This month, come to the Agile PDX 'Agile Tune-Up' meeting and tune up your agile process! Our panel of experts and practitioners will give you personalized feedback on the issues you're facing in an informal workshop-like format.

Before the session, visit http://agile-pdx-tune-up.appspot.com/ for a brief questionnaire that will help you identify your areas of greatest risk. Then bring a printout with you to the session to get targeted advice on what to keep doing and what to change!

This event is free and is at our new location, 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.

This month's session has two parts: * Four lightning talks sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly of transitioning to Agile or practicing Agile. * Collaborate to refine Agile PDX's charter.

This event is free and is at our new location, 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.

Being a ScrumMaster is not a role for the faint of heart. Effective ScrumMasters use a combination of natural talent, common sense, insight, observation technique, and--well, let's admit it, luck to help teams sustainably use Scrum to reliably deliver business value. But the standard two-day training course doesn't fully prepare us for what lies ahead.

In this talk, subtitled, "What I Wish I Knew Before I Became a ScrumMaster," experienced and newer ScrumMasters(or anyone who wants to help a team succeed and deliver) discover and share non-obvious insights into what a ScrumMaster can do to help their teams grow into great teams -- and learn a valuable technique.

This event is free and is at our new location, 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.

Great software comes from getting your team’s best ideas into the product. Jim McCarthy, who led the legendary turnaround of the Visual C++ group at Microsoft, left Microsoft in 1996 to create a team dynamics laboratory to figure out how to always create a create a high performance team.

The McCarthy lab has focused extensively on this challenge, and has produced 11 rich, precise protocols (called the Core) for making unanimous decisions, supporting quality thinking, strengthening design iterations, and incorporating feedback, emotions, nobility, and passion into products.

Learn about these protocols in this motivating, challenging talk. In just a few minutes, you can pick up the fundamentals of an entirely new class of tool.

• Do you notice too much discussion and arguing and would prefer the best ideas would just get implemented now? –Learn about the Decider Protocol which guarantees unanimous team decisions with accountability and moves the team forward with a bias toward action.

• Do you accept that it is vitally important that you get the opinions of others about the quality of work products but notice that it is consistently painful to give and receive feedback? – Learn about the Perfection Protocol which solves all the problems associated with criticism.

• Do you notice that dumb things consistently happen on your team and everyone seems to lack self-awareness to some degree, including you? – Learn about the Core Commitments which provide a team constitution about commitment and accountability to the team. And learn about the Personal Alignment Protocol which allows each team member to address self-awareness around courage, integrity, passion and other virtuous behaviors.

This event is free and is at our new location, 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.