Agile Estimating & Planning Class

This week I'll be heading down to San Diego to attend Agile Estimating & Planning Class. This one is being put on by the Scrum Alliance and features Mike Cohn. I'm pretty excited to be getting to this class.

Where most of Scrum is absolutly intuitive to me, there are a lot of questions I have around estimating and planning in the Scrum world. Primarly centered around how to do it, and how to measure how your doing so you can improve.

I'll run down the class on Thursday.

Oh, and according to Mike we all get Planning Poker Cards. Is that just too cool or what?

CSPO Class Completed

OK, so just woke up after an 8 hour drive from San Jose, after the end of class. So if this is semi-incoherent, sorry, I'll clean it up later.

This CSPO class was presented by Bryan Stallings and Chris Sterling from SolutionsIQ, via the Scrum Alliance.

Class was excellent. Quite possible the best IT related class I've ever been in. And with all the years I've been around this game, that's saying something.

Bryan and Chris present a quiet professionalism that I don't see any where near enough. Both possess a unique ability to combine real life examples of Scrum at work, with the presentation of course materials.

They run the class as a mini 4 sprint scrum project. Complete with sprint planning, burn downs, sprint board, etc, etc. Very effective way to present Scrum.

Course materials were excellent. From the slide deck to the large posters on the walls with salient information. Everything, despite early appearances, is well thought out and done with purpose. My comment about early appearances is only that early in the class, we're asked to deal with a class exercise, the point of which ends up being to drive home how important preparation and planning is.

The course proceeds through a series of short lectures w/slide deck and back up materials and plenty of class interaction. The exercise are too the point, expectations and instructions are well communicated, and time is adaquite. Well time is adequate if the team uses the time wisely.

As a team they also work very well together. Hand off is smooth, and it's evident either could teach any portion of the class, and could handle a class alone if necessary.

All in all, I highly recommend this class, or for that matter any class these two put on.

CSPO Class This Week

Heading up to San Jose for CSPO class. This one is being put on by Bryan Stallings and Chris Sterling from SolutionsIQ, via the Scrum Alliance.

Having been through CSM Class about 5 weeks ago I'm pretty convinced this will be 75% the same material. All about Scrum, etc, with a bit pitched in for the Product Owner instead of the Scrum Master. Even if this is the truth, I still believe there's a lot of valid information to hand out.

If you watch the courses the ScrumAlliance holds, there's somewhere in around 10 CSM classes to each CSPO class. While I understand this is simply a matter of demand, it's unfortunate. I see the CSM role as being critical to the entire process. However, I see, as the "single ring-able neck", the CSPO role and management's interest in that role being well trained as a key indicator as to management's willingness to proceed with an enterprise wide Scrum adoption.

More on this after class.

Where to now?

Ok, so in the last two posts I bored you with my background, and some of the technologies I've dealt with over the years.

In the end though I've been around the block a few times and I've done the VBITS conference speaking kind of things, you probably won't know my name. I tend to be heads down, deep in the technologies, and do more private mentoring than shouting out loud.

I'm seriously enamored with a couple of things. First and foremost in my frontal cortex is Agile development practices, with a serious concentration in Scrum. I was able to go through Certified Scrum Master class a month ago and am rolling it out into my organization slowly, but steadily. Next week I'll be in Certified Scrum Product Owner class, and the following week in a 1 day "Agile Planning and Estimating", class presented by Mike Cohn. (Ought to be a CSE, Certified Scrum Estimating) . I'm starting to ramp up involvement in the Scrum Alliance.

I will be using this as my bully pulpit for my thoughts on Scrum. To a certified cowboy coder like me, who has hated all things process, this has hit me like a thunder storm. Scary, but oh so refreshing. One of my very best buds tried to get me to look at Scrum a couple of years ago, but my head and heart were just dead set against more process. I've been kicking my self and apologizing to him for a couple of months now.

Next is AJAX. I've done remote asynchronous calls from browser to server side methods without a full post back for years. But with the mash-up of technologies called AJAX, this is so much easier, more robust, and is going to be a huge enabling tool for web development in the future. I don't want to deprecate the use of the MS AJAX Toolkit. As a java script library, it's a very nice set of tools, but the true power of AJAX lays in the in the asynchronous nature of the technology.

Next on my list is WCF. I've been in an org for years that hasn't had a real need for an SOA, or the time and resources needed to deal with SOA and all the work it takes to put it together. Enter WCF and the encapsulation of all the plumbing necessary to do the grunt work, and let my dev team work on building business solutions.

Have a couple of books I'm working through. One great, and well one that's not worth the ink and paper it took to print is. The great one is "Programming WCF Services: Building SOAs with Windows Communication Foundation" from Juval Lowy.

So swing buy from time to time to listen to me rant. Technology, development, process are all on the table. Heck might even do a movie or book review or 2.