to the more formal Agile PDX users group meetings (3rd Wednesday).

Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer, and people interested in all flavors of Agile - XP, scrum, crystal, evo, lean/kanban, FDD, build-your-own, etc.

There's also a 3rd Friday westside lunch. Watch for it too!

The Process Work Institute's parking entrance is at the west side of the building. Please park by the back side of the building and come to the only big room named "class room".

Let's experiment a new technology for communication!

WELCOME! Welcome to world of communication! This is one of my answers to “Is there an easier and cooler way to learn communication?”.

I have had so many troubles about communication. Human being science developed so much. There must be a new technology and practice to make things easier, and even cool way for me.

I am as a Tree hugger computer system engineer fascinated by transpersonal psychology and Process Oriented Ecology, Non Violent Communication and Deep Democracy. And I would like to mesh up and introduce for cool technical people.

And as you know, communication is important!

This new technology to inspire you about communication and team work is well designed for people who are very high functioning in technical area and interested in improving the art of communication.

Cost to Attend: Free

Organizer: Jiro Isetani

I am a student of Master of Art in Conflict Facilitation and Organizational Change at The Process Work Institute. I'm mainly from Japan, living in Portland since 1996. This is a part of my final project.

Process Work Institute's parking entrance is at the west side of the building. Please park by the back side of the building and come to the only big room named "class room".

Let's experiment a new technology for communication!

WELCOME! Welcome to world of communication! This is one of my answers to “Is there an easier and cooler way to learn communication?”.

I have had so many troubles about communication. Human being science developed so much. There must be a new technology and practice to make things easier, and even cool way for me.

I am as a Tree hugger computer system engineer fascinated by transpersonal psychology and Process Oriented Ecology, Non Violent Communication and Deep Democracy. And I would like to mesh up and introduce for cool technical people.

And as you know, communication is important!

This new technology to inspire you about communication and team work is well designed for people who are very high functioning in technical area and interested in improving the art of communication.

Cost to Attend: Free

Organizer: Jiro Isetani

I am a student of Master of Art in Conflict Facilitation and Organizational Change at The Process Work Institute. I'm mainly from Japan, living in Portland since 1996. This is a part of my final project.

Process Work Institute's parking entrance is at the west side of the building. Please park by the back side of the building and come to the only big room named "class room".

Let's experiment a new technology for communication!

WELCOME! Welcome to world of communication! This is one of my answers to “Is there an easier and cooler way to learn communication?”.

I have had so many troubles about communication. Human being science developed so much. There must be a new technology and practice to make things easier, and even cool way for me.

I am as a Tree hugger computer system engineer fascinated by transpersonal psychology and Process Oriented Ecology, Non Violent Communication and Deep Democracy. And I would like to mesh up and introduce for cool technical people.

And as you know, communication is important!

This new technology to inspire you about communication and team work is well designed for people who are very high functioning in technical area and interested in improving the art of communication.

Cost to Attend: Free

I would like to take video for my learning purpose. The video will be viewed by only me, my supervisors and editors.

Organizer: Jiro Isetani

I am a student of Master of Art in Conflict Facilitation and Organizational Change at The Process Work Institute. I'm mainly from Japan, living in Portland since 1996. This is a part of my final project.

Agile PDX convenes a monthly 1st Friday practitioner's no-host lunch in central/eastside Portland Metro area as an informal complement to the more formal Agile PDX users group meetings (3rd Wednesday).

Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer, and people interested in all flavors of Agile - XP, scrum, crystal, evo, lean/kanban, FDD, build-your-own, etc.

This months discussion will start with a discussion around Uncle Bob’s recent video blog “Restoring the Trust” (http://cleancoder.posterous.com/stub6-restoring-the-trust) as well as other topics related to the recent ten year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto.

Join us at our new location a reserved room at Paddy's Bar and Grill.

Announcing Agile Open Northwest 2012! This Agile Open Space event will be held February 7th and 8th, 2012, in the Northwest Rooms of Seattle Center in Seattle. Spaces at this event fill up fast! So register today to make sure you get a space. For registration and further details go to :

http://www.agileopennorthwest.org

This will be our sixth annual Agile Open Northwest conference. Alternating each year between Portland and Seattle, AONW conferences bring together practicing members of the Northwest Agile communities to explore the latest developments in agile software development. We held our fifth annual event last year in Portland and enjoyed another great success. Registration is $150.00 for both days, including light breakfast and lunch. This low-cost regional conference is a great opportunity to connect with the local agile community, experts and novices alike.

Please join us this year as we host 125 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest U.S. (and beyond) in tackling the issues around our recurring theme "Agile for Real." As in past years, attendance is limited to a predetermined number in order retain the many advantages a small conference has to offer.

Here is a comment from a previous attendee:

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair

More information can be found at http://www.agileopennorthwest.org. We look forward to seeing you there!

AgilePalooza is a community event that brings together internationally recognized agile coaches and trainers with local software professionals. Attendees will learn about advancing agile methods through workshops and collaborative sessions.

Use promo code V1Save50-C for 50% off. Only $35!

Speakers include: Dr. Ahmed Sidky has a Ph.D. in value–based process frameworks for effective agile adoption. Ahmed’s work has gained popularity and respect in the agile community as a pragmatic approach for organizations of all sizes attempting to adopt agile. Diana Larsen Drawing on 15+ years of experience working with technical professionals, Diana is a pragmatic agile consultant with FutureWorks. Diana leads system-wide groups in collaborative thinking and planning, as well as guiding teams through project kick-offs, chartering and retrospectives. Dave Sharrock drives change within technology-driven organizations through the introduction of agile product development practices, using agile frameworks such as Scrum. And more!!

For $69, attendees receive a full day of agile learning, lunch and the opportunity to participate in one of two tracks: Practicing Agile and Planning Agile. The Practicing Agile track is geared toward those interested in agile fundamentals and engineering practices and the Planning Agile track is for those planning and managing multiple teams and projects.

Go here to learn more and register: http://www.agilepalooza.com/Portland2012/default.asp

Who: YOU and all members of the local active Agile community (i.e., anyone who's doing any form of Agile - or wishes they could)

What: We invite you to join us in looking at future opportunities for AgilePDX.

When: On our regular meeting date, 3rd Wednesday, August 21

Why: Because "self-organizing" "collaborative" "responding to change"

How: Alicia Lanier (our facilitator) will help us stay on track as we take a couple of hours to look at:

• our draft Purpose and how it influences our decisions

• where we are now and how we got here (3+ meetings at different days, times of day, and geographic locations!)

• what that tells us about where we'd like to be

• what next steps will help us get there

Not one of our usual meetings, but more of an AgilePDX-wide retrospective and continuous improvement event. Please join us in service to the local Agile community. AgilePDX can be the best user group EVER!

Fluency is "what you can say without having to think about how to say it." "Refactoring" is a language that describes ways to make your code suck less. I want to inspire you to become more fluent in that language, so you can make your code suck less without having to think about it.

Note for Agile PDX: this presentation is in no small part an homage to, and a continuation of, "Therapeutic Refactoring" by Katrina Owen. If you have time, you might enjoy watching that talk first: http://confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therapeutic-refactoring

About the speaker...

Sam Livingston is a developer from sunny* Portland, Oregon. Sam's been working in code since 1998, in Ruby since 2006, and at LivingSocial since 2012. He likes TDD/BDD/TATFT, pair programming, and refactoring—but finds that long walks on the beach tend to result in sandy keyboards.

• YMMV

Companies who have ‘gone Agile’ often experience several failure modes. We know that Agile brings unprecedented transparency to adopters - but this often exposes organizational dysfunction which has ‘always been there,’ but often neither acknowledged nor addressed. This can result in one of the most disruptive transitions a company can go through. What to do?

-How can we spare ourselves months of what seems like inevitable struggle? -What have some veteran Agile practitioners learned, and done, to accelerate their transition, and reap the rewards that have eluded others? -How have they measured success?

Our panel of Product & Development experts will share their experience and strategies, to help you cross this minefield successfully and faster.

Mark Bednarski has worked with iGrafx since 2007, starting in Germany as a Business Process Consultant and Six-Sigma Black Belt. He transitioned into Product Management in October 2013 when he transferred to iGrafx headquarters in Tualatin, OR. iGrafx goal - to reduce the release cycle from 18 mos. to 6 mos. - required major changes in both Dev & PM processes, which Mark will lead to completion by the end of this year. This goal screamed for an Agile approach, causing Mark to learn and discover on his own – a tough learning curve, which started to pay back just a few months ago.

Tony Aiello has spent 20 years in machine vision / factory automation engineering, and 5 years in the movie business. He's regularly intrigued by how much these disciplines actually have in common from development / production viewpoints, and gratified that the skills are transferable.

We will confirm the remaining two panelists early next week.

Questions? Contact [email protected]

The Summer Code Retreat has been cancelled.

Code Retreat is designed to hone software craftsmanship skills and software design through repeated attempts to build an implementation of a well-known software problem (Conway's Game of Life). Developers use pair programming and discussion to exchange knowledge, and additional constraints are given throughout the day to emphasize good design concepts and practices. More details about the Code Retreat format can be found at http://www.coderetreat.org.

For details, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pdx-global-day-of-code-retreat-2014-tickets-11470688137

It might technically be Winter, but Portland's weather doesn't seem to think so. Which is fine, we're holding the 2015 Spring Coderetreat a little earlier this year.

Come join your fellow Portland programmers to practice the art of software development together. Write code, learn from others, teach someone else, and expand your network of friends who are passionate about their craft. Show up with your laptop and favorite development tools to participate, everything else is provided.

Come join your fellow Portland coaches and programmers to learn facilitation of disciplined practice of software technical skills. Matt Plavcan will be sharing his experience teaching software development and running Coderetreats and Code Dojos for the Portland community and Intel.

Some simple coding is part of the day, but all work will be done in pairs. You do not need to be a coder to participate.

Please see event URL for more details.

Come join your fellow Portland programmers to practice the art of software development together. Write code, learn from others, teach someone else, and expand your network of friends who are passionate about their craft. Software developers of all skill levels and backgrounds are welcome! Show up with your laptop and favorite language and development tools to participate, everything else is provided. Continental breakfast and lunch will be served.

Come join your fellow Portland coders to practice the art of software development together. Write code, learn from others, teach someone else, and expand your network of friends who are passionate about their craft. Software developers of all skill levels and backgrounds are welcome!

This event is free, continental breakfast and lunch will be served. (Event starts promptly at 8:30am, breakfast served at 8am)

Please bring your laptop with your favorite development tools and a unit test framework, everything else is provided.

Coderetreat is a worldwide pattern designed to hone software skills and design practices through repeated attempts to build an implementation of a well-known software problem (Conway's Game of Life). Unit testing and Test-Driven Development will be emphasized as key practices. Developers use pair programming and discussion to exchange knowledge, and additional constraints are given throughout the day to emphasize good design concepts and practices.

Agilists from across the Pacific Northwest will converge at the Nike World Headquarters for a career changing day. This is a one-day conference with 3 keynote speakers (Richard Sheridan, best-selling author of Joy Inc., Gene Kim, founder and CTO of Tripwire, and Mamie Jones, SVP of Product Development at Intuit) as well as 20 workshops on Leadership, Product, Technical Enablement, Leadership, Innovation, Agility and much more.

Use this promo code, MeetAC17 for a 10% discount on registration if you register by 8/23/2017!

In an effort to raise the effectiveness of Scrum, the Scrum Alliance created the Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) program (AKA Agile Engineering course.) A Certified Scrum Developer is someone who has demonstrated through a combination of formal training and a technical skills assessment that he or she has a working understanding of Scrum principles and has learned specialized Agile engineering skills.

This three-day class is aimed at helping software development professionals and teams be more effective when implementing Scrum and other Agile methodologies. You will learn how to create and maintain high quality systems through industry standard practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI) and common software design patterns. This class was specifically designed to deliver the core Agile Development Practices Learning Objectives of the CSD program and should prepare the participant to successfully pass the Scrum Alliance CSD Candidate Assessment.

This class focuses on automated testing, TDD (heavily covered in class), Continuous Integration, Design Concepts (Design Principles and Practices) and Extreme Programming (XP) practices. Class is hands-on, and you will participate in a project where you will build an actual feature using Agile practices and learn about the technical practices. You'll learn about how team members interact during sprints. Other topics covered include Technical Debt: Strategies & Techniques to help reduce technical debt.

In order to earn the CSD certification, the Scrum Alliance requires at least five days of formal training followed by a CSD assessment/evaluation. This class fulfills 21 of the required 35 hours and can be paired with the Certified ScrumMaster class to complete the requirement.

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.

Topic: Agile thinking: Compare Scrum, Lean, Kanban, XP and any other methodologies you have used. What has worked? What hasn't? Maybe one methodology is better suited for certain situations or work efforts. Or you have seen great success going beyond frameworks and methodologies. Join us and tell us about the spices in your kitchen, and let's compare notes!

Please RSVP at our Meetup event and get the zoom connection info: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/254946132/