Blog-fade

Dear subscribers and people who just happened to come across this blog.

We've discussed our communication guidelines recently, and arrived at the conclusion that the blog is one of the less valuable channels to maintain. We've therefore ceased posting updates here.

Head over to the homepage to find other channels that you can follow.

Thanks for checking in!

Bonn Agile Meetup - July 2013: Dealing with Burnout

I've been hearing a lot about burnout in the industry lately,  especially in the open-source, podcasting and community where such things are unavoidably public. 

We've all had shorter or longer mini-burnouts in our careers, so let's get together over a beer and talk about how to deal with burnouts, before and when they happen.

When/where:

Tue, 02 Jul 2013, 19:00

Bierhaus Machold

Heerstr. 52

53111 Bonn

Germany

• Groups discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bonnagile/m7ejAplGb0w 
• Xing event: https://www.xing.com/events/bonn-agile-meetup-july-2013-dealing-burnout-1266459

Bonn Agile Meetup - June 2013: Communicating in Distributed Teams

More and more teams are working in a distributed fashion.

Many people find it comfortable and practical to work from home, or from cafes and parks, saving themselves the commute. Other teams are simply spread out across countries or continents.

Distributing the team collides with the agile practice of co-location (everyone together in one room). But thanks to technology, the communication barriers are being overcome with the help of video, chat-rooms, and asynchronous workflows (code-reviews instead of pair-programming, etc).

This time we'll meet to exchange experiences and ideas on how to best achieve distributed-team nirvana. What practices have you tried? What tools are there? Where do you get tips on how to get started?

Where
Bierhaus Machold
Heerstr. 52
53111 Bonn

When
Tue, 04 Jun 2013, 19:00

Sign up for event on Xing

The May meetup

After the Easter break the Bonn Agile meetup will be back in full swing on May 7th with a focus on the agile principle "individuals and interactions over processes and tools". Christoph Baudson will be sharing his thoughts in an opinionated talk titled "Der Mensch in artgerechter Haltung". Here's a synopsis:

We know people are different and should be treated appropriately - individuals and interactions over processes and tools, as the fathers of the agile manifesto stated. They didn't mention it was really hard, especially in environments with lots of processes and tools.

We also know all models are wrong; but some are useful! The talk will show a few ways how to simplify this complex endeavour. We'll cover the traffic situation in South East Asia, discuss the relevance of Aristotle and Plato, find out why some prefer 'Star Wars' and others '2001', investigate molluscs and clams, and finally play a game of poker.

The meetup will take place on May 7th (first Tuesday of the month) at 19:00, and will be hosted by the awesome people of doo in Bonn (directions).

And if you're still not convinced - you can also win books!

Sign up for the event at Xing!

Feel free to join the discussion at the group mailing list.

Bonn Agile Meetup - March 2013: Web-testing with Geb

The next meetup we will continue our quest for great tests! This time Michael Kutz will show us the awesomeness of driving web-tests using the Geb Framework (and Spock, which you might remember from the previous meetup).

Discussion and preparations for this meetup can be found here. Just drop a line if you have any particular questions or things you want Michael to cover in his talk.

We will meet at Tarent in Bonn (directions PDF).

We begin at 19:00, and the day is the first Tuesday of the month (as it will be in foreseeable future), which is Tuesday, 5th of March.

Sign up for the Xing event.

Bonn Agile Meetups in February/March

Summary:

• Bar meetup: Next week at Mojito, Monday 18th of February
• Next proper meetup, Tuesday 5th of March

Read on for the longer version:

Two Year Anniversary

The next Bonn Agile Meetup will be an informal bar meetup to celebrate our two-year anniversary! This is the last time we'll follow the old schedule where we meet the third Monday of the month. So we'll meet at Mojito on the 18th of February at 19:00. Yes, that's in one week.

Here is the Xing event for the February bar meetup.

New Meeting Schedule

After the anniversary meetup, we'll switch the regular meetup schedule. Our new plan is to meet on the first Tuesday of every Month. You can read the reasoning for this on the mailing list.

Next proper Bonn Agile Meetup

Most importantly: The next proper Bonn Agile Meetup will be 5th of March. The Meetup will probably be at Tarent - and the topic will be around Automated Web Testing with Geb.

Resources from the January Meetup (TDD with Spock)

All in all I think we were around 17 people at the last meetup. Thanks all for coming, and big thanks to Data in Transit for hosting once again!

Our little improv pair programming with Spock was very fun, and we even learned a couple of new things ourselves on the way. Here is the code we ended up with during the meetup live coding:

https://github.com/tfnico/bonnagile-spock/tree/meetup

The Spock tests are located in here.

If you want to have a look at the first implementation Daniel and I came up with, you can find it here (master branch):

https://github.com/tfnico/bonnagile-spock

Some links that were mentioned:

• Spock homepage
• Try out Spock in the browser
• Spock docs
• Geb (Spock-powered web tests)
• Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests

A picture of the crowd:

And one of the speakers, @kaffeecoder and @tfnico:

Finding a new time to meet

After the January meetup in a week, we'll be looking for a new time of the month to meet regularly.

I've asked at Nerdhub.de, who are the closest thing to an authority on these things, and they say Tuesday is generally the day with the most free spots around the area.

So, here's the poll. It first lists possible Tuesdays, and then the remaining free Mondays:

http://doodle.com/2a7aptcrz7r94ac3

Please check all options where you *can* participate. Thanks!

Bonn Agile Meetup - Januar 2013: Modern TDD with Spock

This time we'll get together to talk about one of the most recurring topics in agile circles: testing!

Daniel and Thomas have been switching a lot of unit tests from standard JUnit to the feature rich testing tool called Spock. This meetup they'll share some of their experiences.

Currently Spock can only test Java and Groovy code, but the talk should be interesting to anyone familiar with any xUnit testing tool, as many Spock features have and probably will be ported to other languages/test-frameworks.

Where:

Data in Transit
Adolfstr. 34a
53111 Bonn

When:

Mon, 21 Jan 2013, 19:00

Sign up:

Xing Event

Bonn Agile Meetup - November 2012: Learning

This is just a post to journal the last meetup we had in 2012. This was another bar meetup, with some fruitful discussions on how we acquire knowledge. I think we were six people in the end.