Our Presentation at Devoxx: XP Loops (Scrum in practise)

Sometime ago I received an forwarded e-mail from one of my new team members (Thanks Filip). Devoxx was looking for people to hold 2 talks about scrum.
Being a new agile project manager of a large team at the Belgium post, I kept postponing to do a real proposition. (Not really GTD)

Luckily for me Stephan and his team got back to me, asking me if I was still interested. By that time Sylvain had proposed to do an introductionary talk of scrum. Combining a talk with someone I did not know was a big risk to have overlapping content. Especially when one session was scheduled immediately after another.

Then I had the idea why not propose to deliver the XP loops from Pascal & Vera? I have been given this presentation a few times this year, I know the subject by heart, the slides are done and no risk in overlap with Sylvain’s session. On top of that I can do a pair-presentation, which are my favorite presentations anyway.
Stephan immediately replied to my proposition, that was ok for him. Sylvain also wrote it was a good idea. Great.

After doing my workshops at the different european XP days, agile 2008 etc, I really want to do more talks like these. Looks like I started myself doing this.

Only later I realized that both Vera and Pascal were not in Belgium during the conference. When I mention this at the Belgium Post to Jef Cumps, he proposed to help me out. Although I told him I wanted to see if I could find someone at XP days benelux that had delivered this presentation before, I instinctively felt it was a good mach. So at Xp days benelux I did not actively look for another person.

During the preparation Jef perfected the slides and kept asking questions to understand the complete picture.
As with all presentations and workshops, the preparation is the hard work. The presentation itself is much relaxing and trying to enjoy. (When I’m presenting all fucked up from stress, it never is good.)

Before we started, the video guy ask us not to move so that we would stay into the picture all the time. That felt strange as that is the opposite of what I’m trying to do to keep my presentations fluent.
His remark kept spinning in my head, so during the presentation I felt like I was some kind of statue.

Halfway in the presentation I realized I was also avoiding to look at the camera, which made me avoid like half of the public.
(Not sure if people notice that when you are in the room, but  I always try to look at every part of the room, no matter how many people I speak to.)
Officially it is a room of 400 people, I have no idea how many people came to have a look at us.

As usual the slides of the XP Loops are not distributed to the public ( a decision made by Pascal & Vera) , I will post the accompanying notes later this week.  Update: you can download the notes here

I had a small but interesting talk with Dave about collaborations between different agile communities I will post some about that in the next days.

Both Jef and I had a great feeling after the presentation and from the feedback I heared and read I think people are happy about it.

At my last slide I made publicity for more agile session at Devoxx.

By popular request here are they again:

•Test Driven Development : 13:30 (R7) If you missed this session read all about it here

•Agile Testing 17:25 (R8)

•Effective code reviews in agile teams 9/12 20:00 (R2)

• a Finger in the air: gentle introduction to software estimation 10/12 12:00 (R4)
Giovanni is a guy I ran into XP Day London a few years back. That workshop was not so good, but it did learn e a few things and got to know Giovanni as a nice guy. (And the second time I saw him his presentation was way better…)

• Effective Pairing: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly 10/12 14:00 (R5)
Dave is going to agile conferences around the world, I don’t know how he does it, but every time I see it, he has another presentation. And always top class.

•  Behavior driven development in Java with easyb 10/12 15:10 (R8)
Some call BDD the future of TDD.
• Implementing agile at enterprise level 12/12 9:30 (R9) 
Jef will be talking here about the work we are doing at the Belgium Post (I’m doubting to say we, as I’m only there for a few months)

I did not put this on our slides, but this session breathes agile as well:
Meeting-avoidance for self-managing developers

I mentioned a few of books during the presentation.

The New upcoming book from Jutta Eckstein 
I don’t find it back on amazon yet. Her old book is here:
Agile Developing in the large

Crystal Clear is the agile methodology I mentioned that has some good tips for all kinds of different scaling software  projects. Like I said I no nobody that uses crystal, but a lot of people steal idea’s from this book.

I actually use a mix of XP, Scrum,  Lean, Crystal, The core protocols in my projects.

(See Librarything for my whole booklist)

Update I also talked about a documenting team (Non Software team) that used scrum for organizing their work. Eva informed me that they have a wiki about their work
They even link to the perfection game on my blog.
Check it out if you want to optimize your sex-life. 😉

I also would like to thank Jan Tielens, who made me realize up front that I would not be able to see my audience in such a room. I guess he know how much I like to interact with my audience. 😉

Attending this devoxx made me I’m looking forward to go to XP Days London later this week.

Update: I also received a few questions about the post I mentioned on self-organizing teams. 
You can also have a look at my slides about my talk about the myth of a self-organising team on slideshare.net

 

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project Coach and you can reach me @ Yves at my agile training company .net

Technorati Tags: devoxx,agile,xp,Scrum,Java,JavaPolis,extreme programming,XP Loops,Crystal,Vera Peeters,Pascal Van Cauwenberghe,Jef Cumps,Yves Hanoulle