We are delighted to announce the launch of the Leeds Atlassian Community Group, the first of its kind in the city. The group is being led by Royd Brayshay, founder and director at NewRedo and co-organiser of Agile Yorkshire. With years of experience in agile delivery and digital product development, Royd is passionate about building communities and supporting professionals to share knowledge, improve practices, and work more effectively together.

This new initiative creates a dedicated space for professionals who use Atlassian tools such as Jira, Confluence, Trello, and Bitbucket to come together, share experiences, and build a supportive and collaborative network.

Leeds has firmly established itself as one of the United Kingdom’s most dynamic digital and technology centres. With more than 3,000 tech businesses and a workforce of over 70,000, the city plays a vital role in the national tech ecosystem. It is therefore fitting that Leeds now joins the global Atlassian Community network. 

The Leeds Atlassian Community Group is open to anyone who uses or is interested in Atlassian products. Attendees will be able to explore product features, discuss integration strategies, and share best practices across a wide range of industries.

Our launch event will offer a welcoming and engaging environment with insights into the purpose and goals of the Atlassian Community, as well as a chance to help shape its future in Leeds. There will be opportunities to network over refreshments and to participate in an open discussion session.

**Event Agenda**
- 5.30pm to 6.00pm: Arrival, welcome drinks and snacks
- 6.00pm to 6.30pm: Introduction to the Atlassian Community and group goals
- 6.30pm to 6.50pm: Open discussion and Q and A, Guest speaker slot (TBC)
- 6.50pm to 7.00pm: Event wrap-up and details of the next meetup

**Event Details**
- Date: Wednesday 25 June 2025
- Time: 5.30pm to 7.00pm
- Location: NewRedo, Platform, New Station Street, Leeds LS1 4JB
- [Book your FREE event ticket here](https://ace.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-leeds-presents-leeds-atlassian-community-launch-pad/)

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting new chapter for the Leeds tech community.


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Launch of the Leeds Atlassian Community

We’re excited to announce that Agile Yorkshire is proudly sponsoring this year’s Agile Manchester conference! This event has earned an excellent reputation for bringing people together to share ideas, spark conversations, and foster valuable learning opportunities. We’re thrilled to be part of it and to support this amazing gathering of agile professionals.

As a part of our support, we’ve sent out an exclusive discount code to all our Agile Yorkshire community members. If you’re already part of our community, keep an eye on your inbox for your code!
Not yet a member of Agile Yorkshire? Don’t worry – you can still join in time to take advantage of this discount! Simply head over to the website and add yourself to [the Agile Yorkshire "Get Invited" list](https://api.transpond.io/form?am=34215&fid=40211&host=true). You'll receive the discount code directly in your inbox, ensuring you don’t miss out on this fantastic opportunity.
We look forward to seeing many of you at Agile Manchester!

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Agile Yorkshire Partner with the Agile Manchester Conference – Exclusive Discount Code for Our Community!

Last Wednesday, the Agile Yorkshire community of practice group held the first Speech Master Incubator workshop, an event designed to help our community members make the move to become speakers at our events or to become better and more confident speakers. The workshop was hosted by Catherine Bonner from Ambient Tribe and was a super enjoyable afternoon for all concerned.

The Speech Master Incubator is a safe space to explore new techniques and tactics for better communication and style, as well as build confidence and learn from Catherine, a veteran of public speaking herself. The event is open to anyone who has spoken at a past Agile Yorkshire event or has volunteered for a future event.

Keep your eyes peeled and check the Agile Yorkshire website for the next workshop planned for November.

## What You'll Learn
- How to develop your speaking style and delivery
- How to use your voice and body language to convey your message
- How to manage your nerves and build confidence
- How to structure and organise any presentation
## What You'll Get Out of It
- Gain the skills and confidence you need to become a more effective speaker
- Have the opportunity to practice your speaking skills in a supportive environment
- Get feedback from experienced speakers
- Build a network of fellow speakers
## Who Should Attend
- Agile Yorkshire community members who want to speak at our events


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The Speech Master Incubator and How to Become a More Confident Speaker

Hey Agile Yorkshire aspirant speakers,

The festive season is approaching and it's been our tradition to do something slightly different for our December meetup. 
:christmas_tree:**The Annual Lightning Talks Competition**:christmas_tree:

It's an opportunity for **YOU** to grab the mic, share your ideas, and engage with our fantastic community in a lighthearted, informal setting.

Here’s the deal:
- **Date**: December Meetup (Wednesday 4th December at Platform, New Station Street Leeds LS1 4JB)
- **Format**: 9 speakers, 10 minutes each 
- **Theme**: **Anything** you think the community will enjoy! Whether it's agile, tech, or something completely different, we want to hear from you! (For inspiration? Check out the [lightning talks from 2015](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf1VGI2nz4c&list=PL7XGHxpjyxikdsic2hynCI-iZGm9jIFkS&pp=gAQBiAQB), [lightning talks from 2016](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5gH4VLoO7M&list=PL7XGHxpjyximijJThwb29mrKUWeta4Sp2&pp=gAQBiAQB), and [lightning talks from 2017](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDBOC6I3K8g&list=PL7XGHxpjyxim-enJe2wZGaSMvw42a9JUp&pp=gAQBiAQB)
- **Prizes**: Yes, there will be prizes! (No promises on how extravagant though 😉)
- **Deadline**: Don’t wait! Apply soon using [***our proposal form***](https://speak.agileyorkshire.org/speaker-form/d0a5a22e-84e3-410a-b03a-4b60ce84353d) to secure your 10 minute spot.

With only 9 slots available, we might not be able to fit everyone in this session. But don’t worry – if you don’t get a December spot, we’ll offer you a slot in the new year to make sure your talk gets heard!

🎤 **Why have a go?**
Lightning Talks are a great way to participate in the community without the stress of preparing a long presentation. It's all about having fun, sharing something you're familiar with, and connecting with your fellow agilists.

💡 **Public Speaking Workshop**: Need a bit more practice before the big day? Join our **Speech Master Workshop** in November with public speaking coach Catherine Bonner to boost your confidence and fine-tune your skills!

For any questions, feel free to contact us at: **speakers@agileyorkshire.org**.

Let’s make this December event one to remember – we can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Happy holidays in advance,
**The Agile Yorkshire Team** 🎅🎁

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Call For Xmas 2024 Lightning Talks Speakers

We’re absolutely thrilled to announce that Agile Yorkshire has been shortlisted for an award at the Leeds Digital Festival Awards! This recognition is a fantastic nod to the passionate community of Agile enthusiasts, practitioners, and supporters who bring so much energy and inspiration to our meetups.

A huge thank you to the Leeds Digital Festival Awards for this honor and to everyone who has contributed to making Agile Yorkshire the vibrant learning hub it is today. Whether you’ve shared your expertise, attended an event, or simply supported us over the years, this recognition is as much yours as it is ours! 🙌

Here's to the future of Agile in Yorkshire! Thank you, Leeds Digital—we’re incredibly honored!

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Agile Yorkshire Shortlisted in the Leeds Digital Festival Awards

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

Named The UK’s Leading IT Recruitment Company by CV Magazine Corecom Consulting specialise in the recruitment of contract and permanent IT professionals across the north of England.

We’re really excited to be working in partnership with Agile Yorkshire to help further grow, bring together and add value to the people in the Yorkshire tech community. People are at the heart of our business and we pride ourselves on the individuals we place, the clients we partner and the colleagues with whom we work. We always strive to improve, innovate and excel with the goal of standing out in the market place. We’d like to say we’re not just your typical recruiter – but we’d rather you did.

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Announcing Corecom Consulting as a Sponsor for Agile Yorkshire

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

Well done James Scanlan who was last night crowned the Agile Yorkshire 2018 Xmas Lighting Talks Champion, walking away with the Amazon Kindle top prize. It was a close run battle with Adam Mitchell pipped into second place and Bian Teeman third. All the speakers were as excellent as ever with voting well distributed across them and everyone went home with a bottle of wine for their efforts. A special mention should also be made of Ash Winter who won the slide karaoke round plus Gwen Diagram and Leslie Walkinshaw for also volunteering to take part.

Merry Xmas and a fantastic new year to everyone.The video production has now started and we should be able to publish all the lightning talkers in full flow within the next few weeks. Keep checking back here and see you all in 2019.

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A Fantastic Night of Festive Lightning Talks

## Call for Speakers EXTENDED by another week
**(slide decks to be submitted by Sunday 9th Dec and talks delivered on Wed 12th Dec)**

We try our very best to make Agile Yorkshire relevant and useful to everyone who comes and as well as inviting popular industry speakers from around the country we want to balance that with content from members of our own community. However speaking takes practice, confidence must be built and time is required just to pull a talk together. So, for several years now we've run the Xmas Lightning talks Competition on our December date.
The idea is to provide an easy entry platform for new speakers or a fun opportunity for those with more experience. There are prizes for all the speakers and a special prize for the winner voted by all the attendees. Don't worry, everyone is very supportive no matter how your talk unfolds.

If you don't know what a lightning talk is there are lots of resources around and don't worry it's very simple...

A ten minute Lightning Talk for Agile Yorkshire's annual competition should:
- Probably have a maximum of six slides (maybe none).
- Be on a topic you already know quite well and can be anything you think our audience will enjoy.
- Be interesting to our audience but could be about pretty much anything - It doesn't have to be agile related.
- Be possible to completely script (if that’s your style).
- Not be a second more than ten minutes.
- Win you a SIGNIFICANT prize on the night if you put your mind to it.
### Here's some of the topics from past events:
- Hello, this is Windows Support Desk - Not!
- The One Bad Thing about BDD
- Finding a School - Code vs MumsNet
- Why Does Your Browser Think #chucknorris is a Color
- How cars work
- Why Triathlon is Better than Football
- How To Write Bad Code
- How to Bridge the Dev-DBA chasm?
- Resistance when Transitioning From Waterfall to Agile Scrum
- ScrumBan vs Sprint

And don't forget there will be significant speaker prizes on the night.

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Call for Speakers - It's the 2018 Lightning Talk Competition

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

## Call for Speakers closes on Friday 17th NOVEMBER
**(slide decks to be submitted by Friday 1st December)**

We try our very best to make Agile Yorkshire relevant and useful to everyone who comes and as well as inviting popular industry speakers from around the country we want to balance that with content from members of our own community. However speaking takes practice, confidence must be built and time is required just to pull a talk together. So, for several years now we've run the Xmas Lightning talks Competition on our December date.
The idea is to provide an easy entry platform for new speakers or a fun opportunity for those with more experience. There are prizes for all the speakers and a special prize for the winner voted by all the attendees. Don't worry, everyone is very supportive no matter how your talk unfolds.

If you don't know what a lightning talk is there are lots of resources around and don't worry it's very simple...

A ten minute Lightning Talk for Agile Yorkshire's annual competition should:
- Probably have a maximum of six slides (maybe none).
- Be on a topic you already know quite well and can be anything you think our audience will enjoy.
- Be interesting to our audience but could be about pretty much anything - It doesn't have to be agile related.
- Be possible to completely script (if that’s your style).
- Not be a second more than ten minutes.
- Win you a SIGNIFICANT prize on the night if you put your mind to it.
### Here's some of the topics from past events:
- Hello, this is Windows Support Desk - Not!
- The One Bad Thing about BDD
- Finding a School - Code vs MumsNet
- Why Does Your Browser Think #chucknorris is a Color
- How cars work
- Why Triathlon is Better than Football
- How To Write Bad Code
- How to Bridge the Dev-DBA chasm?
- Resistance when Transitioning From Waterfall to Agile Scrum
- ScrumBan vs Sprint

And don't forget there will be significant speaker prizes on the night.

Call for Speakers - The 2017 Lightning Talk Competition is Back

Its that time again already. The annual Agile Yorkshire Lightning Talk Competition is fast approaching. It's an Xmas tradition to make the December 13th meeting a celebration of community speaking, with prizes to boot. If you don't know [what a lightning talk is](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_talk) there are lots of [lightning talks resources](https://www.perl.com/pub/2004/07/30/lightningtalk.html/) around and don't worry it's very simple...

### Submit Proposal

CLOSING Wednesday 30th NOVEMBER
(event on Tuesday Dec 13th)

A ten minute Lightning Talk for Agile Yorkshire's December 13th 2016 meetup should:
- Probably have a maximum of six slides (maybe none).
- Be on a topic you already know quite well.
- Be interesting to our audience but could be about pretty much anything.
- Be possible to completely script (if that’s your style).
- Not be a second more than ten minutes.
- Win you a SIGNIFICANT prize on the night if you put your mind to it.

Here's some of the topics from past events:
- The One Bad Thing about BDD
- Finding a School - Code vs MumsNet
- Sketchnoting Agile (one doodle at a time)
- How cars work
- 10 simple ways to help your team run like clockwork 
- How To Write Bad Code
- How to Bridge the Dev-DBA chasm?
- Resistance when Transitioning From Waterfall to Agile Scrum
- ScrumBan vs Sprint

And don't forget there will be significant speaker prizes on the night.

The 2016 Agile Yorkshire Annual Lightning Talks

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

We've moved! Agile Yorkshire has been based at the Round Foundry for the past few years. It's been a great venue and fantastic to work with the Round Foundry staff. However nothing stays the same for ever. With opening of Futurelabs and it's dedicated community event space we wanted to support what the Futurlabs team are trying to do as well as to keep improving the Agile Yorkshire experience. It's still early days for Futurelabs and work is ongoing to make it the best it can be; however we felt that Agile Yorkshire and Futurlabs share similar goals and values to support software product development in our region and bringing our community together in the Futurlabs event space was the best way we could help.
Check out the venue map and directions on our Contact page or [take at look on Street View (its the red doors) ](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.798892,-1.5392834,3a,75y,347.57h,89.72t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sNIIwmHGtNgsLcsBwVHASMg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0.28000000000000114%26panoid%3DNIIwmHGtNgsLcsBwVHASMg%26yaw%3D347.57!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDQyMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D)you may already recognise it.

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New Home for Agile Yorkshire

After the success of Agile Methods in London, UNICOM is pleased to organise Agile Methods North in Manchester.
This event originates from the idea that learning about Agile Methods are important; but that understanding HOW they apply to the companies’ specific contexts is critical. Independent agile practitioners and organisations will benefit from the conference mix of case studies, thought-provoking presentations and discussion sessions. Not matter if you are new to agile, there is always more to learn to improve the way it is introduced, sustained and scaled.
### The event is focused on these key topic areas
- Agile Programme & Project Management (for all business sectors)
- The public sector
- The banking, finance and insurance (BFIS) sector

You can get a 15% discount on ticket price, when referencing: AY15
More details can found on the Agile Methods North website.

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Agile Methods North Conference

Returning for it’s 2nd year, [Agile Manchester 2016](https://agilemanchester.net/archive/2016) is the hands-on Agile and Lean conference happening at the studio, Manchester from 11-13 May 2016.

The conference has been created to provide Agile practitioners - from novice to advanced - with a collaborative, fun and hands-on atmosphere in which to grow as professionals.

Members of Agile Yorkshire can access a 10% discount using the code AGILEYORKS2016

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Agile Manchester Conference 2016

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. These gatherings help practitioners find each other and provide a platform for exchanging ideas, sharing experiences and growing personal skills outside a single workplace. It's great to see Equal Experts also recognise that talent is everywhere and move into our region. It fantastic when they also share our values enough to support Agile Yorkshire and help us to continue to support our region. Below is a quote from Equal Experts about their new association with Agile Yorkshire.

"Equal Experts is an award-winning agile consultancy, specialising in simple software solutions for big business challenges.
Our approach prioritises expertise – our consultants typically have at least 10 years’ experience. And since we’re keen to work with the best talent wherever it lies, we’re now actively seeking to grow our network in the north.
We respect our teams, our clients and third party providers equally – a grown-up approach that’s helped us to be recognised by Glassdoor as one of the UK’s best employers for work-life balance, all while delivering exceptional software for clients as diverse as O2, Tesco and HMRC.
We’d love to meet you at our next NiteTech North event. Held in Leeds on February 24, there’ll be drinks, nibbles, and a couple of talks that will give you an idea of what we’re all about. Hope to see you there – just sign up on our meetup page."

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Announcing Equal Experts as an Agile Yorkshire Sponsor

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

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

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

The conference comprises three parallel tracks with plenary combined sessions, each with a different and specific focus.  One of these is for all business sectors and addresses the Agile Programme and Project Management. The other two tracks focus deeply on the unique challenges encountered when introducing, sustaining and scaling Agile within (1) the public sector and (2) the banking, finance and insurance (BFIS) sector. A discount code for the Agile Yorkshire community will be winging it way to your email inbox very soon if you haven't received it already.

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Agile Methods Conference - Programme and Project Management for the Finance and Public Sector

Its that time again already. The annual Agile Yorkshire Lightning Talk Competition is fast approaching. It's an Xmas tradition to make the December 8th meeting a celebration of community speaking, with prizes to boot. If you don't know [what a lightning talk is](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_talk) there are lots of [lightning talks resources](https://www.perl.com/pub/2004/07/30/lightningtalk.html/) around and don't worry it's very simple...

### Submit Proposal

CLOSING Monday 30th NOVEMBER
(event on Tuesday Dec 13th)

A ten minute Lightning Talk for Agile Yorkshire's December 13th 2016 meetup should:
- Probably have a maximum of six slides (maybe none).
- Be on a topic you already know quite well.
- Be interesting to our audience but could be about pretty much anything.
- Be possible to completely script (if that’s your style).
- Not be a second more than ten minutes.
- Win you a SIGNIFICANT prize on the night if you put your mind to it.

Here's some of the topics from past events:
- The One Bad Thing about BDD
- Finding a School - Code vs MumsNet
- Sketchnoting Agile (one doodle at a time)
- How cars work
- 10 simple ways to help your team run like clockwork 
- How To Write Bad Code
- How to Bridge the Dev-DBA chasm?
- Resistance when Transitioning From Waterfall to Agile Scrum
- ScrumBan vs Sprint

And don't forget there will be significant speaker prizes on the night.

2015 Xmas Lightning Talk Competition - Call for Speakers

Fruition, the Leeds based recruitment company, have generously stepped forward with support and sponsorship for Agile Yorkshire. Without the generosity and cooperation of our sponsors meetups could not happen in the way they currently do. By supporting Agile Yorkshire our sponsors support lean and agile practitioners across the Yorkshire region region with learning and collaboration opportunities through each other and with industry experts nationally.

Martin Jones - Associate Director at Fruition commented...
“Fruition IT are delighted to be joining Agile Yorkshire as sponsors.  As an independent IT recruiter based in Leeds, it’s great to be able to contribute to the Yorkshire IT community that is so important to our business.”

Please take a moment to let Martin or anyone from the Fruition team know their help is appreciated by taking a moment to say hi over the coming months.

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Announcing Fruition as an Agile Yorkshire Sponsor

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

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

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 [talk entitled Transforming NHS Choices With Agile & Lean UX](https://agileyorkshire.org/event-details/2015-april-meetup) 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

At our March meet up the main speaker, Kiran Singh, enthusiastically delivered a presentation on Microservices: Conquering Monoliths which, in the words of one of our attendees, “sold the topic to a sceptic”. Drawing from his own experiences in breaking down an unruly monolith of legacy code into a number of small, responsive, HTTP services using the principle of bounded contexts and domain driven design. The aim of this was to make components of the software independently releasable using the model espoused by successful companies such as Netflix and Spotify. Kiran pointed out many of the tangential benefits of moving to a microservices architecture not least the ability to get new developers productive much more quickly in a given service where the code can be simpler and cleaner. Kiran stressed that this is not just a technical problem, it requires buy in from all levels of the team and a truly agile culture to support it.

The support speaker for the evening was James Salt who gave an interesting take on Team Based Iterative Consulting which aimed to address the mismatch between a typical consultancy engagement model and agile. After outlining the problems with a typical engagement (for example named ‘resources’, difficulty in measuring consultancy deliverables and scope creep for time & materials engagements) James proposed a set of principles for agile consultancy namely “Priority over Process, Throughput over Headcount, Responsiveness over Headcount and Client Collaboration over Contract Negotiation”. With these he suggests that it is possible to move an engagement model based more on feedback loops than up front estimation of scope and effort. As one member of the audience observed it was “an interesting view on working iteratively with customers” and seemed to strike a chord with many in the audience.

Finally thanks also to all our volunteer team who make the event happen and to main sponsors Piksel, Callcredit and [NewRedo](https://www.newredo.com/) and to our prize sponsors O'Reilly, JetBRAINS,Manning, Wrox and PluralSight.

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Taming Monoliths the Microservices Way plus Agile Consultancy Engagement

The February meet up was organised as an evening themed by the #BeyondProjects hash tag with Allan Kelly who has championed the Twitter conversation and Paul McCormick, the SkyBet head of technology, who came to explain how their projects are being replaced by investment themes as a way to control and allocate their product development spend.

Many months ago Allan Kelly started his twitter campaign using the #NoProjects hash tag but was persuaded to switch to #BeyondProjects as something slightly less absolute as well as following in the footsteps of the #BeyondBudgeting movement. Alan himself is every bit as passionate about the need for absolute change however, and this came accross in both his reasoning and animated presentation. Being able to look past project metrics or agile dogma and focus on what it is that has commercial advantage brought Allan's focus onto delivered value. In a 2008 Capers Jones study quoted by Allan, they had observed business change at a rate of 2% per month and his assertion was that product development must be successful within this context. The call to action was to stop the goal displacement of chasing deadlines and instead focus on outcomes. With a culture of failing fast and cheaply, plus an institutionalised learning cycle, risks may be reduced and mitigated implicitly.
Another strand to the Allan's pitch was that of big projects equal big batches of work. The savings associated with smaller batch sizes are well documented within the agile community and increases in risk, rework and work in process were all cited as diseconomies of scale. Allan's final rallying call was to move beyond projects as accounting codes and instead look to the venture capital companies and their models of incremental investment. This turned out to be the approach broadly being followed by the IT organisation our other speaker for the evening represented - SkyBet.

Paul McComick referred repeatedly to the SkyBet way and how, inspired by Spotify's recently published organisation model, they have been transforming their delivery into something capable of processing ninety functional changes a week and a mean time to market measured in days not months or even weeks.
These changes haven’t happened overnight but Paul explain that by starting small with a single squad and using simple data collection techniques like recording lead and cycle times on physical story cards and using spreadsheets to do the analysis they have increased throughput significantly.
Traditional time reporting of people has given way to collecting data on actual work items and their flow efficiency characteristics including things like percentage of time work flows backwards. The squads are grouped into a tribe which works on an ongoing investment theme rather than a sequence of projects. An investment theme receives staged investment based on commercial performance and each tribe also runs its own profit and loss reporting with an embedded responsible finance person. All these tactics are designed to continuously answer three questions: are the right things being built, are they being built right and are they being built fast enough.
Of course all this can only be achieved in an organisation culturally able to absorb significant qualities of ongoing change and it should therefore be no surprise that there are plenty more changes and experiments planned for the future.

The Agile Yorkshire feedback forms often contain praise for the speakers who present at our monthly meet ups. We should all be thankful for their time and preparation as this is what makes the evenings such a learning experience. Occasionally a topic or speaker seems to really resonate with the community and judging by the reaction both of these things seemed true of our #BeyondProjects evening. Rarely have our feedback forms contained the word “excellent” so many times.

Finally thanks also to all our volunteer team who make the event happen and to main sponsors Piksel, Callcredit and [NewRedo](https://www.newredo.com/) and to our prize sponsors O'Reilly, JetBRAINS,Manning, Wrox and PluralSight.

See you next month,
Royd

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#BeyondProjects - Project Management gives way to Investment Themes and Beyond

The first talk of this month's meetup was a presentation about presentation skills, presented by Ivor Tymchak. Ivor's key message was that in giving a talk, one is "trying to change the audience's mind", just as he was trying to change our minds with regard to presentation skills in his own talk that evening.

By presenting in person, be it a technical talk, business pitch or even just a day-to-day conversation, the speaker is able to respond to the feedback of their audience and really judge whether that audience is understanding the information that is being delivered. The audience is the real focus of the presentation, Ivor reminded us, and as a speaker one must build a bridge from the audience's current understanding of the topic in hand to whatever point it is one is trying to teach.

Ivor made great efforts to impress upon us the importance of making sure all aspects of a presentation add value. Slides, for example, should be treated like a billboard. You wouldn't put something useless on a billboard that you were paying a lot of money for, so why would you distract your audience with superfluous information on a slide? Also on the topic of slides, Ivor pointed out that for anyone to whom design does not come naturally there are resources aplenty for coherent colour schemes, tasteful fonts and free-to-use, high resolution images to be found online.

Confidence in speaking will only really come to most of us with lots of practice, and as a final piece of useful advice, Ivor reminded us to always have a backup: "If the projector goes down, would you still be able to give that presentation?".

The main talk of the evening was given by Martin Sumner, technical lead of the Spine II programme at the NHS. Spine is the name given to a set of services for providing clinical and non-clinical data in the NHS, including prescriptions, details of adverse reactions to medications, patient addresses and personal information. Martin reckons the system deals with something in the region of thirty million messages a day.

The Spine I project (presumably then just known as 'Spine') involved about two thousand people, over one billion pounds, and took over eight years to (sort of) complete. Several years down the line from Spine I's 'completion', and plans for replacing that system, a system Martin had been involved in developing, were under way. Martin was worried to see signs that the organisation of the project seemed to be going the same way as the first version of the system, with lots of upfront planning based on specifications that were certain to change and large portions of the project being earmarked for outsourcing at great expense.

Attentive Agile Yorkshire crowd Martin and a colleague started on a small proof of concept with the aim of showing that a small team could achieve the results needed to improve and extend the system. They were successful, and also managed to show that, as Martin had suspected, the project specification was severely lacking and they needed a way of working to allow for the gradual development of those specifications. Something more 'agile'?

The project took a couple of years to complete, and so far seems to be fulfilling its goals of providing a highly available, efficient and reliable set of data services. It is estimated that the new Spine has time savings of seven or eight hundred working days per DAY over the old system! A pretty incredible figure. "Was the project agile?", pondered Martin. In some respects, yes: they managed to have a good amount of automated test coverage, continuous integration and test environments which were a close analogue to the Live ones, all of which allowed for agile reactions to changing requirements and for the work to be completed incrementally. The release itself, however, could not really be done incrementally, due to its being an 'all or nothing' affair, involving hefty, tightly coordinated data migrations, which took a up a lot of the development effort.

Looking back over both iterations of Spine, Martin has seen most success when the teams he has worked in were really engaged in the project, and also that the development process doesn't have to be fixed -- people over process!

Workshop Notice: If you'd like to improve or develop your speaking skills Agile Yorkshire is running a workshop with Ivor Tymchak very soon and if you step forward to speak at a future Agile Yorkshire meetup it's almost FREE.

Finally thanks also to all our volunteer team who make the event happen and to main sponsors iSource IT, Piksel, Callcredit and [NewRedo](https://www.newredo.com/) and to our prize sponsors O'Reilly, JetBRAINS,Manning, Wrox and PluralSight.

See you next month,
Eleanor Chambers

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NHS Spine-Tingling Success plus Event Presenter Polish

At Agile Yorkshire in December,
Were Lightning Talks and I remember,
Talks of ten minutes, sometimes less,
My thoughts on which I'll now express.

Grant Crofton, of the [Leeds Code Dojo](http://leedscodedojo.github.io/), 
Keen to flex his coding mojo,
Showed that he was not undone,
In finding schools fit for his son.

In Ioanna Touflexi's driving lessons,
She tired of hearing odd expressions,
So learnt the things a car can do,
And shared them, with neat videos, too.

Jon Fulton, an experienced Scrum Master,
Had tips to keep us from disaster.
He's customized his working style,
In ways that he has found worthwhile.


Paul Henshaw joined us from Immedia,
With tales where Scrum-Ban made work speedier.
He always finishes what he starts,
By cutting out the useless parts.

If project time is running short,
Code structure should be your first thought.
Joe Simmonds loves a unit test,
And fixing code when time is best.

C# tools from Microsoft,
May seem to have a painful cost.
Matt McLoughlin's [Omnisharp](http://www.omnisharp.net/),
Might be a better place to start.

Matt Russell's "[Test Reporty Thing](https://github.com/thetestpeople/trt)",
Wants to take the vicious sting,
From flaky tests which obfuscate,
Your software's verifiable state.

Why keep your rules in two locations,
And risk conflicting validations?
With only one truth to maintain,
Tim Brown thinks you might save some pain.

And finally onto last year's winner,
Ivor Tymchak's no beginner.
Last year he won a Kindle Fire,
This time he warned us off desire.

We voted using lego bricks,
Building pillars for our top picks.
It was then judged whose tower was higher,
First came Grant, then Ioanna and Ivor.

[Eleanor Chambers](https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/eleanor-chambers/71/155/6ba)

Amazing festive thanks to Eleanor for her fantastic poem above (much better than my dull write up last year) and apologies for any browser rendering issues. It's not easy to get a poem and and a dozen photos looking sensible with the stupid Google WISYWIG editor. Congratulations to the Grant Crofton, the overall winner, Ioanna-Kyriaki Toufexi second and Ivor Tymchak third, plus all the other speakers who made such a fantastic night.

Finally thanks also to all our volunteer team who make the event happen and to main sponsors iSource IT, Piksel, Callcredit and [NewRedo](http://www.newredo.com/) and to our prize sponsors O'Reilly, JetBRAINS,Manning, Wrox and PluralSight.

See you next year,
Royd.

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Amazing Evening of Festive Lightning Talks

"What motivates you to get out of bed and leave for work in the morning?" asked Agile Yorkshire stalwart Neil McLaughlin at this November's meet-up. We agreed we'd all like our work to be challenging, fun and ...lucrative, but even with all of these things, how does one stay motivated?

It might seem that our desire to enjoy work would be at odds with the running of an efficient business, but Neil reminded us that even Frederick Taylor's carrot and stick approach to getting the most out of his workforce recognised that having breaks from work improved the overall throughput of his operation. As Neil told us, while the carrot and stick of yesteryear may have been superseded by butternut squash and lightsaber, it remains of benefit to businesses to find ways to keep its workforce motivated.

As a salient example of the will of the people with their hobbies and aspirations for autonomy, mastery and purpose triumphing in the face of big business with a 'too big to fail' mentality, Neil brought up the success of Wikipedia in the world of digital encyclopaedias. For many, Encarta pre-dated their experience with the internet. How could Wikipedia, with its articles written by volunteers and lack of marketing ever compete with Encarta? But it did, and open-source projects continue to win out against traditional business models over and over again.

Continuing on the theme of self-reflection, Kev McCabe joined us to speak on the theme of Software Craftsmanship, a topic in which he is particularly inspired by Sandro Mancuso. It's not like people wake up each morning thinking "today, I'm going to do a bad job", reckons Kev, but as pressure to speed up software delivery increases, he has observed that the standard of software delivered often slips. It makes sense that as code quality decreases, it takes longer to develop new features, as developers are no longer working with a system that has been designed with extensibility in mind.

The Agile Manifesto calls for 'working software', but what qualifies as 'working'?, Kev asks. Why should someone feel they have to say "I've done it and it's working"? Should these two facts not be synonymous? and where did the phrase 'Technical Debt Backlog' come from? Whilst such a thing is blithely accepted, it feels like working software and mastery of the craft of writing software are becoming increasingly difficult to attain.

It can be challenging to improve at our craft when we're not expected to practise in work time, Kev admits. He advocates an approach of learning in small chunks, but often; stopping to ask questions; voicing your frustrations and not being miserable and negative, you can always leave! Show everyone around you that you're happy and it should benefit everyone on your team.

Kev personally advocates following XP practices. He also advised that when dividing up tasks amongst a team of developers, one should allocate work to people with the fewest skills first in order to avoid a situation where some of members of the team are left with nothing they can work on. We also learnt that some of his top coding gripes are poor naming choices and the lack of deletion of stale code!

As a parting thought, Kev left us with this: Software Craftsmanship and Agile in isolation will fail, we need both to succeed.

The evening ended with the monthly prize draw and drinks in the Midnight Bell. Thanks to all our volunteer team who make the event happen and finally thanks to main sponsors iSource IT, Piksel, Callcredit and [NewRedo](https://www.newredo.com/) and to our prize sponsors O'Reilly, JetBRAINS, Manning, Wrox and PluralSight.


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