Tuesday 21 October 2008

Another Cracking Session

Last Thursday 16th October saw another great session at NxtGenUG Southampton, Plamen Balkanski and myself discussed Scrum and Agile techniques and end the session with a planning game that was based around a NxtGen pizza machine.

Everyone was split into groups of 5 people and given two iterations of 10 minutes to produce drawings/models of the end product, the whole point of the game is to give people a very brief introduction into what it might feel like to be on an agile team. The response we had from most members was generally positive and they all had fun although some people were a little confused and didn't quite get it.

If any one is interested in the slides they can be found here.

Thursday 9 October 2008

"Agile" Birthday to Us

So my run of presenting seems to be continuing what with my WatiN nuggets at NxtGenUG Southampton, followed by my WatiN nugget success at Remix 08 and then a recent WatiN nugget at NxtGenUG Cambridge I figured it was may be time for a change. So I am teaming up with a good friend of mine Plamen Balkanski to do a full session on Scrum and Agile methods at NxtGenUG Southampton, it's also the Southampton region's 1st birthday so it should be quite fun with the usual pizza and swag a plenty.

The session will essentially be an introduction to Scrum, what is it all about and why your company may benefit from using it, but we'll also be getting everyone involved in an agile planning game that will ensure that every single attendee will "feel" what it is like to be involved in an Agile project when it is done correctly.

The session is taking place on Thursday 16th October and you can find more details about it here, I look forward to seeing you there.

WatiNCF - Live on CodePlex

I've had a fair bit of interest in my WatiN Controller Framework recently and after attending Remix the other week and seeing Sara Ford (her blog has some awesome Visual Studio tips and tricks) doing a talk about CodePlex and it's new integration with Subversion clients such as Tortoise SVN I decided it was about time I published it, so for anybody that may be interested, the project can be found at http://www.codeplex.com/WatiNCF.

At the moment there aren't any help files apart from my blog and there is no installation file so you'll just have to download the source code and build it for yourself, if I get a bit of time over the coming weeks I'll post a bit more about how you go about using the framework but if you have any immediate questions in the short term just let me know.

Please feel free to add any comments or submit proposals for changes or even contribute to the project if you like, just let me know how you get on with it if it helps you or even if it doesn't.

I hope you find this useful in some way.