Events
Wed. 9th Aug: Ian Carroll on How long will it take? How much will it cost? + John Le Drew and The product owner is an agile anti-pattern + Ian Lister with Cynefin A Gentle Introduction
One of the nice things to have witnessed over the last few years is the growing number of people regularly speaking on lean / agile topics across and based in the north of England. With a slight change to our normal format this months gathering is a showcase of talent with three speakers all from our region. Ian Carroll runs Lean Agile Manchester and we've been trying to coax him along for some time, John Le Drew ran an excellent session at Agile Yorkshire on safety a few months and hosts the Agile Path podcast and Ian Lister is making his debut appearance. Hope everyone is having a great summer and see you in a couple of weeks.
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Tue. 11th July: Marcus Robinson and How We Use Value Stream Mapping to Identify Where to Focus to Achieve Maximum Impact and What it Takes to be an Agile Developer with Steve Trapps
We're welcoming Microsoft Evangelist Marcus Robinson talking about value stream mapping for July. Organisations exploring what is actually happening during their product development life cycle isn't easy to spot. If they are the focus is more than likely at the development team level. But, there are often huge lead time gains to be made by looking up and downstream and value stream mapping is an excellent way to do this. Marcus is sharing his experiences doing this with clients. Steve Trapps is also back for July to explore the agile developer skill set and traits. Steve is a past winner of our lightening talks competition and always a popular contributor.
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Wed. 14th June: Managing change in the 21st century: what we know and where we must do better with Mike Burrows. Plus Ivor Tymchak on Tell stories, not data.
Author, regular conference speaker and founder of the Agendashift network Mike Burrows is back this month to talk about the perennial topic of managing change. As many of us know through experience, any kind of change is a hard won victory. This is especially so in larger organisations with numerous conflicting agendas. Mike insight is always fresh and worth listening to. This months support slot is filled by Ivor Tymchak fresh from his TechOff victory at the Leeds International Festival. Ivor has been running speaker workshops with Agile Yorkshire for a couple of years now and is back to tell us how he won, pass on some tips and explain the new round of workshops we're organising to help budding presenters take their stories to the next level at conferences and beyond.
 Which is better: “top down”, with the challenge of overcoming resistance to change, or “bottom up”, perhaps never gathering momentum? Perhaps this is false choice? Could there be a third way, an approach to organisational transformation that is simultaneously respectful, ambitious, and sustainable?
Bio: Mike Burrows is author of Kanban from the Inside and founder of Agendashift, the home of an integrated set of online, workshop-based and coaching tools for a growing community of Lean-Agile transformation practitioners. Prior to these roles, he has been a CTO for a late-stage startup and Executive Director and global development manager for a top tier investment bank. Part I of his new book Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation was published May 11th, 2017. Twitter: @asplake Website: blog.agendashift.com
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Tues. May 9th Tony Heap:Story Splitting for Beginners and Experts Alike and Stew Abel: Using AWS PaaS for an MVP
Fresh from the hugely successful one day Crazy Agile Thing conference over Leeds Digital festival week we've two excellent speakers pluck from our own community this month. Tony Heap has always been very popular with his past session being amongst our most watch videos and Stew Able, long time supporter of AY is debuting as a speaker.
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Wednesday April 12th: John Le Drew with Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable Positions plus Chris Cheadle & Sean Craig on Firebreak Tall Tales - A Break From Routine
This month John Le Drew, host of the Agile Path podcast is previewing his talk about safety and it looks great. Also AY regulars Sean Craig and Chris Cheadle will be presenting an experience report on an innovation experiment they ran within the NHS. They'll be sharing their insight warts and all.
 John Le Drew: Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable PositionsOver 3 months John recorded over 60 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”
This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety.
This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast (which will launch in Jan 17) is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field; Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 60 hours of audio. This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.
Bio: John has over 17 years of experience working in software engineering as a system administrator, software engineer, technical lead, technical director, development manager and agile coach. He currently runs the consultancy firm Wise Noodles here he helps organisations solve tough technical problems by untangling their people problems. He is also host of The Agile Path Podcast which creates in-depth audio documentaries on the topics that most affect organisations transitioning to agile ways of working.
Twitter: @antz29 Website: www.agilepath.fm
Towards the end of last year, we decided to remove as many constraints as possible and let our let team at NHS.UK work on what they wanted for 2 weeks. We borrowed the idea, and the name, from GOV.UK but of course they weren't the first and won't be the last. This is our story. What worked, what didn't, what we will do differently next time and why we think you might want to consider one where you work.
Bio: Apart from two years as an International Account Manager for software sales, Chris has been leading project delivery in both the public and private sector since 1996. During the early 2000s Chris developed a passion for improving how organisations work and has strived to combine delivery with effectiveness and efficiency improvements since. Accredited in 2004 for leading the capability maturity improvement in both delivery marques at level 3 by the APMGroup; a world first. In October 2009, he joined the team delivering the www.nhs.uk website and since January 2011 he has been leading the project and programme teams at NHS Choices.
Sean is an experienced leader of software development teams with over 20 years’ experience in technical roles with organisations such as Kellogg’s, IBM, Yorkshire Water, Asda, Department of Health and currently dev manager for NHS.UK at NHS Digital.
An agile and lean advocate and implementer and he’s transformed teams from waterfall to agile in multiple organisations.
Twitter: @chris_cheadle and @seancraiguk
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Tuesday March 14th: Amy Thompson and Velocity: The Golden Snitch of Scrum plus Jon Fulton with Agile Telemetry: Using Data Like a Formula 1 Team
Last month's two engineering based presentations received great feedback but we like to mix things up and this month it's all metrics, data and quantitative decision making. This should be the foundation and focus of any lean / agile leadership team, however this is sometimes not the case. When an organisation uses data well it knows what it's capable of and can match resources to demand, deliver predictably and react in real time to production problems before they escalate. Unfortunately the lagging indicator reports of old are still alive and in common use, accompanied by the familiar lurching from one crisis to the next.
Come along this month, learn from others and don't let that happen.
 Amy Thompson and Velocity: The Golden Snitch of ScrumNo-one seems to talk about velocity anymore. I want to talk about velocity. And Harry Potter a bit. I mean I like Harry Potter, but I like stable velocity a fair bit more. I'm going to talk about why velocity is so important to me, why it should be so important to you, and how its possible achieve predictable delivery when you catch the Golden Snitch of Scrum.
Bio: Amy Thompson is an award winning Scrum Master and Agile Coach who is passionate about Agile practices. Specialising in Scrum and Kanban, her belief in discipline and structure has transformed many teams to high performing success. Having worked in an array of organisations from large enterprises to FinTech startups, there's not much she hasn't seen. Amy firmly believes the key to high performance is a collective mantra of 'setting each other up for success', and educates both teams and senior management on how to do this well.
twitter: @Scrum_Mistress + blog and website
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Tues February 21st - Dr Oliver Shaw: Test Driven Development, the most misused term in software development? and Keith Williams: Dependencies, Injection and Abstraction for Fun and Profit
It's a while since Agile Yorkshire had an entire evening of content that was firmly planted in agile engineering but for February we're back to our roots. We're still building our calendar for 2017 so watch out for new announcements and get in touch if you know someone with a story to tell.
 Dr Oliver Shaw: Test Driven Development, the most misused term in software development?In this talk Oliver describes what "Doing TDD" is and, importantly, what it isn't. He will make the ethos of TDD very clear and show you how to do TDD via a live coding demo. He touches on mocking, the testing pyramid and finishes by doing a fanaticism check with the audience. Bio: Oliver is an associate with Equal Experts. Currently assisting the public sector. Oliver has an interest in creating pragmatic, quality software and getting that into live as soon as possible using DevOps techniques. Specific tech interests include Scala, Docker, CI/CD. Co-Organiser of DevOps North East. twitter: @olly_shaw
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January 10th - Adam Mitchell: Hello... I'm Your Project Manager! plus Kev McCabe: The Agile Fluency Model
 The dichotomy between agile teams and traditional management has plagued my world for the past few years. I look at scenarios you might come up against and how I've tried to deal with them to allow companies to transform into an agile way of delivery.
Bio: Agile coach and triathlete. Spent the last 14yrs working in IT around Leeds/Manchester. Left development behind and moved into helping companies with agile transformation programs.
 Agile is about teams and people, and the success of any project will depend on it team(s). Team fluency is more than the capabilities of the team members. There is also the management structures, relationships, and company culture, as well as the tools, practices and technologies that the team use. Many agile teams have plateaued, while we all know that continuous improvement is a foundation of agile, many teams has stopped making these improvements. They lose the benefits that can be had for themselves and the company. The Agile Fluency Model will help guide a pathway through many of these issues and work with the wider business to incorporate them into the agile process.
Bio: Kev has worked with large corporations in the Finance, Media, E-commerce and Logistics spaces. He’s currently a freelance code smith, coach & trainer; 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 and SAFe agilist in 2015.
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December 13th - Annual Lightning Talks
 Every year around Christmas we host the annual Agile Yorkshire Lightning Talk Competition. It's an Xmas tradition to make the December 13th meeting a celebration of community speaking, with prizes to boot. If you haven't been before then you've definitely missed out on a quite a bit of fun and an opportunity to be inspired. The topics are now confirmed!
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8th November, James Hull - We Become What We Behold: Sociology, software and Conway's Law + Stephen Mounsey, Listening: An essential skill for software testers
 Conway's Law states that 'organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations' - e.g. highly distributed development teams will produce a distributed application architecture.
""First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us"". In the context of software development, do we reflect enough on the way our environment, tools, languages etc determine how we view the world and attempt to problem solve?
What can awareness of these sociological aspects of software do to help our work, and what are the implications for business, politics and the economy?
Bio: Freelance Agile and Systems Thinking consultant and developer @jamesahull northern-union.com
 “When you talk you are repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new” Dalai Lama
Are you really listening? Listening is an important skill for any human being but for a tester an essential skill. If part of testing is about information gathering and interpretation then Listening is a key component.
A detailed look at the art of listening with parallels being drawn between listening theories and how we test. Listening when done effectively has the potential to change your relationships as well as your testing.
Bio: Stephen is a scrum master and agile coach who values visualisation, games, play and fun at work. He's an enthusiastic agilist with a passion for emergent thinking and self organising teams. When Stephen gets time away from his 2 dogs and 2 young children, he likes to attend and speak at agile and test meet ups.
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