Scrum Trainers and Coaches Wanted!

The Ukranian agile user group is looking forward to cooperate with Scrum Trainers and Coaches for

• conducting CSM classes in the region;
• team coaching for the local companies;
• possible long-term collaboration.

Please contact us per email.
We would be happy to work with you and your consulting teams.

Scrum Initiation course

Agile Ukraine conducts a half-day trainings on Scrum and Agile.

The training is called 'Scrum Initiation'.

Why 'initiation'?

You could as well call this an 'introduction' or a 'kick-off', we just like it to be an 'initiation'
as it calls for further actions to be performed by the trainees on their own after the course.

Learning Scrum or any other Agile practices cannot be taught as a University subject or a science. It is rather a never-ending self-educational practical curve that an IT professional should do over his/her career.

The course gives advices on where to start and where to aim. It provides reusable patterns that will make it easier to start from. Explains the need of being agile versus being ineffective. It gives useful hints on how one can be doing Agile in distributed environment.

The Topics

The agenda of the training will be varying upon the audience and their expertise in Agile. Though in general it should cover the following topics:

1 Agile philosophy
2 Scrum as one of the Agile approaches
3 Concepts and principles of Scrum
4 Structure of Scrum: meetings, artifacts
5 What Scrum gives to the teams. XP and Scrum
6 What Scrum gives to the customers
7 Starting a project with Scrum: reviewing different cases (optional part)
8 Scrum and User Stories (optional part)
9 Scrum in outsourcing: experience of Ciklum, drawbacks, possible solutions (optional part)
10 Questions and Answers

What will you be able to do after the course?

• You will be able to help your team or assist the others in starting a project using Scrum framework or moving an existing project on to the Scrum rails.
  
  
• After the course you will be able to explain to your colleagues and customers the benefits of being agile, the agile principles and values.
  
  
• You will be able to see easily if a given team is doing Agile or not and will know how to help them.
  
  
• You will be able to know more sources on Agile information.
  
  
• You will have a chance in becoming an active member of the Agile Ukraine group.
  

Interested? Email us now.

Вторая конференция: Agile Gathering

This event is in the past.
Please refer to our Events page for further Gatherings and other group events.

Acknowledgments

First of all let me thank everyone who was able to come and participate in our second gathering. Though it was a working day, about 40 people were able to attend. We appreciate your interest in the topic and tried to make sure your time was properly spent.

We very much thank to Mike Vizdos, Alexander Laszlo Ross and Alexey Maslov who made shared their visions and experience. It was you who made the gathering, guys!

We thank to Ciklum and GlobalLogic companies who helped us to organize the event and took over the expenses. We thank particularly to Lena Terioshina from Ciklum who helped a lot in solving organization questions.

Again about the topics

1. Michael Vizdos (http://www.michaelvizdos.com/, http://implementingscrum.com/) made 90 minute intro on Scrum basics which we believe was useful for the newcomers to agile as well as for the more experienced audience
   
   
   
   
   
2. Alexander Laszlo Ross (risingstarpartners.com) shared his experience in refactoring (transforming) a problematic distributed project into more agile-oriented environment. Presentation will be uploaded here.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Alexey Maslov from GlobalLogic made a unique presentation on Offshore Agile sharing common problems, pitfalls, ideas. This was extremely interesting for the audience as the majority of Ukrainian IT people participate in outsourced projects.
   Power point presentation is available here.
   
   
   

Photos

Here is the link to our Picasa album.
Have more photos? Send them to us please.

Feedback

According to the feedback - the second gathering was more effective that the first one which we did in April 2007. Good news! We are happy to keep on improving. Here is what we’ve learned this time:

1. Environment:
1. we need to pay attention to air-conditioning
2. having a place which is located closer to metro station is always a good thing, it will also make it simpler for non-Kiev easier people locate the meeting place
   

We will do our best to satisfy these needs.
Recommendations on a place that we can use the next time are welcomed.

2. Audience was mixed, that’s why about a half of the attendees called for more advanced topics to be covered with more real life examples and discussions on problems and solutions.
   
   We can reach this goal by focusing our next gatherings on more practical aspects and real-life project cases. Below is the list of topics people find interested
   

Backlog of topic to be covered during our next gatherings (in order of interest):

1. Offshore agile. Reality and practices.
2. QA role in agile project. Communicating with customers. Place of QA in the agile team.
3. Planning and estimating.
4. Requirements management, user stories.
5. Self-managing teams and place of seniors in them.
6. Make team communicate, developer’s focus on communication.
7. Risk management in agile.
8. Implement agile in non-agile teams.
9. Retrospective meetings.

Please contact us if you have a chance presenting any of the listed topics. It is very much appreciated by our community. Languages: Russian, Ukrainian or English.

Next Gathering

Yes, it is time to plan our next gathering. What about October 2007?

Let's discuss it here. Feel free to subscribe to our Google calendar, Google group or just visit our site to watch for the upcoming events.

We start looking for presenters and sponsors. Email us if you can assist.

Refreshing our mission

Being “Agile Ukraine” our mission is to help spreading out of agility in the Ukrainian software development market. We are happy to help your company and project teams learn more about any aspects of agile software development, and finally adapt agile. Stay connected with Agile Ukraine.

Agile has been working for us, so why it cannot work for you as well?