posted 10 Jul 2018, 03:20 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 16 Jul 2018, 04:17
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In a fight (for attention) between Agile Yorkshire and the England World Cup semi final match we expected Agile Yorkshire to come of worst. Obviously the Agile Yorkshire community is full of dedicated and passionate lean / agile practitioners but we figured we should move aside for this "once in a generation" moment and reschedule our meetup from the normal second Wednesday. Hopefully that's OK with most.
*** Attention (read carefully) - The Venue for this Month Has Changed ***
We're changing venue for this month because our home on Floor 10 of the Platform building above the station has been rented out and there isn't an alternate space that's appropriate. Therefore we're on the move and for this month it's going to be on the first floor of what was The White Cloth Gallery on Aire Street behind the station. Full details of the venue address are show at the bottom of this event page.
Tony Heap: Options Engineering
There are always options. But when making business and IT change, we often forget to consider them, to the detriment of the overall outcome. The reason for this is the way the human mind processes ideas, and dates back to the cognitive revolution around 70,000 years ago.
In this session you will learn:
- How humans have ideas and make decisions
- Why considering options is so powerful, and yet so hard
- How to overcome these difficulties - a structured, yet lightweight, approach that I like so much I decided to give it a name
Bio: Tony Heap is a freelance agile coach / trainer / scrum master / business analyst designer based in Yorkshire. He has worked for all sorts of clients including HMRC, YBS Group, ASDA, Morrisons, NHS, DoH, RWE nPower, Arcadia, BT, BarclayCard and Egg, in some cases partnering with consultancies such as Equal Experts, BJSS and Answer Consulting. In his spare time he likes to share his experiences and ideas on his blog www.its-all-design.com. He is particularly interested in agile approaches and how they apply to business analysis. He is a requirements denier.
James Sheasby Thomas: QA and Testing - a Retrospective
The term 'Quality Assurance' has a controversial reputation within the testing community - quality is subjective, so it cannot be assured, although it can be assessed, analysed, advocated for, questioned or improved. However it's also arguable that 'Testing' does not fully describe what modern testers do and the impact they can have on project success. Could there be a better label for the role that QA/Testing professionals perform in an agile context?
In this talk, James will discuss the limitations of both 'QA' and 'Testing' as labels, as well as previous attempts to define them. He will also explore the many ways that QAs/Testers in agile teams use their time and skills to help ensure project success and meaningful quality, and situations where our role overlaps with others. Attendees will be invited to contribute to the discussion and suggest possible alternative labels to 'QA' and 'Testing'.
Bio: James Sheasby Thomas is currently a Test Analyst for Inviqa, an established technical partner company based in the UK and Germany. His most popular talk is `Accessibility Testing Crash Course', which he presented at TestBash Manchester 2017, Leeds Test Atelier, Leeds Tester Gathering and Liverpool Tester Gathering.
Venue for July
We've lost our space at Platform so we're trying our a new venue. For July Agile Yorkshire will take place on the 1st Floor of what was the White Cloth Gallery behind Leeds train station. The address is given below and there is a picture of the building and front door also.
1st floor, Aireside House
24-26 Aire Street
Leeds
West Yorkshire
LS1 4HT
Travelling by Train
The venue is 1 minutes walk when exiting the station at the door next to Wetherspoons
Travelling by Car
There is parking very close by in the station or cheaper parking further down Whitehall Road.
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posted 5 Jun 2018, 09:12 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 5 Jun 2018, 09:22
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The variety and depth of topics covered by speakers is ever expanding. We all know the value and savings made though gaining feedback from users of a system early and often and this month Dennis Vergne shares an approach to system building in the public sector that he's dubbed "whole system prototyping" as a model for doing just that. Plus Austen Bell and Glen Crossley are here to talk about the open source Blended Agile Delivery (BAD) toolkit that has recently emerged from work right here in Leeds.
Prototyping Public Services - Dennis Vergne
We had a theory that Agile is just as well suited to Public Service organisations as it is to Private, software development industries. We proved that theory right. Through 'whole system prototyping' we incorporated Agile, Design and Adaptive Leadership to bring about positive, sustainable change in to UK Public Services. We used these approaches to not only enable better services and achieve savings but also brought about a true sustainable adaptive culture, able to face the future with confidence. I'm looking forward to sharing the what, why and how with you... Maybe even throw in an activity to help explain.
Bio: I have a passion for enabling transformational change that sticks; turning ideas into effective practice and behaviours. Although originally from Holland, most of my work has been within the British public sector, ranging from over thirty local authorities, the NHS, probation services and central government. After gaining an MSc in this field (Oxford - Distinction), I set-up RedQuadrant, a successful full service public sector firm, with Benjamin Taylor in 2007, before becoming Managing Director of Basis.
Blending Agile Delivery - Glenn Crossley & Austen Bell
An introduction to a blended approach to Agile delivery. There are many tools, techniques and frameworks available, one rarely solves all your challenges. BAD is an open source knowledge base that attempts to share experiences of blending multiple approaches together to experiment, learn and adapt.
Bio: The Blended Agile Delivery (BAD) Toolkit is an open source set of tools and techniques that help Portfolios, Programmes, Projects and Teams efficiently plan and deliver managed change within Lean and Agile principles.
The toolkit offers a practical approach to the prioritisation, planning and execution of delivery and transformation initiatives. It is the culmination of decades of experience as well as leveraging the experience and knowledge of thought leaders across the globe.
Glenn Crossley and Austen Bell are both co-founders of The BAD Toolkit.
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posted 30 Apr 2018, 07:24 by Royd Brayshay
Building the right thing and having a good outcome from a software project requires all sides to be wilfully collaborating in a creative and enthusiastic fashion. That may seem obvious and easy but the IT industry has a legacy culture to deal with. It's not uncommon for both sides to be evaluated on meeting deadlines and budget constraints but not always on costs saved or revenue generated by the outcome of a software project. Of course measuring outcomes isn't always easy and bringing people together to collaborate meaningfully when they may also have other day to day tasks to get done is a similar challenge. However in the world of software product development it's people working together that often transforms the outcome and this month our two speakers Simon Cookson and Simeon Smith are both drilling into upstream end of the product development pipeline.
Simon Cookson - Stakeholder Engagement, Sales Thinking and Should We All Be Product Owners?
Simon will explore what agile teams could learn from sales thinking and practice about engaging stakeholders. Talk about how stakeholder engagement can build team resilience and explore whether we should all become mini-product owners.
Bio: Since gaining an MA in Creative Sector Management from The University of Sheffield’s Business School, Simon has worked in digital and creative businesses for over 20 years and his experience centres around sales, marketing and client services. Simon has been involved in founding successful digital start ups, helping build the UK’s first digital bank,and winning and managing multi-million pound digital transformation projects.
Simeon Smith - Business Analyst, Product Owner or Product Manager?
Having been through a few job titles over the past few years (Business Analyst, Product Manager, Product Owner), I’ll be talking through what I think the similarities and differences between the roles are. I’ll also explain one approach to setting-up teams including these roles which avoids people stepping on each other’s toes.
Bio: Product Management Consultant with software delivery experience across Healthcare, Sports Betting and Personal Finance. Currently working with Hippo Digital on a front-line NHS delivery.
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posted 23 Mar 2018, 10:42 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 4 Apr 2018, 06:35
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Software technology keeps marching forward with new ideas and fascinating engineering innovations that can, if allowed to, distract from the job at hand - to provide value through software features that normal humans can actually use. That means delivering value as soon as possible and regularly checking that people can reliably accomplish what they need to quickly and without fuss or lots of training. This month we focus on just this with insight into agile testing of the UX kind with Ian Franklin and Ashley Wheat plus a dip into the world of MVPs and what they can bring to any delivery team with Joe Williams.
Ian Franklin and Ashley Wheat - Making UX work within Agile: half-baked? hopeless? Make it stick!
Too often the big blue sky horizon of Agile falls short of its promise when technical delivery takes over and UX design and user needs start to look like a bolt on, a nice to have, and “it's a lovely idea but not now as …. [technical issue fix]”. It's even worse when those above lose sight of the user and start suggesting or imposing user stories and use needs that seem to come from the whims of a stakeholder or outer space.
In the talk Ashley and Ian will cover how to keep UX, user centred design design and user needs alive and kicking throughout Agile process. This will include tricks to keep stakeholders onboard, how to package UX and user centred design so that it maintains importance, and how to manage upwards when the senior project team are new to Agile roles.
Bio: Ian is a professionally qualified and accredited business psychologist with nearly 20 years experience working as a consultant in the public and private sectors. His strengths are in culture change, team working (including virtual teams) and design of customer services and the user experience. He is committed to ensuring that design is something which is done with people and not to them. Currently he is developing the user research capability of NHS Digital’s Digital Delivery Centre.
Bio: Ashley is an experienced user researcher with experience working in both academia and industry. He has experience carrying out work on varied projects including military analysis, online gaming and medical applications. He has worked with organisations such as Sky Betting and Gaming and NHS Digital, and is committed to making the voice of users heard in fast paced, Agile environments where they can often go unheard, and making user research something everyone is involved with. Ashley has made a number of publications, presented work at events such as Naturalistic Decision Making and spoken at the World Bank.
Joe Williams - How Our PO Learned to Stop Worrying and Love MVP
When pressed with hard deadlines like the start of the Premier League season and a rapidly changing market, we really had to think about the way we would deliver software. Our product owner wanted frills and bows, but we didn't really have the time to give him either. Instead, we taught him to stop worrying, and love the minimal viable product.
In this talk I'll go over how we optimised our process, learnt to be strict with our product owner, and ultimately delivered the new Sky Sports iOS Enhanced Live player for Premier League fixtures. I'll also talk about the impact of this going forward, and how we extended the player to include EFL fixtures in just 3 points. I'll also talk about how, in my own independent development, I faced the same issues my product owner did, and the issues that arose from that. Hopefully at the end, there'll be something you can take away, whether it be about embracing MVP, or learning that MVP isn't what you think.
Bio: I'm developer working at Sky, on some of their biggest apps. I've contributed to Football Score Center, Sky Sports UK, Italia, Germany, and our legacy stuff with a bunch of different, but excellent teams. I've also worked at small start up agencies, in teams of 2 or 3, that are just in the process of embracing Agile. Through these, I've learnt how to refine my own way of working, and also work in teams to find our best way of working.
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posted 1 Mar 2018, 04:03 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 2 Mar 2018, 04:50
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One of Agile Yorkshire biggest strengths is hearing real life stories and insights from experienced local practitioners. When these stories are shared they a substantially more valuable because they are told along with the circumstances and context within which they relate. Our speakers this month are two excellent example of this. Laurence Wood explores trust between delivery teams and their customers who may often have been used to working with teams delivering in in a traditional project manor with large batches of work and limited or no iteration. Believing in iterative product development often needs to be seen before it is believed. Andy Butcher digs into the emotional attachment that can grip teams and trick them into delivering the wrong thing with frustrating outcomes.
Laurence Wood on how High Performing Teams Know More About Trust
Customers can distrust people who limit scope in order to achieve early deliverables. Previous disappointments (they never got the functionality they wanted) mean they assume the first release will actually be the only one. So they include everything in a gold plated wish-list due to a lack of trust. But in a trusted relationship a team will be able to negotiate on scope finding the contingency they require to meet their commitments despite inevitable curve balls. Every Digital Delivery team needs to show they can be trusted. I find it helpful to ask what factors they expect to impact trust in them as a team. This hands-on session shares how IndigoBlue help digital teams to explore reputation and trust.
Bio: Laurence inspires teams and leaders to deliver more value, more often using Agile and Lean in India and the UK. He discovered Lean as a Jaguar Cars apprentice in 1988 supervising V12 and XJS assembly whilst studying Manufacturing Engineering at The University of Birmingham. Ford’s takeover prompted his decision to move fully into IT with RAD (Rapid Application Development) pioneers Marks and Spencer. Freelance development lead roles followed in South Africa, Austria and the UK including Coca Cola, and South African Airways. He later became Development Manager then Divisional Head of IT at Williams Lea in the demanding City of London investment banking arena. His Lean and Agile experience spans 25 years. Now Yorkshire based he likes to help software teams and digital leaders to deliver more value more often with leading consultancy IndigoBlue.
Andy Butcher on The Shit Nightclub AntipatternWhy people and organisations are reluctant to abandon a project or an idea, even when it's clearly rational to do so.
Bio: Solutions Architect at Sky Betting & Gaming. I feel strongly that software development is about people. I'm fascinated by how we can build teams and systems that we feel proud to be involved with.
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posted 31 Jan 2018, 08:20 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 13 Feb 2018, 03:21
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The software industry has transformed it's self over the past two decades by finding new ways to work that properly recognised the unpredictable, problem solving nature of much of it's work and at the same time reduce risk and significantly increased the rate of value production. The mantra has been to question the cost of every activity in light of the risks it mitigates or the value it realises. This has led to much innovation within the typical product development pipeline and many smaller businesses have capitalised on this as a significant commercial advantage.
Achieving these changes within a small team can transform performance with little disruption however as the size of an organisation increases so does the resistance to change. There are a lot of hearts and minds to realign, right from the coal face to senior leadership teams and resistance normally exists in one form or another at every level. For any large organisation to truly transform it's self and realise the commercial benefits is a long slow process requiring a lot of leadership and good dose of personal risk taking. This month we're going to hear a couple of experience reports that are definitely worth listening too.
Andrew Meyer and Gary Green - Attempting to Create a Dynamic, lean and Innovative Organisation - NHS Digital’s Journey into Agile and DevOps Delivery and What Went Not Quite to Plan
NHS Digital is the national information and technology partner to the health and social care system, using digital technology to transform the NHS and social care. It’s vision is to harness the power of information and technology to improve health and care. Their systems and information  helps doctors, nurses and the health care professionals improve and make care safer.
Over the passed 3+ years the NHS Digital Delivery Centre has been on a journey to transform itself. It was previously heavily reliant on large managed national services that were expensive and difficult to change. It has quietly and diligently been transforming itself into a Lean, Agile, DevOps capability reducing the cost of national health care solutions by 10’s of millions of pounds.
This talk, is to explore how it started, the transformation journey, where it’s going next and, most importantly, what did we learn.
Bio: Andrew Meyer - Director of the Digital Delivery Centre at NHS Digital
Andrew has a strong background in delivery, with a passion for delivering value and for developing a culture to support high performing teams. Andrew headed up the replacement of a number of key NHS National Services used by 10,000’s of users across the UK, successfully re-developing the service and transitioning it in-house.
He has built the Digital Delivery Centre from a small team of around 25 people to one of around 400; using Lean and Agile tools and techniques to ensure value and quick delivery. Andrew established DevOps teams to build and evolve the national services.
Bio: Gary Green - Principal Consultant, Infinity Works
Gary is a Principal Consultant at Infinity Works and has been working with the NHS Digital Delivery Centre, leading a tribe of over 70 to deliver national services for the NHS. Gary has also been leading the software delivery of a £50m programme providing new products to revolutionise NHS data capabilities and services as well as assisting with Agile organisation design as NHS Digital evolves and grows.
Kev McCabe - Core Protocols for Shared Vision
In this session Kev will give a very brief overview of the Core Protocols and Commitments. These can be used to create highly performing teams by creating psychologically safe zones. The Core Protocols are a set of practices that enable people and teams to: * learn results-oriented behaviours, * enter a state of shared vision and stay there, * trust each other, * stay rational and healthy, * make decisions effectively, and * keep moving toward the team's goals. In this state, teams can be very effective. Teams with these practices innovate, create, and get things done.
Bio: Kev has worked with large corporations in the Finance, Media, E-commerce and Logistics spaces. With a passion to improve developers from the ground up in all areas of development. He also has a huge Interest in all things Agile since 2002, mainly XP, but of late Scrum & Kanban having become a Certified Scrum Master in 2012 and Accredited Kanban Practitioner in 2013, SAFe agilist in 2015 a Disciplined Agilist (CDA) in 2016 and ICAgile Certified Professional-Agility in the Enterprise (ICP-ENT) in 2017.
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posted 9 Jan 2018, 02:55 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 15 Jan 2018, 05:28
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A new year is upon us with new challenges plus hopefully new goals and new target conditions. We've got some fantastic speakers lined up for the coming months but we're kicking the year off with a couple of people many of you will know. Diversity is regularly in the news these days and John Le Drew is here to prompt us in to thinking why and how this matters to product developments teams. Jon Fulton is back to challenge our own assumptions about us as agile practitioners. As agents of change are we actually helping?
John Le Drew - Diversity, Chocolate and Safe Cracking.
Diversity. It's the topic of the hour. Organisations are all putting 'diversity' and 'equal opportunities' on every job ad. But, for some organisations it still seems to be a struggle. What's the goal? Do we want diverse teams because it's the "right thing to do" or is it "good for our teams and organisations"? Are we hiring minorities to keep up with quotas or our competition? This talk will engage the audience in a frank discussion on what diversity is, why we need it and how we might achieve it.
Bio: John has spent most of the last 2 decades working in the software industry, with a focus on web technologies. After 10 years as a software engineer John moved into consultancy where he quickly learned the value of team dynamics and how most technical challenges are projecting underlying issues with collaboration. So his focus shifted, while still being very involved technically, his first focus is on facilitating a safe, creative, collaborative environment.
Jon Fulton - Agents of Change
These days social media is awash with stories of ‘fake agile’ and ‘dark scrum’. Has Agile failed? What if it was us, as Agile practitioners, who failed our organisations? What is required of us now, as agents of change?
Bio: Jon spent 12 years as a software developer before finally focusing on Agile Delivery in 2012. Since then he has worked with teams to use Agile and Lean techniques in industries such as Fin-tech, Leisure, Online Gambling, Kids TV, Tourism and Government.
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posted 24 Nov 2017, 04:13 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 5 Dec 2017, 04:49
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Wed 13th December
Christmas is just around the corner and to celebrate over the last few years we've hosted a Lightning Talks Competition. It's a fun pack festive celebration of community tech. public speaking. If you haven't been before you've definitely missed out on an opportunity to be inspired. We've an amazing line up a speakers and topics, some significant prizes plus plenty of food and fun.
Topics and SpeakersGary McAdam - How the MVP is misunderstood, misused and abused, and how to do MVP properly! James Scanlan - Enterprise Architecture versus Agile Delivery: Let them fight Bernard Jauregui - Agile Smells Geoff Bowden - The Future Brian Teeman - The web would be better if we all spoke english
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posted 21 Oct 2017, 13:37 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 21 Oct 2017, 15:34
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Over the years Agile Yorkshire has been for fortunate in hosting some of the industries most experienced practitioners and this month is a prime example. Karl Scotland has been sharing his insights and experience through his blog and speaking at conferences for many years. He played a fundamental role in contributing and popularising the Kanban body of knowledge in it's early days and continues to do so. Ian Thomas brings his experience as an architect at one of our regions largest technology businesses to reflect on some of Extreme Programming's fundamental principles through real world examples.
Karl Scotland - Leading Lasting Learning: Becoming a Lean Enterprise with Strategy Deployment
Learning is a key part of both Lean and Agile. Learning about customer needs and how to most effectively meet those needs. But as well as learning how to solve today's problems, we need to be able to solve tomorrow's problems, and next weeks, and next years. We need to learn how to learn. And we want all that learning to be aligned towards the addressing the same critical challenges or opportunities. That requires leadership to create an environment where experimentation is encouraged.
This talk will explore how Strategy Deployment can be used lead lasting learning and introduce some tools and techniques which can help achieve that goal.
Bio: Karl Scotland helps businesses become Learning Organisations. Over the last 15 years he has been an advocate of Lean and Agile approaches to achieve this, working with companies including the BBC, Yahoo!, EMC Consulting and Rally Software. During this time, he has been a pioneer of using Kanban Systems and Strategy Deployment for product development, a founding member of both the Lean Systems Society and Limited WIP Society, as well as being active in the community and a regular conference speaker. As a result he was awarded the honorary Brickell Key Community Contribution Award at the 2013 Lean Kanban North America conference.
Ian Thomas - Does anyone remember YAGNI?
Extreme programming kickstarted a lot of what we consider the modern agile movement, but many of its practices often fall by the wayside due to the high discipline required to implement them. This talk looks at the "you aren't gonna need it" principle and how engineering teams often find themselves walking the fine line between gold plating and unstructured bloat in their delivery of software. Using real-world examples from recent work, we will look at how YAGNI can help (and hinder) our efforts to deliver the best software for our customers.
Bio: Ian Thomas is a Software Architect working to develop the next generation of sports betting experiences at Sky Betting & Gaming. Leading teams tasked with building API-driven, component-based applications which, when combined, form a cohesive, resilient and performant customer experience which cope with both the scale of the customer base and engineering team.
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posted 5 Oct 2017, 06:28 by Royd Brayshay
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updated 5 Oct 2017, 07:58
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The cost of public services are in constant scrutiny and anyone who's worked on a public sector software project knows there is plenty of room for doing things differently if there is a motivation to do so, saving enormous amounts of money in the process. Some of you will remember Martin Sumner speaking at Agile Yorkshire back in January 2015 comparing the NHS Spine 1 project with the Spine 2 project. The former a traditionally procured and run waterfall affair requiring hundreds of outsourced consultants and lots of expensive proprietary hardware and the second a pilot for an agile approach employing a tenth of the resources and taking significant advantage of low cost, open source infrastructure. In a non IT context Malcolm Gladwell's much discussed 2006 article in the New Yorker Million-Dollar Murray challenges the accepted approach to dealing with the homeless with a system thinking eye that should be familiar to us in the agile community. This month Matt Barnaby will share his thoughts on doing this differently in the public sector in our main speaking slot followed by Agile Yorkshire regular Joe Stead's reflections on working with new and existing product code bases.
 Matt Barnaby - Changing the Change: Agile in Public Services
Times are hard in public services. An increasing demand for providing services to the most vulnerable members of society is being undermined by crippling bureaucracy, continuous budget cuts, increased stress and 'more for less' as a mantra. In fact, times are really hard! How on earth do services cope with change? For years Basis (a RedQuadrant Company) has been helping public services to 'change the change', to do 'it' differently. You guessed - we use agile to do it differently. How do we do it? Come and find out. Our session is going to walk through a number of cases where we have 'changed the change'. We have delivered savings of millions, dramatically improved social care practice whilst making savings, and engaged staff in re-developing their own mental health services to halve the customer journey time whilst boosting quality.
We intend to demonstrate how progressive prototypes are so much more beneficial to delivering the right thing sooner (which might not have been what they thought they wanted, right?) and how self-organising cultures maximise the use of agile.
We also like to play games so come prepared, you might need to get creative (or lose some clothing!)
Bio: Matt is agile coach specialising in change, improvement, project mobilisation and the delivery of transformation to create organisational efficiency, process and service redesign within public services. Matt has delivered effective agile models with the sole purpose of making things better for people delivering - or indeed receiving - services. His work has brought sustainable change to public services. He started his career as a youth worker, before working with many different public sector clients as an agile coach. These range from 20 local authorities (in the UK and Australia) to the NHS. His work has also seen him delivering projects in other sectors such as transport, finance and central government.
Joe Stead - The Trials and Tribulations of Greenfield vs Legacy Projects
I've spent a large chunk of my career working on greenfield projects, the promised land. All of the projects faced different issues, and we worked towards coming up with different solutions. The promised land wasn't all it's cracked up to be. Recently, I've spent a lot of time working on legacy projects, bringing them into the modern world. Again, these projects aren't perfect and presented a whole variety of different issues. Let's explore the types of projects, and decide which is better: Greenfield, or Legacy.
Bio: The majority of my career has been dominated by the .NET world, although recently my focus has been on exploring the greater development community. I'm a firm believer of continually learning and trying new things, you never know what else is out there. Recently, I've focused on setting up a user group and developer community in Hull, HullDevs
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