Ariel Schapiro’s Blog

I had the chance to speak at the second Latin-American Conference on Agile Development Methodologies, running now in Florianópolis, Brazil. I’m having a really good time attending to some talks offered by great personalities of the Agile movement such as Brian Marick who gave an excellent opening keynote, Diana Larsen who’s talk about generating trust in teams I found really exciting, Roy Singham (founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, Inc.) who made from yesterday’s closure keynote an inspiring message of South America opportunities in the years coming and Dave Nicolette, a guru of agile metrics who’s work I follow very closely.

My session was about a process of measuring cross-project indicators that an agile company can follow once they are compliance with the baseline of measurements such as velocity, code quality. More details here.

Two collages from Southworks spoke at this event too: Martin Salias gave a high level view of practices to follow after succesfully adopting agile culture and practices, while Nicolas Paez gave a workshop around agile estimation and planning. We filmed our talks so I guess some time in the future they’ll be published.

If you follow (or intend to follow :)) agile practices and didn’t get the chance to go to any edition of Agiles, I really recommend you don’t loose the next edition (country to be defined) and in the meantime contact your local agile community for other local events.

Stay tunned for more updates!

Last Tuesday I attended to June’s meeting of an agile practitioners group called "Agiles" (Spanish). The topic for that meeting in particular was "How do you start your projects?". Overall product planning and project, team and process setup were some of the activities discussed as part of the first iteration of an agile project.

The format for the meeting was similar to a Lightning Talk; in this case a series of time-boxed presentations and Q&A (7 +3 mins). Presentations were very interesting, but especially I always find this kind of talks formats very effective: as opposed to long open discussions, they help the audience to get quickly to the point, have a fare amount of questions and then move to the next presentation. This way the audience (customer?) gets added value after a short iteration, in this case of 10 minutes. Any similitude with agile goals?

July 14th meeting will be around estimation in agile projects and they’ll use the same Lightning Talk format.