Bonn Agile Meetup - October 2012: Retrospectives

Just a quick post to inform that the October meetup in one week will be about Retrospectives.

Read more on Xing and sign up for the event there.

September Meetup: Continuous Delivery

Some pics from our September meetup:

The gang sharing their experiences on Continuous Delivery.

Our Continuous Delivery "Capability Maturity Model" :)

Thanks for the great discussions! Some links and resources can be found in the mailing list.

Bonn Agile Meetup - August 2012: CQRS and Event Sourcing

Last Monday we did our September meetup at one of Bonn University's buildings.

Many thanks to Lukas Pustina for setting us up with the new venue! Even though it is a bit removed from stuff like bars and shops, I think it could be a nice locale for any meetups where we need to have a lot of table-space for laptops, like code-retreats and dojos.

This time around, Daniel Westheide (twitter, homepage) joined in to talk about CQRS and Event Sourcing. It's an extremely interesting pattern that I think a lot of teams should consider, instead of overusing the classic CRUD/DAO model everywhere. 

Señor developer @kaffeecoder presenting away

Unfortunately, we didn't get too much audience this time, due to the awesome weather conditions, but hopefully Daniel will repeat his talk at some other venues (?). In any case, his slides and demo-code are available on Github:

• Code example (Scala)
• Slides (html in a zip)

Big thanks to Daniel for doing this presentation!

Bonn Agile Sommerfest 2012: Retrospective

In spite of the rainy weather, we fired up the barbecue for Monday's Sommerfest, and most of the RSVP'ed showed up, so we totalled around 17 people. After eating, Thorsten Kalnin guided us through a great Kanban simulation game that you can read more about here.

BBQ tasted really well, in spite of the rain

Pizzas in the making

Between pizza baking days

Thanks for coming everyone, and thanks to Viaboxx for hosting us once again!

Bonn Agile Sommerfest 2012: The Kanban Pizza Game

Monday (16th of July) it's time for our annual Summer Party!

The Sommerfest will again take place at "Villa Viaboxx"

Agenda

Agile coach and speaker Thorsten Kalnin will be joining us to facilitate a fun and interesting Kanban game:

With the Kanban Pizza Game from agile42 you can find out how Kanban feels like. While common Kanban games are usually focussing only on the flow in an existing Kanban system, our new Kanban Pizza Game shows in addition how to get from an existing process to a Kanban system.

We start barbecuing, eating and drinking around 18:00-19:00, and then towards 19:30 we'll start the game.

Location

   

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Sign up

Xing event is here.

Mailing list discussion here.

Bonn Agile Meetup - June Recap

A rather technical subject this time: Daniel Kurka visited us to tell us about GWT-PhoneGap and mgwt (links). It was a really great presentation, and afterwards some very interesting discussions on everything from augmented reality to apps-overload at the "retrospective":

What's more is that a couple of weeks later, there were some big announcements at the Google IO conference. You can read more about the news on Daniel's blog.

Bonn Agile Meetup - 18. Juni: GWT-PhoneGap

Wann, wo, was

Wie üblich treffen wir uns am dritten Montag im Monat. 

Dieses mal am 18. Juni um 19:00 Uhr bei

data in transit
Adolfstr. 34a
53111 Bonn

Daniel Kurka wird einen Vortrag über GWG-PhoneGap halten

PhoneGap erfreut sich nach wie vor sehr großer Beliebtheit und bietet dabei die Möglichkeit mit einfachen Webkenntnissen mobile cross-plattform Apps zu schreiben. Hierzu wird oft Javascript und CSS3 eingesetzt.

Daniel Kurka wird zwei Open Source Frameworks vorstellen, mit denen solche Apps nicht in Javascript sondern in Java erstellt werden können: mgwt und GWT-PhoneGap. mgwt stellt dabei Widgets zur Verfügung, die Anwendungen auf jeder Plattform wie native Anwendungen aussehen lassen. GWT-PhoneGap ermöglicht es aus GWT Anwendungen PhoneGap Funktionalität zu nutzen.


Daniel Kurka ist seit ca. 15 Jahren Webentwickler und Open Source Committer. Seit 2009 erstellt er u.a. mobile Anwendungen mit GWT und PhoneGap und hat zu diesem Zweck zwei Open Source Projekte veröffentlicht: mgwt und GWT-PhoneGap. Durch diese Frameworks ist er zu einem Experten für performante, mobile, cross-plattform Anwendungen auf Basis von HTML5 und CSS3 geworden.

Bonn Agile Meetup - May 2012: Git

When, where, what

As usual, the meetup will take place on the third Monday of the month, this time on the 21st of May. We begin at 19:00.

We will be at Tarent's offices in Bonn-Duisdorf (PDF with instructions for getting there).

• Xing event (unfortunately it is already booked out, but some places might free up as we get closer to the date, so check back regularly)
• Mailing list discussion

Topic this time is the distributed revision control system Git. I'll give a rough intro to what it is, how it works and how to use it, and then we'll discuss ideas, experiences, and so on.

Homework

If you have no experience with Git, it would be cool if you try installing it and play around a little, just to get a feel for it and what kind of questions you'd like to ask during the talk.

Want to sponsor some Git knowledge?

If you are a company, and you want to inspire some book reading in the Bonn Agile community, it would be awesome if you buy and bring a few Git books to hand out the event. Either I can use them as rewards for good questions, or we just hand them out at random. Feel free to stick some company fliers or business cards inside the books, or write a greeting inside the cover!

Here are some German Git books:

• Git - kurz & gut (9,90€)
• Git - Verteilte Versionsverwaltung für Code und Dokumente (29,90€)

While I'm at it: Call for talks, lightning talks and topics for discussion

We are continuously looking for speakers that can provide material for discussion at the meetups. We accept any kinds of longer talks, lightning talks and discussion formats!

• Do you have experience with a practice or a tool, and you'd like to share with the community?
• Is there a new technology, trend or hype you would like to discuss at the meetup?
• Do you know some agile coach or guru in the vicinity that might come by to do a talk for us?

It doesn't have to be fancy, or too extensive, as we are a small and informal group. So if you got any ideas for a meetup, write it into the idea wiki page, send an email to bonnagile@googlegroups.com, or mail me directly on tfnico@gmail.com.

Bonn Agile Meetup - April 2012: Test Automation

The next Bonn Agile Meetup will take place on the 16th of April (we begin at 19:00 as usual). Testing expert Stephan Kämper (blog) will share with us some thoughts on test automation:

(German abstract)

Testautomatisierung wird viel diskutiert und (abhängig davon wen man fragt) geliebt oder verabscheut. Im Vortragsteil stelle ich vor was Tester in agilen Teams darunter verstehen und wie (und von wem!) es von Unit-Tests bis zu User-Acceptance-Tests umgesetzt werden kann. 

Besonders interessant und sinnvoll sind automatisierte Tests auf "Geschäfts-Ebene" die Projektleiter und Benutzer verstehen können und die als "ausführbare Spezifikation" Team sehr dabei helfen die richtige Funktionalität zu Entwickeln.

If you have any ideas or thoughts around test automatization you want to discuss at the meetup, please tweet about it while including the hashtags #bonnagile #testauto.


Doo GmbH has been kind enough to provide us with a location for this meetup. Their address is:

Argelanderstraße 1, 53115 Bonn

Furthermore..

• Sign up for the event on Xing
• Discuss on the mailing list

Bonn Agile Meetup - March 2012: Cultivating Code Quality

This time we'll meet to discuss how we can cultivate good code quality. Jan Nonnen from the Bonn University will present a tool called Cultivate (update: link fixed!).

Cultivate evaluates and visualizes bad code smells and software metrics. Results are either shown as a textual representation or via a variety of diagrams, focusing on specific design aspects. Developers using Cultivate can easily define a software architecture. During development, violations imposed by the architecture constraints, are indicated. Cultivate shows and analyses also the underlying software concepts, represented in the identifier names. 

Hopefully we'll have time to discuss our experiences and opinions about tools and practices we have used for improving code quality.

The meetup will take place on Monday, 19th of March, 2012 at

data in transit
Adolfstr. 34a
53111 Bonn

Update: We begin at 19:00.

For directions check http://g.co/maps/kz6k8.
Sign up for the Xing event and contribute to the discussion on the mailing list.

Bonn Agile Meetup - February 2012: Sustainable Pace

In February, the Bonn Agile Meetup focuses on "Sustainable Pace".

Sustainable Pace is an essential part of both Extreme Programming and the Agile Manifesto. In contrast to aspects like Test-Driven Development or Continuous Integration, Sustainable Pace is less known, less formalized, and thus is often perceived as fuzzy or diffuse.

An introductory presentation will establish a context for dialogue and discussion.

The meetup will take place on Monday, Feb 27, 2012 at

data in transit
Adolfstr. 34a
53111 Bonn

For directions check http://g.co/maps/kz6k8.

We are looking forward to your participation! To RSVP, sign up for the event on Xing.