Here are some highlights of the topics we have covered at previous events. NOTE: As we present new topics in the monthly meeting, the detail migrates here for historical refererence.

We have covered:

Planning and Estimating: A run-through of the key activities you must execute on to effectively plan and estimate within Agile projects. The conventional wisdom is that Agile and Scrum projects do very little planning. The truth is that on Scrunm projects, planning is a continuous best-practice. Agile practitioners do avoid PREDICTION and that was the focus of this presentation.

Trip Report: Agile2007: An formal rundown of presentations from the annual, international conference on Agile held each year. This report was from the 2007 Washington DC event.

Agile, Empiricism and Entrepreneuers: The actual Agile2007 conference session from Dan Mezick, chair and organizer of the group. See the link to the Agile 2007 abstract here.

User Stories Demystified: A treatment of the User Story best practice, a format for collecting requirements. We covered User Stories structure, and size, and how to estimate Stories using Story Points.

Scrum as Attention Manager: Scrum absolutely does not discriminate in terms of dealing with distractions. All distractions are considered WASTE. In this session, we looked at Scrum's attention-management mechanics and demonstrated how Scrum does an absolutely tremendous job of focusing on the work-- at the expense of all kinds of distractions.