The first Agile Experience Group meeting was a very successful!
Turnout was 19/9, meaning nineteen people attended the meeting from 6:30 - 8:00 and nine went for drinks afterwards until about 10:00. Also, I received several emails from people who could not make the December meeting but are interested in attending in the future.
Here were the objectives for the first meeting:
* Get to know other people with Agile Experience.
* Make sure group's purpose and name are OK with
everyone.
* Discuss affiliation(s) with Agile Alliance, OTUG, etc.
* Decide next steps including:
* Meeting Format: what do we want?
* Next meeting time & location
And here is what we accomplished:
We did get to know each other and shared some very interesting experiences. Many good observations, experience stories, ideas, and laughs.
Some people who attended did not have agile project experience and that is just fine. Interest is all that matters. People without agile experience are welcome and make valuable contributions, as was the case last night.
The name of this group and the Yahoo! group are fine with everyone. We decided to become a special interest group of the Object Technology Users Group (an OTUG SIG). OTUG is an active, professional, non-profit organization that meets monthly, has a local mailing and email list, and a website and monthly newsletter that we can use for promoting the Agile Experience Group (AEG). See www.otug.org for more on OTUG.
We also decided to associate ourselves with and leverage the Agile Alliance. They are the folks who did the Agile Manifesto, www.agilealliance.org, and who just this week became an actual, formal organization.
A big part of the meeting was spent generating a list of ideas for what we wanted these meetings and this group to do. We brainstormed and then went around the room answering the question "What do you want from this group?"
The following whiteboard list shows, in no particular order,
what topics we are interested in and what people want from
this group:
Emergent Processes
Experience Reports
Camp Agile (pair-programming with laptops on pet projects)
Customer Experiences
-- including getting actual customers in to talk
Tool Reports
Agile Practices / Processes
Large Projects
-- see Martin Fowler's paper on a 60-person team
Culture / Organizations
Teams / Personalities
Extreme stories
Other Papers or Presentations
Personal Networking
Local Agile Flavors
-- what works & doesn't in the Twin Cities
Stealth Agile
-- like how to do XP "under the covers"
Selling Agile
-- getting stakeholder and others to buy in
Adaptive Agile
Learning
Education
Successful Agile
Organizations / Customers
Business Value
Contented Programmers
How Business Value & Contented Programmers go together
Project Management
Best Practices
Conversations
We decided to continue having meetings at the same location, ATI in Edina. OTUG meets on the third Tuesday of each month so AEG will meet the previous week but will alternate which day of that week. We agreed that 6:30 - 8:00 p.m. works well.
The topic for the next meeting is "Customer Experiences, Getting the Customer Involved". See "AEG Jan 2002 Meeting Plans" message for details.
Special thanks to Advanced Technologies Integration (ATI, www.atico.com) for providing the meeting space, snacks, refreshments, and for agreeing to host future meetings.
+Kyle