Agile Atlanta on July 8th: Agile Architecture IS Possible

Before you start your Independence Day celebrations, don't forget to add the next Agile Atlanta meeting to your calendar! On Tuesday, July 8th, Mark Isham will us a special sneak preview of the presentation he is delivering in August at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto.

Agile Architecture IS Possible - You First Have to Believe!

Speaker: Mark Isham
Date: July 8th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Have you ever been told “Agile works great for UI, but just doesn’t work for large scale systems architecture”? In this experience report, I will review a real world project to redesign a successful large scale ecommerce system that became plagued with growing pains. After the team initially ran to the comfort of a long term waterfall project, cost overruns and escalating problems necessitated a new approach. Enter in Scrum and a focus on iterations and frequent customer feedback, and a once failed project turned into a blazing success.

Process/Mechanics

1. Review of the problems we were hitting
2. Overview of the initial “monolithic” redesign ideas
3. Discuss business pushback on those ideas
4. Discuss push to try agile technics to solve
5. Cultural resistance faced by original architects from #2
6. Talk about the points made and counter-arguments presented
7. Review the revised iterative approach to solving
8. Followup with results on how that approach worked.


Agile Atlanta group on LinkedIn (Thanks Al Snow!!):
http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sortCriteria=3&groupFilter=120862

Upcoming Meetings:
August 12th: Regular monthly meeting, topic TBA
September 9th: Regular monthly meeting, topic TBA
September 25th-26th: APLN Leadership Summit, Marriott Perimeter Center

Upcoming Training:
July 31st - August 1st: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Chris Doss, Innovel, LLC
August 13th-14th: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Bryan Stallings, Rally Software Development

Thanks!
Handly Cameron
http://handly.blogspot.com
" type="hidden"> Before you start your Independence Day celebrations, don't forget to add the next Agile Atlanta meeting to your calendar! On Tuesday, July 8th, Mark Isham will us a special sneak preview of the presentation he is delivering in August at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto.

Agile Architecture IS Possible - You First Have to Believe!

Speaker: Mark Isham
Date: July 8th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Have you ever been told “Agile works great for UI, but just doesn’t work for large scale systems architecture”? In this experience report, I will review a real world project to redesign a successful large scale ecommerce system that became plagued with growing pains. After the team initially ran to the comfort of a long term waterfall project, cost overruns and escalating problems necessitated a new approach. Enter in Scrum and a focus on iterations and frequent customer feedback, and a once failed project turned into a blazing success.

Process/Mechanics

1. Review of the problems we were hitting
2. Overview of the initial “monolithic” redesign ideas
3. Discuss business pushback on those ideas
4. Discuss push to try agile technics to solve
5. Cultural resistance faced by original architects from #2
6. Talk about the points made and counter-arguments presented
7. Review the revised iterative approach to solving
8. Followup with results on how that approach worked.


Agile Atlanta group on LinkedIn (Thanks Al Snow!!):

Upcoming Meetings:
August 12th: Regular monthly meeting, topic TBA
September 9th: Regular monthly meeting, topic TBA
September 25th-26th: APLN Leadership Summit, Marriott Perimeter Center

Upcoming Training:
July 31st - August 1st: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Chris Doss, Innovel, LLC
August 13th-14th: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Bryan Stallings, Rally Software Development

What Twitter is for: Communities of Purpose

David Cushman has blogged that Twitter Isn't About Conversation - It's About Forming Groups.

This is a great point. Much of the value I get from Twitter is getting a feel for how the community is thinking about various subjects. Many times someone tweats on an idea or links to a new article which triggers a discussion and gets more new ideas flowing.

...

Twitter is for forming groups - communities of purpose. Communities of purpose may be adhoc. They may come together to solve a shared problem for a short period and then disband, often with overlaps, as they evolve toward the next purpose. And Twitter is exceptional at doing this - because of its architecture, because of the
fuzzy-edge nature of the way groups form, reform and evolve.

The open sharing of our metadata, in the form of 'status updates' or 'look at this conversation-starting link' or 'look who I'm talking to' kind of tweets help us find our right-now community of purpose and start a conversation within it.

See David's post to read more.

Cool Enterprise 2.0 chart

Michael Pincher linked to a cool Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint by R. Todd Stevens.

This chart brings together a model of Business Drivers, Actors, Technology, Methods, and Value-Add for Enterprise 2.0. I have printed a copy for my wall as a great reference of all of the things to consider when bringing organizations up to speed with the latest in social and collaborative technology.

Thanks R. Todd!

New Lotus product wikis encourage a better community

As Ed Brill just pointed out, the Lotus DeveloperWorks team just changed all of the product wikis from the previous Confluence based engine to a new Domino-based platform. You can read details of all of the new features here.

This is really a great step forward for the Lotus wikis. The previous implementation for the Lotus wikis was locked down pretty tight, did not do much to make the layout pretty or easy to read, and generally seemed pretty disorganized.

In this new platform, Lotus and the community realize several benefits:

• The look and feel is very pretty and matches the new Quickr / Connections / Sametime UIs.
• Better navigation, tag clouds, RSS feeds, and search capabilities make the content of the wikis much more accessible.
• Most importantly, all of the content is now editable using your regular IBM/Lotus web login (assuming you can find the right one). There is even a $25 incentive for the first 50 new, significant articles by external people.
  
• The wiki is using Lotus technology*, which is good considering they sell a product with a wiki.

Perhaps the only drawback I see so far is that the article editing is just a simple rich text field and misses the one key feature that makes a wiki a wiki, which is auto-linking to existing and future content. I'll talk more on that in a future post ...


*Don't get me wrong - I love Confluence. It and its sister product,
JIRA, are two of the best Java applications I have had the pleasure to
work with (and I spent 7 years running Java development teams)
including feature capabilities, deployment, administration, and an easy
to manage plug-in environment with a strong community. Features like
proper forward linking to new documents, auto save, and great
extensions like the charting plug-in make Confluence a great tool to
work in. Quickr, Sharepoint, and many others have a long way to go in
understanding that a wiki is more than just an editable rich text field!

IBM shows Microsoft that social computing is about the people

This morning, IBM and Microsoft presented Lotus Connections and Sharepoint in a head-to-head demo of social networking platforms. Of course, the play by play got published instantly on the public social networks.

Apparently Microsoft focused on email and document management, which did not wow the crowd. IBM got points for talking about how social networking is about the people. Quotes included "MS failing dismally at showing off Sharepoint collab tools. IBM totally ate their lunch.".

A few blog posts on the session:

IBM wins round 1 against Microsoft!
Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft
Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft Part 1
Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft Part 2

Finally, the conference has a social page devoted to the session:
Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft

Agile Atlanta: Executable Specification and Behavior Driven Development

June's Agile Atlanta meeting is coming up on Tuesday!

Executable Specification and Behavior Driven Development

Speaker: Bob Vincent
Date: June 10th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Bob will be presenting a paper he is delivering to the IBM Academy of Technology Agile Practices and Methods Conference.


Upcoming Meetings:
July 8th: Agile Architecture IS Possible - You First Have to Believe!, presented by Mark Isham (see http://submissions.agile2008.org/node/2835 for more details)


Upcoming Training:
June 19th: Agile Roadmapping , delivered by Peter Hodgkins with Agile University
August 13th-14th: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Bryan Stallings, Rally Software Development