• Dave Nicolette about the organisation of the conference.
• Dave Nicolette about the Dimensional Planning session.
• Dave Nicolette about the Simproject session.
• Dave Nicolette about the Best way to introduce Agile? session.
• Dave Nicolette about the Seeking to perceive more than to be perceived session.
• Dave Nicolette's personal highlights
• Dave Nicolette: one more thing...
• Matteo Vaccari about the first day of the conference.
• Portia Tung's side of the XP Days Benelux 2008 simblog
• Pascal Van Cauwenberghe's side of the XP Days Benelux 2008 simblog
• Luc Segers
• Mary Beijleveld writes about the first day.
• Mary Beijleveld writes about the first day in Dutch.
• Mary Beijleveld writes about the second day.
• Yves Hanoulle describes his impression of the event.

Pictures

• Yves Hanoulle
• Xavier Quesada: Day 1 of the conference
• Patrick Debois Paircoaching lego game
• Bernard Vander Beken
• Stefan van den Oord's pictures of the Scrum board game

Thursday 20 November

08:30	Registration & coffee
09:30	Opening plenary
	Room 115	Room 111	Room 110	Tuinzaal	Room 42
10:00	Responsibility-driven Design with Mocking Marc Evers, Willem van den Ende & Rob Westgeest Presentation	The Best Way to Introduce Agile? Nicole Belilos	Is your team within the comfort zone of SCRUM? Vladimir Blagojevic , Olivier Biot, Nick Boucart & Wim Codenie Paper	How SCRUM saved the Internet Lars Vonk & Trudy Prins	Dimensional Planning for Fixed Price projects Koen Van Exem & Martien van Knippenburg Presentations
11:00	Coffee break
11:30	End-to-End Continuous Integration Xavier Quesada & Alex Snaps Presentation	So now you're an Agilist...What's next? Jurgen Appelo	Agile Metrics Dave Nicolette Presentation and more information	An Ericsson example of Enterprise Agility Jasper Goos & Marc Verschueren	Using Mingle for Agile Planning Koen De Hondt Presentation
12:30	Lunch
13:30	Testing your Tests Markus Hjort & Tuomas Karkkainen	SimProject Laurent Bossavit	Mirror, Mirror on the Wall... Why me? Portia Tung & Pascal Van Cauwenberghe Download the game	Paircoaching Agile Game Yves Hanoulle & Ignace Hanoulle	Coaching self-organizing teams Joseph Pelrine & Ben Fuchs
15:00	Coffee break
15:30	The Invariant Game Matteo Vaccari Slides Invariant Game Problembook	The Top 9 pitfalls of adopting SCRUM Cesario Ramos & Eelco Gravendeel Presentation	Critical Chain Christophe Thibaut & Olivier Pizzato	CONTINUED	CONTINUED
17:15	Closing
17:45	Working with Resistance - Olivier Costa & Frank Vanhoeck
18:15	Drinks sponsored by
19:00	Dinner
	Games Night

Friday 21 November

08:30	Registration & coffee
09:30	Opening plenary
	Room 115	Room 111	Room 110	Tuinzaal	Room 42
10:00	Seeking to perceive more than to be perceived Emmanuel Gaillot & Bernard Notarianni English Handout French Handout	SCRUM Board Game Wim van de Goor & Stefan van den Oord	My language is bigger than yours! Arnaud Bailly & Christophe Thibaut	One year of introducing Agile in a large organisation Didier Blanjean & Jan Verstrepen	Dirty Jobs Rob Westgeest & Tjakko Kleinhuis
11:00	Coffee break
11:30	CONTINUED	CONTINUED	CONTINUED	Agile SOA Rutger Dijkstra	CONTINUED
12:30	Lunch
13:30	Overcoming Resistance to Change Dave Nicolette & Lasse Koskela Materials	The Business Value Game Vera Peeters, Pascal Van Cauwenberghe & Portia Tung Download the game	At the riverside - Continuous Integration with Hudson Martin Heider	Distributed SCRUM at Dutch Railways Jan Vermeir	Eliminating Waste Patrick Steyaert, Wim Bollen
14:30			Coffee break
14:45			Executable story specifications with RSpec Rob Westgeest & Willem van den Ende	Agile Distribution. How to maintain velocity when distributing teams Eelco Rustenburg	Requirement decomposition, how far do we go? Jurgen De Smet & Marco Busschots Presentation slides
15:00	Coffee break
15:30	Both sides of the story! Go out and motivate people to make exciting changes Gino Marckx & Bernard Vander Beken Presentation / Handout	Hey Scrummaster! Let the team decide! Lieven Baeyens, Peter Janssens & Patrick Debois
15:45			Coffee break
16:00			10 things that can derail with Agile... and how to prevent it Tim Pijpops & Jan Van Reusel	Using XP+Scrum for medical software Christ Vriens & Erik Bos	Poker for Pros Jasper Goos & Mark Urban
17:15	Closing and drinks sponsored by

Objectives:

Presentation and discussion on Continous Integration and build promotion strategies for the enterprise agile release process

Intended audience:

Release managers, Developers, IT Managers, people who missed CITCON

Required experience: Notions of CI recommended

Contents

With agile methodologies gaining adoption, organizations are quick to setup their CI infrastructure. Yet they soon realize that having a full strategy involves more than just a CI server. How many enviroments are necessary? When to run automated tests? Should builds break if unit tests fail? How to solve integration issues? Does the process need to go all the way up to releasing to production?

In this session we will share our experiences addressing these and more questions in large scale enterprise environments.

Format and length: 50 minute presentation, 10 minute Q&A

Feedback forms

Session feedback

What did you like?

What will you apply or investigate?

What would you do to make the conference perfect?

What did you like about the sessions?

Tag clouds made with Wordle]]> pascal 24 November 2008 20:10 GMT http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2008/FrontPage.html http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2008/FrontPage.html XP Days Benelux 2008

20-21 November 2008

Koningshof conference center, Veldhoven, The Netherlands

Latest News

• 24/11/2008: The results of your feedback forms are being collected. They are published on the participant retrospective page.
• 24/11/2008: The conference is over. Session slides and outputs are available on the program page. Blog entries and pictures are being published on the reports page.
• 12/11/2008: Conference sold out. If you want to attend, register and we will put you on a waiting list to get any canceled tickets, first come, first served.
• 30/10/2008: Rally Software joins us as sponsor.
  
• 21/10/2008: Inxin joins us a bar sponsor.
  
• 27/09/2008: Outsystems and JetBrains have joined us as sponsors. Thanks to them we can offer a high value conference for a low cost.
• 13/09/2008: Get to know our presenters by visiting their blogs or by hanging out in the XP Days Benelux Friendfeed room
• 29/08/2008: The Program has been published
• 29/08/2008: Early registration is now open.

Sponsors

Agile Consortium Benelux

Media Sponsors

Building on my past experiences as software engineer in various technologies, I evolved towards localisation project lead and then to team lead, before jumping on the agile train, just as it started to move out of the AGFA Healthcare main station.

And what a ride it has been since: I have had the pleasure and privilegde to be SM in one of the first team to adapt the Agile SCRUM methodology, later helping to scale to 2 SCRUM teams, getting off-shore developers and test engineers on board in both teams.

In parallel, I have had multiple opportunities to act as a SCRUM coach for other emerging Agile SCRUM teams in AGFA Healthcare. 
Very recently, I took another significant step on my Agile journey, becoming a CSPO. 
I aim to continue playing a central role in the process of making AGFA Healthcare a truly Agile organisation.

Objectives:

Intended audience:

This session is for people who

• think that Agile and Fixed Price are contradiction in terms, but have an open mind
• want to try fixe price with minimal risk
• already did Agile Fixed Price but experienced overruns (time/budget)

Contents

Dimensional planning is planning technique that splits up requirements along functional and technical dimensions, we call them dirt, cobblestone and aphalted roads. Applying dimensions results in finer grained requirements, that eventually lead to more frequent feedback.

Contents

First we will demonstrate the current state of affairs by explaining 'Agile fixed price projects' as described in the two papers by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe.

• Agile Fixed Price Projects part 1: “The Price Is Right”
• Agile Fixed Price Projects part 2: “Do you want agility with that?”

Then we will briefly explain dimensional planning

• the technique and the jargon
• discussing functional and technical dimensions
• compare it to other planning techniques (e.g. Critical Chain/buffering)

After that we will explain how to apply Dimensional Planning to 'Agile fixed price projects'

• show how it differs from the former approach (e.g. allow change requests vs exchange requests)
• show what the benefits are using dimensional planning

Finally we will demonstrate our approach on the 'GSE For Sale' project.

• Pre Project Phase
• Project Phase

The Pre Project Phase is inspired by Feature Drive Development (FDD).
We will briefly describe FDD, a very old, yet very unknown, Agile Method.

Format and length: 60 min presentation

OutSystems is a software company providing the industry leading All-in-One Agile Platform for rapid delivery and management of web business applications that are built for continuous change.

Unlike traditional approaches, companies use the OutSystems Platform to deliver web business applications on-time and on-budget in weeks rather than months or years.  The platform provides IT Management complete control and visibility over the application delivery process without compromising the flexibility required to address continuous business change.

The combination of OutSystems' Platform and Methodology results in applications that continuously reflect evolving business needs, bridging the gap between IT and business across the entire application life cycle.

Since it was first introduced in 2001, the OutSystems Platform has been used to successfully develop, integrate, deploy and manage agile web business applications in over 4000 IT environments across 138 countries.

Rally Software helps organizations perfect the art of software development through Agile and Lean practices.

Rally is the #1 partner for Agile success through its family of products, coaching and community support. With a dedicated focus on Agile development, Rally helps software organizations of all sizes incrementally adopt Agile practices to shorten their development cycles and collaborate across distributed teams and silos.

Rally’s on-demand Agile lifecycle management products were honored with three-time Jolt Product Excellence Awards (the industry’s Oscars) in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and currently support 900 customers, 20,000 projects and 35,000 users in 50 countries.

With more than 5598 members located around the globe, the Agile Alliance is driven by the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We recommend agile approaches to software development because they deliver value to organizations and end users faster and with higher quality.

At JetBrains, we have a passion for making people more productive through smart software solutions that help them focus more on what they really want to accomplish, and less on mundane, repetitive "computer busy work".

JetBrains makes tools for developers like IntelliJ IDEA, TeamCity, ReSharper, DotTrace and MetaProgrammng system.

INXIN: Infrastructure for the Independent.

We provide management, development, sourcing and hosting of ICT projects. We are specialized in Agile Fixed Price projects, using our Dimensional Planning technique. INXIN works exclusively with independent workers, for whom we provide the necessary infrastructure. For the customer, this infrastructure is a guarantee for quality and continuity.

The Agile Consortium Benelux consists of leading companies that endorse the agile way of working. This Consortium, founded twelve years ago as DSDM Consortium Benelux, recently changed its focus into agile in general. Thereby we extend the power of DSDM/Atern with other agile principles, practices and philosophies. We offer individuals and organizations a platform for sharing knowledge and experience.

Objectives:

We'll give you a simple tool to better understand and manage your Scrum teams, both within and beyond the context of software development. The underlying simple metrics emerged from a study of 9 different teams, each applying Scrum to build other kinds of products than pure software products. Amazingly, the results uncovered two basic parameters applicable to both software and non-software developments: team's shared commitment and resolving ability. Participants will also get some insights in how to improve the team's working and increase effectiveness of Scrum.

Intended audience:

This session is targeted at people that want to know if scrum can work in their team/organization, people interested in applying scrum principles within their organization other then pure software development. Also people with mixed experiences in applying scrum can find some answers on why Scrum did not deliver the expected boost in their context.

Contents

Scrum is a successful agile management method for incremental software development whose success has raised an interest outside the software community. Can Scrum principles be applied to develop other types of products than software products? In this session, we will present the results of a study of several such alternative applications of Scrum (study included 9 different teams, each of them involved in building other kinds of products than pure software products). We identified four different models for applying Scrum based on two parameters: team's shared commitment and resolving ability. We developed a method called "Agile Probe" that allows you to position your team within those four models:

• Homogenous Model
• Coordination Model
• Co-opetition Model
• Dependency Model

This research resulted in a paper that we will presented during on Agile2008 in Toronto. It is also a continuation of last year's session - it's time to give something back to the community.

Format and length: 60 min presentation and interactive exercises

Conference centre Koningshof is situated a few km to the South-West of Eindhoven. The centre used to be a monestary. The traditional buildings have been expanded with modern conference rooms, restaurants, bar and a gym. The centre is situated in a green area.

The centre has hotel rooms for participants who want to stay on site. The organizers can help you book your stay.

Staying at Koningshof costs about 137€ per night including breakfast.

Getting there by car

• From ’s Hertogenbosch: take the A2/E25 towards Eindhoven and follow the direction Maastricht/Venlo A2/E25, take exit 32 (Veldhoven- Zuid). At the end of the exit turn right and then continue straight ahead for approximately 3 km, you will find NH Koningshof on your left.
• From Breda/Tilburg: take the A2/E25 towards Eindhoven and follow the direction Maastricht/Venlo A2/E25, take exit 32 (Veldhoven-Zuid). At the end of the exit turn right and then continue straight ahead for approximately 3 km, you will find NH Koningshof on your left.
• From Maastricht/Venlo area: take the A67/E34 towards Eindhoven and follow the direction Amsterdam/Tilburg A2/E25, take exit 32 (Veldhoven-Zuid). At the end of the exit turn left and then continue straight ahead for approximately 3 km, you will find NH Koningshof on your left.
• From Antwerp/Turnhout area: take the A67/E34 towards Eindhoven, take exit 32 (Eersel) and then continue in the direction of Steensel (3/4 roundabout). Approximately 2,5 km after Steensel in the direction of Veldhoven, you will find NH Koningshof on your right.

By train

By plane

Carpooling

The XP Days offer him a great forum to talk about this, and get a lot of useful feedback.

contact information

(linked your team ?)
www.aegisoft.be

What if there was a way to use this energy rather than fight it?

That's the core wisdom of Aikido.

Come and experience this in the XP Days Aikido dojo. You will first perform stretching and relaxation exercises. Then you will work in pairs, giving and receiving resistance. Learn how you can deal with the resistance more efficiently, using less force and tension.

At the end of this session you'll have experienced another way to deal with resistance.  Plus you'll be fully energized to complete the day with ease.

Please note:

The exercises are accessible to anyone, you don't need any martial arts experience, special clothing or material. You just just need to want to make your body move.

The exercises won't include complex aikido techniques (although a demo can include some). They will be about receiving fysical force while coördinating your body to keep your balance and redirecting the given energy to work for you rather than against you.

• Flevoland Foyer: registration and open space
  
• Room 116: sponsor and open space room
• Room 115: track 1
• Room 111: track 2
• Room 110: track 3
• Tuinzaal: plenaries and track 4
  
• Room 42: track 5
  

Click the map to enlarge

• Nicole Belilos (Topic Embedded Systems)
• Erik Groeneveld (Seek You Too)
• Yves Hanoulle (Paircoaching)
• Marc Evers (Piecemeal Growth)
• Johan Peeters (Johan Peeters bvba)
• Vera Peeters (Tryx)
• Portia Tung (Exoftware)
• Pascal Van Cauwenberghe (Nayima)
• Rob Westgeest (Westgeest Consultancy)

Participants

Country	Participants
The Netherlands	45%
Belgium	42%
France	4%
Great Britain	3%
Finland	2%
Canada	1%
Germany	1%
Italy	1%
United States	1%
Sweden	1%
Switzerland	1%

Speakers

Country	Speakers
Belgium	41%
The Netherlands	33%
France	10%
Finland	5%
Great Britain	3%
United States	2%
Germany	2%
Italy	2%
Switzerland	2%

Objectives of the session :

During the session, participants will have the opportunity to

• learn techniques that allow to get a better grasp at a group's potential, and to individually use it more efficiently
• practice with communication tools they'll be able to reuse immediately in other contexts
• think about how to contribute to increase the value of a conference
• have fun and meet other people sharing analog interests

Anyone interested in learning through experimentation how they can get more results from their teamwork is welcome to attend. Any level and background is ok.

The session needs at least 5 attendees and scales well up to 50.

Contents:

A drama in a developers' team. Two experienced programmers violently argue about which design choice will satisfy best the customers' requirements they have to implement. Three others, slightly taken aback, wonder about whom they should side for. One of them thinks, maybe it's the right time to suggest rewriting the whole thing, in a programming language she likes particularly. Intervenes the team's manager. He brutally settles the case — because "we have to keep moving forward" — along an orientation that suits no one.

Group work is often the stage of negotiations of territory : a compromise with the others, a compromise with one self. "Am I cut out for it? Do I have my place here? How to contribute? Will I manage to impose my ideas?," one may think. If several team members follow this mindset, there is soon a deluge of ideas and information, many mutually contradictory, unexploited due to lack of time, everyone waiting for the moment they'll be able to offer "their" contribution, oblivious to others. Here lies a paradox: even when we (think we) know what the group needs, saying it may hinder the group in its finding answers.

As members of various groups — agile teams, family, business companies… — we can do better.

This session explores an alternative to "information push:" to seek in others with a curious mind the stories and ideas they might have, and to combine them with what has already be shared. This benevolent, attentive listening, this non-judgmental investigation helps to embrace ideas that surround us, and to meet more efficiently the whole group's expectations.

We'll experiment with several tools that help adopting an active listener posture — namely: Marvin Harris's emic approach, Tadashi Suzuki's Soft Focus and Jim & Michele McCarthy's Investigate protocol, taken from their Core Protocol. We'll discuss together the discoveries we'll have made along the session.

Format and length: Tutorial, 120 minutes. This is a fast-paced, hands-on, experiential session.]]> pascal 20 October 2008 21:55 GMT http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2008/sessions/SCRUMmanager Let the Team Decide.html http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2008/sessions/SCRUMmanager Let the Team Decide.html Presenters: Lieven Baeyens, Peter Janssens & Patrick Debois

Objectives:

To get insight into the delicate balance between - respecting the self organization of a team - and the urging feeling to apply your authority and imply changes as Scrum master.

Presentation of Results + Roleplaying. (+/- 90 minutes)

Intended audience:

Anyone involved in scrum management: Scrum masters, coaches, product owner, team leads We would briefly explain the self-organizing concept in Scrum, so in depth Scrum knowledge is not an absolute requirement. Any managerial experience is welcome to feed the discussion.

Contents

A self-organizing team is a powerful concept. But what if the team collectively decides to go into a direction that you as a Scrum Master know for sure that they will hit problems. (or at least you think)

F.i. they decide to abandon retrospectives. Will you respect their decision or will you try to change it? Would you go for option 1) respect the team or 2) try to convince the team away from their decision.

Format and length:90 min workshop

Read our presenter's blogs

• Jurgen Appelo - NOOP: Managing Software Development
• Patrick Debois - JEDI
• Koen De Hondt - Code, the Universe and Everything
• Jurgen De Smet - Agile Fun
• Marc Evers - Dreamfeed
• Emmanuel Gaillot - Words, words, words
• Yves Hanoulle - PairCoaching Weblog
• Markus Hjort's blog
• Peter Janssens' blog
• Tuomas Karkkainen - Miau.biz
• Lasse Koskela - Lasse's blog
• Dave Nicolette - Effective Software Development
• Bernard Notarianni's blog
• Xavier Quesada - From Zero to Agile
• Alex Snaps' weblog
• Portia Tung - Selfish Programming
• Matteo Vaccari's blog
• Bernard Vander Beken's blog
• Pascal Van Cauwenberghe - Thinking for a Change
• Willem van den Ende - Me.Andering
• Rob Westgeest - not a resource