OTUG October 17, 2006 Meeting

Abstract

Building on the success of the September meeting, October will once again follow an open space format. The 20 or so people who showed up last month explored a variety of topics. Eight got involved with the 59-minute Scrum, while the rest went off to sit in comfy chairs with a flip chart while they discussed TDD and Legacy Systems. After exhausting that topic, they went on to discuss other topics they'd be interested in hearing about in future open space sessions. Check out the flip chart pictures in the September meeting files.

Here are two potential topics for the October Open Space that have willing convenors:

• Lego League Possibilities for OTUG (Doug Koch)
• How to make OTUG relevant to more people (Pam Rostal)

Topics recommended by last month's open space session are listed below. Choose one you'd like to convene a session on, or add a new one by submitting a topic to the webmaster with your name as the Convenor.

Business Value

• How to Measure
• When to Measure
• Formalized Models
• Integrate with project planning

First Lego League

• Community Outreach / volunteering
• Research papers?
• OTUG meeting with kids and robots
• Connect with TC Robot group? (every 3rd Thursday at Science Museum)

Enhancing Creativity on Software Teams

• When not to be creative?
• How is knowledge for creative work best shared with team?

How to narrow choices of new technologies / methodologies / information to learn

• Filtering important stuff from noise
• Pick high ROI

Connecting w/other professionals

• TCJUG
• MN Info Professional Soc.
• TCRUG
• Testers Gp.
• Ruby gp
• .Net gp.
• See Computer User

New Technologies

• Spring
• Interop
• Hibernate
• Ruby/Rails
• Squeak
• Other languages
• Struts
• ESBs (e.g. Mule)
• AJAX
• .Net (many)
• MS Power Shell

Several topics were proposed online for last month, but only two of the people who made the proposals actually showed up. One of the conventions of Open Space is that the person who proposes a topic stands up and explains the reason it's worth discussing. That being the case, if you're going to propose a topic to the OTUG webmaster, it represents a commitment to be a convenor if the attendees want to pursue your topic. Therefore, please put a topic on only if you're planning to convene the session, and add your name with the topic.

Topics Abandoned Last Month Because of No Convenor - Still of Interest?

• Implementing Agile practices when Agile is a Dirty Word
• Developer Knowledge Bases - Best Practices/How to Implement
• The Persistent Persistence Quandary - Architectures, Open Source Options, Best Practices, Trade-Offs
• Next Generation Service/Server Architectures to Fuel Rich Internet Client Apps.
• SOA (DOA?) - How to find value in the maze of Marketecture, Standards, and Bloated Technology Stacks.
• Java Architectures for Enterprise Apps: The Spring VS EJB/J2EE VS ? Smackdown
• OO Design Patterns and Idioms for Dynamic Languages