Although Shrove Tuesday, February's Agile Yorkshire meet-up saw one of it's largest attendances, possibly second only to the event at which Martin Fowler was guest speaker. 

Clement Pickering presented a report discussing his experience heading up the transition from traditional to agile methods in the testing function of Callcredit. Discussed were differences in strategy, processes, tools and techniques between an agile and more 'traditional' approach. The presentation was followed by a lively Q&A and debate. 

Following Clement's presentation and a short break, Neil McLaughlin gave a demo of developing a Google Hangouts application, using a suite of cloud applications including Cloud9 IDE, an online development environment. The demo gods had maybe left to eat their pancakes when one of the web services Neil was using was down.

Clement Pickering has been with the Callcredit group for over 13 years leading Development teams in creating a wide range of products for the financial services industry. He has long been an advocate of agile development practices and the philosophy that underpins agile as he passionately believes it helps teams deliver more effectively. He has been involved for many years in helping Callcredit adopt agile practices and in his current role has most recently focussed on helping the QA community and project teams within Callcredit get to grips with agile testing.

Neil McLaughlin is a freelance developer/coach/scrum master who enjoys building stuff and helping teams to enjoy building stuff.

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Agile QA Transition & Developer Adventures in the Clouds

We are thrilled to announce that Catherine Bonner, MD of Communications & Employee Engagement Consultancy, Ambient Tribe, has joined forces with Agile Yorkshire as our Public Speaking Partner.

The partnership aims to support our whole community, build confidence and develop our skills in getting up on stage and sharing ideas. There will be more information coming out soon explaining how we plan to make this available but you can rest assured that if you step forward to speak at one of our events in the coming months we want to support you.

Catherine Bonner is a communication consultant, coach and trainer with over 15 years of experience helping business leaders and teams master how they communicate. She has guided countless professionals in mastering the art of public speaking, refining presentation techniques, and engaging an audience.

Catherine has a deep understanding of the challenges faced by the tech industry, having worked in-house for a tech scale-up and then as a trainer and coach for numerous tech companies. She loves helping people develop their ability to take complex information, connect with their audience, and drive meaningful change and innovation. 


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Ambient Tribe Becomes Agile Yorkshires Public Speaking Partner

Agile Yorkshire have teamed up with the organisers of this years Northern Servant-Leadership Conference to help get the word out and spread the message of servant-leadership generally. The Northern Servant-Leadership Conference has run for several years and is a great event to learn more and meet others from this community. The NSLC isn't technology specific and so attracts delegates and speakers from all industry sectors. This year however one of the speakers will be Mike Burrows who many of you will know as a past presenter at Agile Yorkshire, founder of Agendashift and the author of the book Kanban from the Inside. 

There will be lots of friendly faces from Agile Yorkshire attending so why not come along.

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The Northern Servant-Leadership Conference 2019

It's fantastic news that **William Hill** will be supporting Agile Yorkshire as it is one of Leeds' top IT employers and well know amongst our community for the work it does. Agile Yorkshire's mission has always been to "help our region become a fantastic place to build software" and one way we try to do that is by supporting local experts and the passionate, talented people, who come along to our monthly meet ups.

Working with **William Hill** helps achieve our mission as well as amplify some of the values we promote and underlines William Hill's commitment to using agile development ideas to further its business goals. Below is a quote from **William Hill** about their new association with Agile Yorkshire.

"At William Hill, we go one better in everything we do – and our agile@scale programme is no different. Business agility will help us deliver customer value. Making us a truly customer centric organisation which fosters creativity and innovation. Put simply one of the benefits of working in an agile way is that we can get our products and services to our customer faster. 

Not only that but it speeds up getting their feedback too so that we can modify it and can quickly make changes to improve our customer experience. But agile transformation doesn’t happen overnight and implementing agile practices isn’t easy. It requires a complete mind-set change. Agile working practices encourage everyone in the team to behave as an entrepreneur. Teams are self-organised with no hierarchies. 

Culturally it is hard to change but when you get there it delivers value quickly and creates a more exciting environment. However at William Hill we’re one step ahead. Agile fits in perfectly with Go one better which is about constantly making the small improvements that add up to big returns. Enabling us to set the standard and be the brand in everyone’s hand."

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Sponsorship - William Hill Sponsors Agile Yorkshire

It may have been just a few short hours before the latest episode of Star Wars opened, but on **Wednesday 13th December 2017** in a galaxy not so far far away, a Yorkshire crowd amassed. They witnessed a small band of rebels take to the stage to complete lightning talks, faster than the Millennium Falcon could do the kessel run. 

In our opening episode, we met our story’s hero. Sally Bridgewater had a love story worthy of the silver screen, telling us how she has helped her partner deal with ADHD with the simplicity of the Scrum framework.

Next, Gary McAdam told of MVPs from the dark side and teams force choked by scope negotiation. He showed us the path to redemption through the build, measure, learn cycle.

James Scanlan rounded off our prequel trilogy with an ancient battle between Enterprise Architecture and Agile. James sought to bring balance to the force through both disciplines.
Eva Barabas told of how user needs surround us and bind us together. Complete was her team’s training as they emerged with t-shaped skills.

Jedi Master Andy Butcher had an enlightened approach to Agile architecture, warning us that upfront design leads to silos, silos lead to ivory towers and ivory towers lead to suffering.
The force was with Bernard Jaurequi and his common Agile smells within companies the size of empires. Fear of committing code, knowledge silos and immature CD approaches were a few examples of his wisdom.

Rescuing a princess rewards more money than you can imagine, although Tom Hudson could imagine quite a bit. His tale of large numbers illustrated the relative speeds of processors, caches, solid state drives and internet searches.

Difficult to see the future is, but not for prophet Geoff Bowden. While we may be taken over by droids, Geoff believes there will still be jobs for us Jawas.
Episode 9 saw our saga unlocked by Brian Teeman. In a galaxy full of different languages, it was the Queen's English that could finally teach Master Yoda how to form a sentence. 

Finally, Sith Lord Andy Burgin directed the voting procedure and all that was left was our very own throne room ceremony, with our heroes collecting their medals, except for poor Chewbacca.

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Christmas Lightning Talks Competition 2017

Diversity and Codes of Conduct are both topics that are regularly discussed within the conference organising blogosphere and to a lesser extent within community groups. We've tried a few things to encourage more diversity both within our meetup attendees and the speakers but we're definitely not claiming any victories yet. It's a work in progress. At different times of the year and with all the organising done in spare time, it's not always easy to find any speakers for our gatherings. Trying to be selective enough to create any kind of diversity balance is currently only an ambition.

**Agile Yorkshire supporting the Diversity Charter**
It's an ambition we will keep pursuing but the least we could do to demonstrate our desire for change is to sign up to the recently published Diversity Charter. You can read all the details and sign up yourself on the [Diversity Charter website](https://diversitycharter.org/) and hopefully lots of people will and should.

Reading the Diversity Charter also prompted the admission that Agile Yorkshire still had no code of conduct and for that fix was in order. An evening of internet research turns of lots of useful resources for conference organisers though a fewer aimed specifically at community groups.

Here's a small collection of excellent resources on the subject:
- [The Diversity Charter - Resources page.](https://diversitycharter.org/resources/)
- Lena Reinhard - [Should my tech conference / community have a Code of Conduct?](https://wunder.schoenaberselten.com/2016/02/17/should-my-tech-conference-community-have-a-code-of-conduct-recommended-resources/)
- Model View Culture - [The New Normal: Codes of Conduct in 2015 and Beyond](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-new-normal-codes-of-conduct-in-2015-and-beyond)
- Model View Culture - [Beyond Codes of Conduct: What Tech Events Need to Do Better](https://modelviewculture.com/news/beyond-codes-of-conduct-what-tech-events-need-to-do-better)
- The Ada Initiative
- Ashe Dryden - [A Year+ in: Codes of Conduct at Tech Confs.](https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/a-year-in-codes-of-conduct-at-tech-confs)

In the end the Agile Yorkshire Code of Conduct for now is based on the Geek Feminism Wiki: Conference Anti-harassment Policy and ConfCodeOfConduct.com.

Comments or feedback welcome?

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Code of Conduct and Supporting Diversity

The world's longest running agile conference is coming to the UK for the second time in its 17 year history.

It has always been the only European Agile Conference to bring academics and practitioners together, but this year it returns to its pragmatic roots, with presentations, workshops, experience reports, tutorials and open space discussions for developers, architects, testers, managers and coaches. Combine that with excellent value, on-site accommodation, an inclusive social programme and a 10% community discount and you have an unmissable event. 

We look forward to meeting you!

Agile Yorkshire discount code: **COMMUNITY-AYORK**

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XP is back in the UK for the second time in 17 years

Another thanks to Unicom for allowing Agile Yorkshire to offer our community a 10% discount on tickets for the upcoming Testing Showcase North conference also taking place in Manchester in a few weeks time. Please use the discount code: **AY10**

This is a highly interactive Testing conference, comprising a programme of presentations, case studies and facilitated roundtable discussions addressing themes such as Agile Testing, BDD, Creating a Digital Testing Strategy, Crowd Testing, DevOps, Mobile Testing, Testing in Continuous Delivery, Test Automation, Test Data Management, among others. 

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Testing Challenges in a Digital World

Thanks to Unicom Agile Yorkshire is able to offer our community a 20% discount on tickets for the upcoming DevOps North conference taking place in Manchester in a few weeks time. Please use the discount code: AY20 

The programme of this showcase will cover topics such as how ARA (Application Release Automation) makes DevOps possible, Agile, DevOps and ITIL - Implementing enterprise release management, how to create a fast feedback loop with the right metrics, how to make DevOps fit with governance and regulation, bringing development, testing and operations together, Continuous delivery and two Case Studies, on Lean application delivery and DevOps in the enterprise respectively.

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Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement and Sharing

Going down to Agile Yorkshire June event I was curious about the two speakers of the evening...used to categorise presentations with a fellow developer as "technical" or "non technical" we know what to expect in the former case. In the latter, things are more abstract! 

The first speaker was **Eva Barabas** who talked about a Hackathlons organized by a small team she was involved in. A dental care project with product owner, three developers, users, UX, design, analysis, modelling, collaboration, collaboration, collaboration and work, work, work. What did they learn? "Attend more Hackathlons but create things people need".

Indeed, what she wanted to share with us was how important it is in these competitions to build something that users want. I believe we would agree with her. After all, delivering something and seeing it being used leaves a sweet taste.

What I also found interesting was her answer when I asked her in a casual conversation why she attended Hackathlons. She answered me she likes to test her limits...as she's normally structured but this event is about incorporating different approaches, being in a sociable environment and getting creative.

The second speaker was Bob Marshall and talked about people's needs and the Antimatter Principle. He addressed some questions to the audience: "Are your needs being met at work?" "What's blocking you from achieving your goals?"
"I like these blockers", a familiar face from the audience answered. "Maybe your need is challenge, then?", he suggested. More joined soon.
While the presentation went by, I heard and wrote down labels-the golden rule, the platinum rule, theory X and theory Y, cognitive dissonance-and ideas. Now here are some ideas I liked:

*We don't work to get our needs met, we work to make money which will then cover our needs.*
Interestingly though, when he asked the question "How many of you here think their needs are met by their work?" - a lot of hands were raised.

*People assume that other people have the same basic needs. Think of a developer that wants to work alone, not as part of a team, and another that is proud to be a "team player".*

*What do you do when individuals or teams have different needs? This must be one of the most interesting problems to be solved towards creating successful teams and organisations.*

Finally, the conclusion was that a good job is one that people meet their needs by doing it. "Attend to folks needs" (and you won't regret it) is the essence of the Antimatter Principle. Not sure why antimatter, though.

The evening reached its end then, and we followed to the equally popular after-event: conversing and networking casually at the pub close to the venue.

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Antimatter Principle and NHS Hackathon with a Twist

A push on Code Club recruitment from Linda Broughton, a tour through the world of legacy code with **Krystan Honour**, plus **Joe McGrath** and **Kevin Murray** on transforming NHS Choices with lean and agile user experience were all topics on the table for Agile Yorkshire's April gathering.

With over two hundred primary schools in Leeds and a lot less than half of them with a Code Club up and running there is plenty of room for improvement. Linda Broughton is the Code Club area coordinator and in collaboration with the new Google Garage in Leeds is running a series of training sessions where volunteer candidates can find out how to get involved and what to expect. Keep an eye on twitter and the Code Club website for more information.

**Krystan Honor** is long standing member of the Agile Yorkshire community and this month finally succumbed to requests to speak with a slot about legacy code. After a few minutes covering his career history and with legacy code defined as potentially anything just a few months old, it was clear Krystan was well placed to provide some insightful wisdom on the topic. He covered how it happens, how to embrace it and most importantly some guidance on its management.  

With the discussion exploring the installation of team knowledge, workshops covering engineering good practice, code review, regular pairing, exploring test frameworks and tactics and an attack on coupled code and dependencies the half hour time slot was soon over and rounded off with questions and answers.

**Joe McGrath** and **Kevin Murray** occupied the sixty minute space with a preview of the presentation the pair were booked to deliver at the Agile Manchester conference in early May. Their talked entitled ???? covered process they recently adopted in an attempt to improve the quality and effectiveness of parts of the NHS Choices website use for self diagnosis. 

The target for attention centred around the pages used by people to identify the signs of chickenpox and by adopting a build, measure, learn approach, popularised by the lean start-up movement, a iterative product development cycle of research and reflection began.

Joe and Kevin described their use of a technique referred to as assumption mapping to help identify targets for their attention and how using personal profiles their mapped out initial user journey examples. These were later tested by moving into the interview rooms of the usability labs where, at times, the whole team were able to see first hand how actual people reacted to the candidate designs and prototypes. Often these early designs were nothing more than paper sketches but Kevin Murray at Agile Yorkshire combined with "poker faced" usability analysts asking the questions was important to be able to move fast and collect unbiased data. 

They went on to describe the use of a technique they called "affinity sorting" to help with discovering and ranking items for implementation and further user testing. With a typical five day time box broken down into two days of discovery and three of implementation progress was steady and quantifiably positive.

At the end of their presentation the questions came thick and fast and the feedback forms collected were proof of both the fascinating content and excellent delivery from both presenters.

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Lean NHS UX and Legacy Code Contemplation

The first talk of the May meetup was given by **Andy Burgin**. Andy spoke to our group a year ago and introduced us to the idea of DevOps, Developers and Operations teams working side by side on a product. Too often in large organisations imaginary boundaries exist between teams, Development to Testing, Testing to Release, Release to Operations. Each boundary acts as a hurdle for knowledge transfer and removes the understanding of the business need from the people supporting the application day to day.

Andy advocated a work environment free of these boundaries, where teams were composed from people across all parts of the business where knowledge could be carried from inception to delivery.

With background and history from the inception of DevOps as well as pictures, stories and anecdotes from the recent Paris conference, Andy guided us through the Evolution of DevOps from it's inception to the present day. I'm sure more than a few people headed back to their companies with a few ideas they'd like to try out! Hopefully he'll have a few more recruits for Leeds DevOps over the next few months!

The second part of the evening was lead by **Tony Heap**. When I first read the title "There's no Such thing as a Requirement." I was worried, I had visions of a hippy telling us to embrace change and try to persuade our clients to accept fluid specs and hazy deadlines. What Tony brought us however was very different!

We started with an exercise, the CEO of a major supermarket wanted to buy a new tablet. For that he needed to increase profits, he decides to set his IT Manager the task by selling online. The IT Manager takes on this requirement and designs the high level functionality of the site, he passes each page as requirements onto his subordinate who designs what each page should look like... what we quickly realised was that Tony's claim was correct - there is no such thing as a requirement! There are only different levels of design which are done higher and higher up the process. If these "requirements" are simply someone else's design then they should be questioned and challenged!

While we grappled with this newfound knowledge Tony guided us through the rest of his process. Development teams today are too often held hostage to those fiddly low priority stories, the last 20% of a requirement which takes 80% of the time. Tony illustrated the value of proper prioritisation, weighing the value of those final 20% of tasks against the business need of other user stories. Using the HMS Waterfall as an example Tony demonstrated how proper prioritisation and planning of User Stories is as essential to the modern team's work as a compiler and keyboard. More details of Tony's process can be found on his blog **It's All Design**.

Finally thanks to all our volunteer team who make the event happen and to main sponsors 
- Piksel
- Callcredit
- NewRedo 
- O'Reilly
- JetBRAINS
- Manning
- Wrox 
- PluralSight

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No Such Thing as a Requirement and Devops Evolution

If the audience at this month's Agile Yorkshire is taken to be a reasonable representation of the development community at large, it would seem that most organisations have not roamed far beyond Scrum or Kanban in their approach to Agile. So it was with great interest that many listened to **Rachel Davies**' experiences as an Agile Coach doing XP (eXtreme Programming) at Unruly.

We were warned up front that XP is 'not like Scrum', despite the familiar looking whiteboards and Post-it notes. Unlike Scrum, XP dictates that pair programming is a non-negotiable part of the development process. At Unruly, only a pair of developers working together may make changes to production code, even going to the 'eXtreme' of limiting the number of workstations to fewer than one per person in order to ensure this collaboration takes place. We were assured, thankfully, that their developers do at least get their own chair.

It has not all been without its problems, however. As an exercise in demonstrating that people don't always know what's good for them, a successful change Rachel has been involved with at Unruly has been to break their development teams into smaller units. Though it initially met with some resistance, people soon saw the advantages to working in smaller groups in the form of much more streamlined meetings and the consequent time savings and improvement in communication. 

With small teams working in relative isolation, Rachel told us that it sometimes became hard to maintain consistency as different development teams began to work in slightly different ways, making it difficult for developers outside of a given team to quickly engage in that team's work. To combat this developers are offered the chance to move between teams on a quarterly basis, sharing knowledge and encouraging consistent cross-team practice along the way.

With no staging environments or test team, Rachel feels that good Test Driven Development is an important part of Unruly's success with XP. Software developers at Unruly are expected to have knowledge of the full development stack, with many of the traditional roles in a development team eschewed in favour of a team of generalists. Requirements are written by developers talking directly to stakeholders within the business, often facilitated by an Embedded Project Manager who can provide direction as to where the knowledge on a particular subject lies in the company. 

In terms of the organisation of projects -- well, apparently Unruly don't actually have projects. Instead the developers manage a constant stream of imminent potential work, where development time is estimated and stories composed then eventually prioritised in a Story Prioritization meeting with other members of the business.

In this evening's support slot was **Ray Edgar**, who presented observations of the use of Agile Development in enterprise businesses. Ray has recently been studying to become a BCS Agile Practitioner, giving him an opportunity to reflect on the value of Agile Software Development to the enterprise business. He has found that there is often a discrepancy between 'doing' Agile and working in a way that provides the benefits that Agile Development should. 

Ask most people what Agile Development is and typically they'll respond with a list of fancy sounding acronyms (SAFe) and initialisms (XP!). What it's really about, Ray argues, is focussing on the business value of development and doing it in a way that provides quick feedback. To some organisations, adopting Agile has amounted to a reshuffling of the business processes that were already in place; losing sight of the benefits a more thorough implementation could bring, they stick to the comfort of the familiar. 

For this reason, some companies remain unaware that their confused implementation limits the potential advantage they hoped to gain by engaging in Agile Development in the first place. Finally, Ray encouraged the audience to promote some risk-taking in their workplaces, as a failure to make sufficiently drastic changes can leave a business miles behind the competition.

Rounded off with the monthly prize draw and apres drinks in the Midnight Bell courtesy of **Matthew Wood** and **Charlotte Forshaw** of iSourceIT. 

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Implementing Agile Software Delivery at Enterprise Level

It’s great to announce that iSource IT, one of Yorkshire most familiar local recruitment companies, will now be sponsoring Agile Yorkshire and contributing to it ongoing success and quality. Agile Yorkshire’s mission is to stimulate innovation in the way organisations create software products for greater commercial effectiveness. By supporting Agile Yorkshire iSource IT are also supporting businesses across the whole region.

iSource IT pride themselves on developing long term relationships and delivering a high quality service through fast, accurate delivery. They operate a vertical model covering all areas of IT and work predominantly with clients across Yorkshire and the North of England. They also founded the Yorkshire Mafia and run the annual Buy Yorkshire business conference."
 
Matthew Wood from iSource IT commented... 

“*I have attended Agile Yorkshire and found it to be a very stimulating event which has allowed me to build my knowledge and network. As a business we’re committed to building our Software & Testing vertical whilst developing the all important relationships which underpin our business. This sponsorship is a natural extension of our commitment to this market and Yorkshire as a region*".

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Sponsorship - iSource IT Sponsors Agile Yorkshire

On an evening with heavy sleet showers, Agile Yorkshire attendees could have been forgiven for heading to the warmth of their homes. It was, however, fantastic to see yet another packed house. We could have filled the room twice over as for the first time, we saw more names added to the waiting list than places available. 

This month's first speaker was **Andy Burgin**, the founder of the Leeds Devops Group, speaking on that very topic in the 30 minute slot. Andy was followed by **Seb Rose** who discussed what makes a unit test good or bad.

Andy took the audience through the history of the devops movement while telling the group about 5 definitions of devops and discussing the problems devops attempts to resolve. It was demonstrated, that as with many development practices, the culture around devops is hugely important. 

Andy suggested that it is not a good idea to try jumping straight in with automation, but allow a culture to develop which can then be supported with technology.

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Bad Testing, Good Testing and DevOps 101

A few weeks ago I attended an event where James Allen of @Creative_Huddle ran a session on group creativity techniques. It felt so useful and inspiring (and agile) that talking to him afterwards seemed essential. One thing led to another and James has agreed to visit Agile Yorkshire sometime this year. 

In the mean time he has kindly offered a small number of FREE tickets to two of his upcoming events:

- Upgrade Your Creativity
- A Bootcamp for Creative Campaigns

Both events are happening in the next few days so you'll need to be available but hey, they're FREE. If you can make it along to either come and grab me at tonight's meetup (Feb 11th) or tweet us a message at @AgileYorkshire (priority will be given to tonight's attendees). 

Also if you'd like to reserve space for other colleagues Creative Huddle have offered Agile Yorkshire attendees a 50% discount code which we'll give out tonight or try tweeting us.

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Free Creative Team Training from Creative Huddle

Last month's audio visual extravaganza was always going to be a tough act to follow but, still on form after his well received ten minutes of turtle graphics, **Simon Davey** this month gave a detailed and insightful account of the feature flag strategy used by his team at Canonical - makers of the Ubuntu OS in case you didn't know.

The practice of coding toggle switches into features under development is not new; but doing so with a thoughtful, tactical approach and making a careful note of successful strategies on the way might be. Being able to share this type of insight and experience is the lifeblood of the Agile Yorkshire community and speakers like Simon should be celebrated.

Characterised as config options on steroids, Simon outlined some of the feature flag benefits, including maintaining an always deployable single mainline, providing tailored usability to targeted users and supporting multi variant testing. The downsides of added complexity were emphasised by the hard won advice to removed unused code paths and associated switches as soon as possible after the code is in production and functionality stable. 

Simon’s session was filled with tips like: try to minimise code branches even at the expense of code duplication, make new code the default path to ensure old code is easier to remove later, try to make flags on by default and consider applying a naming convention to differentiate between short and long term configuration. 

Simon covered several real world examples used at Canonical to illustrate his points and the interest and reception was reflected in the numerous questions.

**Phil Rice** filled the second slot for the second time in twelve months. The last time Phil Rice spoke at Agile Yorkshire was back last April, when he covered his business past and Lean Startup future. Several months of work and coding later he was back to talk about what he has been up to with his brand of Constraint Driven Development. 

Phil has plenty of past form in this area having spent many years and a previously business focused on the problem domain of legacy systems and their reluctance to be tamed by conventional techniques in a cost effective way. Using his framework to compose constraints yielding both tests and working functionality holds the premise of a new approach to legacy system re-engineering.
For the code hungry in the audience, Phil’s session was a banquet of Scala. 

With screen after screen of live programming and numerous test driven development “red to green” cycles. The session was based on a Tennis rules kata and after thirty minutes of effort Phil had a working set of coded rules and a suite of tests to match.

The whole session was perhaps too brief to fully absorb the whole concept and explore the full potential but for those wishing to investigate further Phil has a whole website devoted to his framework and its usage.

The evening was capped off with the monthly prizes for "five to" twitter lottery and feedback draw. We now give a total of seven prizes a month so showing up for two or three times means you've a good change of walking away with something.

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Feature Flags in Production & Constraint Driven Development

IT book publisher Wrox have kindly offered to provide sponsorship and help to Agile Yorkshire.

Last month we gave away two book tokens in our regular attendee feedback draw and we will be continuing this in the future. Members can take up discount on books they wish to buy as well as request free books in return for feedback and reviews on popular on-line bookshops. Agile Yorkshire attendees wishing to take up this offer should come see one of the team during our monthly gathering.

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Sponsorship - Wrox Books Sponsors Agile Yorkshire

We've had a fantastic response to our call for Lightning Talk speakers. In the end twenty people came forward, some with more than one idea, for the opportunity to take part in our annual December lightning talk competition. If you get the chance to personally thank any of the following people please take the opportunity to do so:

Ed Jannoo, Stephen Blower, Macs Dickinson, Paul Berwin, Grant Crofton, Stephen Blower, Ash Winter, Simon Davy, Joe Roberts, Andy Stewart, Stew Abel, Ray Edgar, Richard Tasker, Steve Carter, Amy Thompson, James Jeffries, Neil McLaughlin, Royd Brayshay, Nick McKenna and Ivor Tymchak.

 Their enthusiasm has allowed this years event to be bigger and better than ever.

Obviously our problem now is how to whittle down the numbers to give a line up that will fit into two hours on the night. That's still to be decided and it seems only fair to let the speakers themselves have a hand in the process. But however it's done, rest assured that everyone who has come forward will get an opportunity to speak either in December or after the new year and no ones efforts will be wasted.

Stand by for more information and announcements.

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Thanks to all our Lightning Talk Volunteers

The return of **Clarke Ching** to Agile Yorkshire for the first time since 2007 was eagerly awaited with the event fully subscribed ahead of the day. A lot has happened in the world of software development since the days of his last visit. As well as a name change for the group and a move from the back room of a pub to more salubrious surroundings there has been a widespread acceptance of the principles espoused by the agile manifesto. In those early days the focus of the meet-ups, with their underground, revolutionary zeal, was often on engineering practices while Clarke was, rightly, demanding "*show me the money*".

Tuesdays session was again about building a compelling case to put to the business for the adoption of more frequent delivery prioritised by cost of delay where the scale of the figure, rather than it's actual value, is of more importance. Clarke's assertion is that software development has yet to come up with an measure equivalent to James Watt's Horsepower to provide hard figures that the business can relate to and use to inform the decisions which drive the business. Clarke finished with the importance of the introduction, describing the importance of a Lede in journalism, and how that might translate to agile projects in setting the direction of a project. He encouraged the participants to come up with a Twomise* - a high level view, in 140 characters, of the most important business goals of a project. 

**Lee Jackson** the consummate professional, stepping up in the supporting speaker slot. Lee Jackson delivered an entertaining and informative presentation on presenting (and geeks certainly love recursion and self referencing in a presentation). The subject matter was entirely within keeping of the Agile Yorkshire aims of providing a platform for software delivery professionals to become more effective communicators. I got the impression that Lee was surprised at how unlike the stereotype of software geeks the members of the group were. There we many useful tips to take away and apply to speaking at anything from international conferences to small pitches to your team including preparation, understanding what you want your audience to get from your talk, the importance of the narrative of your talk and, of course, the effectiveness of pauses.

The evening finished with the regular prize draw. Thanks to our sponsors NewRedo, O'Reilly, JetBRAINS and Manning once again for generously providing the prizes.

Finally, thanks to all those who help make the monthly meet-ups run smoothly - it wouldn't be possible to run such events without this help.


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Cash-Flow Driven Development & Tips for Success

Another sold out Agile Yorkshire this month saw two talks each with a vastly different focus to the other. The thirty minute slot was filled by **Nick McKenna** giving an experience report of a project he was recently involved with, the following one hour talk was a very developer focused 'Pragmatic Dependency Injection' given by **Ian Russell'**.

Continuing with Agile Yorkshire's recent theme of agile in the public sector, **Nick Mckenna** gave a report of a successful agile project delivering a system for the Ministry of Justice.

The project had a fixed deadline, however there was flexibility in scope, with the MoJ buying time from the supplier rather than having a contract fixed to functional deliverables, the project was delivered on time and within budget. In an environment of publicity being given to government IT project failures, it is good to see the success stories too.

Pragmatic Dependency Injection & On Time, Under Budget

Agile Yorkshire has been enjoying record registrations and attendance over the past few months and the August gathering was no exception. With all places gone within ninety minutes of registration opening and over thirty people on the waiting list, Agile Yorkshire is going from strength to strength. This is born out not just by the attendance but by the diversity and quality of speakers emerging from within the community. Representing polar-opposites in terms of organisation size, Joe Roberts (@zefer) and David Bryant told the group how agile thinking was making a difference to how they work. 

**David Bryant**, from the NHS Information Centre software senior leadership team, opened to a packed room with an honest and insightful account of the agile journey his organisation has taken over the past few years. He was followed by** Joe Roberts** the CTO of Magnolia Box, a tech start-up from Harrogate with customers including the National Gallery and the Science Museum in London. He spoke of the engineering path they had taken as the business evolved and strategy shifted from building up to scaling out and how tactics changed from a monolithic architecture to loosely coupled service orientation.

**David Bryant** on an agile journey.

Service Oriented Architecture has been talked about for a few years now and is generally more often associated with stories of expensive vendor middle ware and extensive enterprise architecture documentation. Joe of course, while acknowledging this view point, set about his debunking exercise by detailing his use of REST, Ruby and Rabbit MQ (or similar). Explaining how, with a tiny team they set about refactoring their “monolithasaurus” into a several, single responsibility services and in the process unlocked more value for their growing business through reuse. The real world example he cited was buried within their infrastructure, now exposed (and marketed) as a stand alone artwork printing service. His delivery was complete with a hand drawn slide deck Tony Hart would have been proud of.

When someone like **David Bryant** stands up in front of a room full of people at an event called Agile Yorkshire and declares their starting point as "agile scepticism",  you know the story that follows will not only be honest and candid; but probably resonate with much of the Agile Yorkshire audience  During the break and in the pub afterwards people could be heard comparing their own journey and moments of doubt. His message was the plain and simple –agility is a journey not a destination and nothing is more persuasive or influential than actually getting things done and being successful. Even in an organisation the size of the NHS patience and hard work can win the day.

As always, the evening finished with a prize draw with an array of prizes from some of our sponsors (O'Reilly, JetBRAINS and now Manning) to give away.

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Joe Roberts & David Bryant - SOA vs Monolithasaurus

A hot and sticky July evening provided the setting for **Mike Burrows** and **Grant Crofton** to deliver perfectly prepared presentations in a back to back contrast of engineering geekery and leadership process design. With the patio of Midnight Bell next door bathed in evening sunshine there were also plenty of takers happy to carry on the discussions long afterwards. 

**Mike Burrows** is a passionate and very active member of the Kanban community who regularly speaks at conference events around the world. He has been hosting a dialogue on the part values can play in the Kanban method for some time and has even started a website to capture related stores.

While many members of the audience are practitioners in the agile space deep knowledge and appreciation of the Kanban method is still less common. Mike introduced the method as “...a humane approach to change, an effective way to develop the learning capability of knowledge-based organisations”. The resonance of this definition could be seen in the twitter stream and in later pub discussions. He walked the room through his “Kanban as an onion” slides to describe his set of values and the way they map to the established principles and practices. At the same time categorising the three value layers into - drive, direction and discipline.
The session ended with Mike prompting the room for war stories illustrating some of his points and asking that people take the time to visit his values website and consider adding their personal experiences to the growing collection. Mike has kindly made his slides available for all to review.

**Grant Crofton** filled the thirty minute slot by walking through the ins and outs of getting started with F#. With stunning ASCII art and well practiced code snippets he elegantly kept the attention of the room despite the technical nature of the subject matter and the mixed audience. Note to future aspirants: live coding can be effortless and engaging if well prepared and executed efficiently. A glamorous assistant also seems to help.

Judging by the feedback forms collected on the night our intention to strive for contrasting topics and try to provide something for everyone is being well received.

The meeting was rounded off with the prize draw for books and software licenses provided by some of our sponsors O'Reilly and JetBRAINS. 

As always our gatherings would not be possible without the support of all our sponsors plus the time and effort freely donated by Agile Yorkshire's team of organisers.

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Mike Burrows on Kanban Through Values

A packed house once again for the June meetup with plenty of faces old and new. Recently there seems to be more people arriving well ahead of the start time of the first scheduled speaker and taking the opportunity to grab a bite to eat and network or, as it should be more correctly called given we are in Yorkshire - scran and chelpin. The evening followed the typical format of a 30 minute talk followed by 60 minute one. 

#####Andy Stewart: Learn Software Development in 8 weeks
Andy Stewart kicked off the evenings presentations with an experience report for a project where financial quantitative analysts ('Quants') were directly involved in the implementation of financial algorithms in Java. 

This was despite the Quants having no previous software development experience beyond MS Excel spreadsheets. The team had 2 senior developers, 3 quants and 2 functional testers and the project was judged by senior management to be an unqualified success with early delivery, low defect rates and 8 week ROI. The success of the project was put down to a number of factors: senior developers and quants pair programming extensively and directly in Java, zero tolerance to defects and coding standards violations, a comprehensive test suite with the focus on a large number of unit tests, support in the code for easily creating test data and very fast build times of less than 1 minute. 

The fast build time was achieved by only having a small number of automated system tests. In addition, infrastructure detail was abstracted away so the dev/quant pair could focus more on the problem domain. The talk was well received and timed to allow plenty of opportunity for questions of which there were many.

#####Dom Hodgeson: An Agile Sweet Shop?
After the break the presentations continued with **Dom Hodgeson's** account of taking an idea from it's (alcohol inspired) beginnings to the current day. Like all good accounts it was full of ups and downs with excitement and frustration in equal measure. 

The starting point for the journey was a hypothesis: can you do pick and mix online? On the way he discovered that free postage to Norway is expensive, people get passionate about sweets, civil engineering infrastructure projects do not move at lean startup pace and users sometimes can't differentiate between a squirrel and a monkey. 

What we learned is that we need to ask the question "what is the worst that can happen?" and that the first thing to do, even before a business plan, is to buy a domain name. The talk generated a huge amount of questions and discussion which spilled over into the post-meeting session in the pub - which was made even more pleasant by the warm summer evening allowing a large number of us to set up in the outdoor terrace of the Midnight Bell. 

The answer to the original hypothesis "can you do pick and mix online?" seemed to be a resounding yes if you learn from your mistakes and keep asking what is the worst which can happen. Jelly snakes anyone?



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Lean Confectionary & Java Bootcamp for Quants

Agile Yorkshire are proud to announce that Callcredit have generously stepped forward to help support Agile Yorkshire. As a significant employer of local IT talent the partnership underlines CallCredit commitment to using agile development ideas to further its business goals. 

Clem Pickering from CallCredit commented “several members of CallCredit have been regular attendees of Agile Yorkshire for many years and have got a lot from the many presentations and discussions the group has held. The CallCredit sponsorship seemed therefore like a great way to support the group and its continued activities, and also to continue to raise our profile as an agile employer in the North of England. As a business we’re committed to using agile as an effective means to deliver software and are always looking for talented people who enjoy working in this way, and who will support the company in looking at ways to continuously improve our development and delivery area”. Find out more details about CallCredit and current employment opportunities on their website or speak to one of their team at the next Agile Yorkshire!
 
The intention is for Agile Yorkshire to use this sponsorship to continue to provide catering for events and to help attract and host a wide range of interesting speakers and cover general running costs of the group.

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Sponsorship - CallCredit Sponsors Agile Yorkshire

Another month, another sold out Agile Yorkshire. Once again the evening saw two speakers impart their wisdom to the group with **Kev McCabe** filling the half hour slot with a look at the mikado method of re-factoring followed by **Brian Wernham** discussing agile project management in e-government. 

**Kev McCabe** first gave Agile Yorkshire a tantalising look at the Mikado Method back in December when he presented a lightening talk introducing the subject, this time around he was able to go into much more detail. We saw how dependencies in code can prevent us from making the changes required, and how this is analogous to the game of Pick-up Sticks also known as Mikado.

Kev demonstrated how we can discover dependencies by diving in, trying to make a change, and seeing what breaks. By discovering and tracking the dependencies we learn more about the system and the problem can be eventually attacked in reverse, allowing the code base to be stable throughout the change. Following the theory of the method, and passing some boxes of Mikado sweets around the room to be enjoyed by the group, Kev took us through a demonstration the technique in action.

After a short break for refreshments, attendees where treated to an in depth look at Scrum and e-government in the UK & USA from Brian Wernham, author of 'Agile Project Management for Government'. Brian started the discussion with 6 changes he believes need to be made in order for Scrum to be successful in the public sector, striking some controversy when he suggested 'water-scrum-fall' or scrum in a waterfall wrapper may be inevitable on some projects.

Brian discussed two case studies, firstly talking from his experience being involved in the 'Universal Credit' project which is gaining much attention in the UK media currently. He explained how although the constraints and the scale of the project are prohibitive, a more agile approach to implementation is being used than in previous large scale e-government projects.

The second case study looked at a project in the FBI to re implement and secure their case management system. We saw how after two attempts at a big bang implementation had failed, wasting eight years and an unfathomable amount of money, on the third attempt agile practices were used. We saw how the methodology was adapted to fit inside strict reporting mechanisms dictated by statute and how after two years the new system was fully implemented and in use.

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Agile FBI and Re-Factoring with Kev McCabe

When worlds collide bad things don’t always happen. The Easter gathering of Agile Yorkshire was another capacity crowd for the Round Foundry conference room. 

Fifty people devoured the buffet then sat captivated, sketched creatively and interacted with peers during Ryan Haney’s passionate pitch for the “unequivocal value of style”. How, when engineers and designers really work together, the results can be outstanding.

Ryan asserted that its possible for anyone to develop their own creative and artistic proficiency with practice and iteration just like any other product development activity. To proved it a round of one-shot Pictionary, as described by **@DaveCTurner**, followed. With much regalement and index card sketching, attendees crossed the room in a test of visual communication. 

Ryan finished off with a deconstruction of software UX and Dieter Rams design values, plus a story of the iterative effort poured into a Broadway musical poster. The later an affirmation of the sweat, time and hard work behind all truly creative or artistic output.

**Phil Rice** filled the half hour speaking slot with a run through of the Lean Startup approach to company building, bravely contrasting it to some of his past business experiences. While he fondly remembered the security of VC investment he also reflected on the pain experienced by discovering, late in the product cycle, that some customer assumptions had been just that - assumptions. 

Phil explained how Lean Startup ideas focus on measuring actual customer behaviour and designing product experiments with as little investment as possible. Relying only on actual data and with an ever ready ability to “pivot” away from the unsuccessful, startup survival odds can significantly increase. With regular small releases, a startup can minimise losses and focus investment only on things that are driving growth.

Phil talked of his experiences to date with his own Lean Startup. Stepping through his early assumptions and customer discovery efforts. He went on to outline current plans to execute his first pivot and continue on his journey of growth. Good luck Phil.

The meeting was rounded off with the prize draw for with books and software licenses provided by some of our sponsors O'Reilly and JetBRAINS.  Overall the meeting was another resounding success with thanks going to Grant Crofton (@relentlessdev), Alex Fleming (@afnw35342) and Neil McLaughlin (@neilbmclaughlin) for generously donating their time to help with the organisation.

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Meetup with Ryan Haney & Hitchhikers Guide to UX

Last Tuesday brought out the cream of Yorkshire's developer community with around 35 attendees turning up to hear **Kevin Rutherford** talk about some specific software principles and patterns - namely the principle of Tell, Don't Ask and the problems he has encountered with trying to follow this principle. His final conclusion was that we should be "Telling, not waiting to be asked" by using a publisher/subscriber pattern and event bus. The slides are available on SlideShare.

For me, the presentation was a great example of how to present a technical topic. Although the material could probably have been covered in less time it is the gaps and spaces in such a presentation which allows the implications of the ideas presented to sink in which give it a feeling of quality. I found it both informative and enjoyable - often not qualities found together in a technical presentation.

**Royd Brayshay** stepped up to the mark, in the absence of any other volunteers, as speaker for the small slot of the evening. He led an entertaining discussion on the subject of sequencing work items (for example by priority) and the pitfalls which may be encountered. A number of different strategies for sequencing were discussed based on business benefits such as cost of delay rather than subjective measures which tend to favour 'pet projects' and technical details.

Both presentations were very well received and prompted some excellent discussion both during the meetup and afterwards in the pub. It was good to have a number of stalwarts of the Agile Yorkshire developer community present especially some of the original founders of the group (Phil Rice and Toby Sucharov) who ran the very first Extreme Programming Club at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds in Feb 2007. I think it's amazing to think that, give or take a few  short gaps, we have been meeting up monthly since then. A lot of credit goes out to those who have helped and attended over the years in building the community. 

**Phil Rice** has stepped forward to present in the small slot in April on 'Lean Startups' which, as a CEO of such a startup, should make for a fascinating topic. We have also just had conformation of the return of **Ryan Haney** who will be talking about UX and Agile in a presentation entitled 'Hitchhiker's Guide to UX'

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March Meeting with Kevin Rutherford & Royd Brayshay

Lightning talks introduced Timeboxing and the Pomodoro Technique before the meeting split into technical and conceptual streams.

In the technical stream, **Aaron Pritzlaff** introduced Scala, one of the new generation of functional languages design to run on mainstream virtual machines. Take a look below for more information. 

The conceptual steam featured a free form discussion starting from the role of time in agile development but wandered constructively onto many topics most memorably around quality.

Thanks to everyone for making this a success.

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