Agile Boston, Agile MA, Agile training Boston, Agile training MA, APLN Boston, APLN MA

Alan Atlas is a practicing, full-time Agile Coach at RALLYSoftware. As such, his job is very hard: he faciliates REAL culture change inside organizations. At Amazon he spearheaded the use of Scrum throughout the company. While at Amazon, he and his team used Scrum to deliver Amazon S3, the industry-award-winning web service that provides unlimited Internet-connected storage, in 2006. Alan is a CSM, a CST, a graduate of Brown University (BA Psychology), UMASS (BS in EE), and Georgia Tech (MSEE).

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Presentation: ALAN ATLAS of [RALLY] on SOCIAL ONTRACTS: THE NEGLECTED ROLE OF MIDDLE MANAGEMENT IN AGILE TRANSFORMATION

Successful agile adoption is in fact cultural change. Culture includes written and unwritten ground rules.

Social contracts are plain-English working agreements by and between stakeholders and participants in any agile adoption effort. A key point of cultural leverage is the middle manager.

However, these managers are often left out of training and other transformation activities in favor of putting all efforts into the teams......

Learn MORE.....

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COMMUNITY NOTES: Things to Ponder, and Do

BART Analysis of Your Team Organization: Boundary Authority Role and Task.

Group Relations: an Intro to GR work.

Scrum, BART and Group Relations: a Primer

Community Meritocracy: How to Organize

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We are Agile Boston. We meet for Agile training events, one per month. We are dedicated to spreading Agile methods and thinking through the software development community in greater Boston. We meet in Waltham MA on the 4th Wednesday, except for August and December....click here to send us an email about absolutely anything on your mind now.

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Welcome to the Agile Boston web site !!

Our average meeting has over 90 attending !!

We have 239++ attending GIVE THANKS FOR SCRUM on 11/25 !! We only charged SEVEN BUCKS. I think we probably charged too much !!

We have 138 attending the November meeting !! (Jeff Sutherland)

We have 147 attending the February meeting !! (Ken Schwaber)

We have 81 for the April meeting !! (Ellen Gottesdiener)

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Get on the Agile Boston mailing list .....to stay notified of Agile news and events in Massachusetts.)

Ken Schwaber, at the February 09 meeting.

We are Agile Boston. We meet for Agile training events, one per month. We are dedicated to spreading Agile methods and thinking through the software development community in Boston. We meet Waltham MA on the 4th Wednesday, except for August and December....

Click here to get full info & register for the NEXT MEETING....

The primary best practice in Agile software development is Scrum—a set of methods, roles and rules that can increase software developer productivity by 10 times if you are willing to follow the simple rules. We teach and discuss Scrum and the art and science behind it. We also cover Test Driven Development, XP and other best-practices under the Agile umbrella.

Experienced Agile practitioners from throughout Boston attend and present at our meetings. We have educational presentations, a focus on Scrum training, and some informal networking time. We also have some very interesting group-level exercises in which we develop expertise and empirical experience in Agile and Scrum.

The leader of the group is Dan Mezick. You can learn more about Dan on this web site. Dan is a Scrum Coach who is an invited speaker to events like Agile2007, Agile2008 and Agile2009. Learn more about Dan here

Anyone can attend a meeting provided you are willing to participate in making the meeting a success. We run mock exercises at the group level that are a lot of fun. Most of these revolve around Scrum tasks like planning, estimating and running Sprints. If you are looking for a very fun way to learn to more and more about Agile and Scrum, this is the place.

This web site contains everything you need to learn more and attend a meeting. Scrum and Agile are gaining a tremendous amount of traction recently. A recent search of DICE.COM indicated over 1000 jobs nationally with the word ‘Scrum’ and over 3000 jobs with the word ‘Agile’. Come to our events to learn how these methods are transforming software development worldwide.

Attending a meeting is simple: send us an email indicating your planned attendance, and show up. We meet at Microsoft office in Waltham MA. See you at the next meeting !

Click here to send an email question to Agile Boston.

Click here to get full info & register for the NEXT MEETING....

Looking for Boston area usergroups? Click here to view a list of local Boston-area groups.

Agile Boston Sponsors:

Agile Coaching & .NET Training from NewTech

New Technology Solutions Inc is Dan Mezick's company. NewTech is a provider of Scrum and agile Coaching and ASP.NET, C# and VB .NET training to businesses of all sizes in the Northeast..

Big Visible is a premier provider of Agile enablement and training solutions.

Rally Software provides tools, services and training for Agile teams.

ThoughtWorks provides Mingle, a tool that enables powerful, easy, distributed project collaboration.

The Scrum Training Institute with Scrum's co-creator JEFF SUTHERLAND provides Certified Scrum training in Massachusetts, New England and worldwide.

VersionOne pioneered the agile management tool market in 2002. The company is a leader in team and enterprise-level project management solutions.

Serious about Scrum? You MUST PASS Scrum's NOKIA TEST....

Any serious Scrum implementation must pass the NOKIA TEST before using advanced techniques such as Scrum-of-Scrums. Are you ready?

This test is the STARTING point for implementing advanced Scrum techniques such as multiple teams working from the same backlog.

According to the NOKIA TEST for Scrum, you are doing Scrum, if:

Iterations. You must be doing iterative development cycle of 6 weeks or less.
Testing.You must be testing as you develop software, and preferably, writing tests IN ADVANCE of development.
Agile Specification via User Stories. You'll want to be using user stories for requirements, keeping them small, independent, and testable.
Product Owner. You have one, preferably with a Release Plan, and one that writes the User Stories.
Product Backlog. You have one, PRIORITIZED by business ROI. Ideally, you an measure ROI based on real revenue, cost per Story Point, or othr metrics.
Estimates. You have estimates, developed by the WHOLE TEAM, ideally by using Planning Poker.
Burndown Chart. You have one! It is updated every day of a Sprint, and you report Stories, not Tasks, since Tasks are not a measure on "done-ness".
Team Disruption. You have only Scrum roles consisting of Product Owner, Team and Scrum master, and NO ONE is disturbing the Team as they work on the current Sprint.

SUMMARY

Scrum is simple to describe and hard to follow. It has the following structure:

Three Roles. The three Scrum roles are Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team. That's it!
Three Ceremonies. You have three main meetings in Scrum: the Sprint Planning meeting, the Sprint Review, and the Daily Scrum stand-up.
Three Artifacts. You have three essential documents in Scrum- The Product Backlog, the Sprint backlog, and the Burndown Chart. Remember that the main item is the User Story, estimated in Story Points......
Three Best Practices. Scrum as of 2008 now defines THREE best practices: the use of User Stories, the use of Planning Poker, and the use of the Scrum board.

Learn more....