Contents

1. Upcoming courses
2. User Story Mapping
3. Story Testing in Finland
4. Mapping Product Line Value Streams
5. XP Days Benelux program published
6. Events

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1. Upcoming courses
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7-9 October, eXperience Agile
22-23 October, Mastering Unit Testing
16-17 November, Mastering Legacy Code, Antwerp (Belgium)

Courses will take place in Tilburg (The Netherlands), unless indicated
otherwise. We also deliver our workshops and courses at other
locations (depending on where most participants come from) and in-
house.

www.qwan.it

Brochure: www.qwan.it/doc/courses_and_workshops_2009.pdf

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2. User Story Mapping
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We are increasingly applying user story mapping to envision and plan
products.  User Story Mapping is a relatively new agile product
planning practice, with its roots in user centered design. It’s being
popularized by Jeff Patton. User Story Mapping enables us to create a
large plan for one or more releases quickly and effectively. It offers
an alternative for traditional agile planning approaches like the
Scrum product backlog. Instead of a simple list, stories are laid out
as a two dimensional map. The map provides both a high level overview
of the system under development and of the value it adds to the users
(the horizontal axis), and a way to organize detailed stories into
releases according to importance, priority, etc. (the vertical axis).
The map shows how every user story fits in the full scope.

An important contribution of user story mapping is its focus on users,
their goals, and the activities/processes that the system should
support. Activities or processes are largely independent of the chosen
implementation strategy; in some cases we may even choose to implement
an activity manually at first and invest in software development later
if we can determine that it is more cost-effective. This helps the
team to focus on why they are building the software – business value
instead of feature details.

User story mapping was a natural fit for us, after working with agile
for a number of  years. It augments existing agile processes and
solves a number of issues we have run into. Story mapping makes it for
instance easier to slice releases and delay features until the last
responsible moment with a group.

blog.piecemealgrowth.net/working-with-user-story-mapping

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3. Story Testing in Finland
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The Scandinavian Agile Conference has a great program, with a broad
range of topics and a full day open space. It will take place on 15
and 16 October, in Helsinki (Finland). Highly recommended!

Willem and Marc will run a workshop on story testing and working in a behaviour
driven way. This workshop is meant for both developers and product
owners:

- As a developer, I want to know story testing frameworks and practice
one of them, so that I can test stories using the examples the product
owner writes together with me.

- As a product owner, I want understand the process of testing stories
and practice specifying acceptance criteria using example scenarios,
so that  I can help developers develop what I want.

We will demo scenario based testing and facilitate participants in
writing and improving test scenarios.

www.scan-agile.org

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4. Mapping Product Line Value Streams
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On 20 and 21 October, the Practical Product Lines conference will take
place in Amsterdam. We will run a value stream mapping workshop, to
explore software product lines from a lean perspective. We will apply
value stream mapping to one or more existing processes or product
lines brought in by the participants. The goal of this workshop is to
apply and evaluate value stream mapping as a tool for understanding
business value creation in a complete software development
organisation from requirements to delivery.

To receive a 10% discount on the conference fee, enter PPLQW when
registering.

www.practicalproductlines.org/ppl2009

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5. XP Days Benelux program published
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XP Days Benelux will be held for the 7th time this year, on 23 and 24
November, in Mechelen (Belgium). The program has been published and
offers a fine mix of lean, kanban, design, agile analysis, … We’re
involved in three highly interactive sessions:

* Retrospective Hero (with Nicole Belilos) – Does your team have
retrospectives regularly? Are they always effective and do they lead
to usable actions? Does your team enjoy attending them and does
everyone participate? Keep it that way! You are a Retrospective Hero.
Or are your retrospectives getting dull after a while? Do they have
the same format over and over again? Do you use them only at the end
of an iteration? Less and less often? Then there is only one solution:
become a retrospective hero, so that you can win any retro situation!
In this session you will learn to have effective retrospectives in
different situations. You will learn to use old techniques in a new
way, and you will get a chance to try out new ones. You will see that
retrospectives can be used in many situations!

We ran this workshop at Agile Open – read more at:
me.andering.com/2009/09/21/retrospective-hero/

* Agile Politics (with Emmanuel Gaillot)

If you believe corporate politics is something for ‘those dirty
managers’ think again. Everybody behaves in a political way when a
limited amount of resources has to be divided over groups of people.
Come play our game and experience firsthand how dirty a politician you
are! We will play politics – in a game you will represent a political
faction that tries to get an organisation to spend money the way you
prefer. Convince others to vote for you so you can carry out your
program, or choose another party to do what you want for you… After
playing the game we will debrief our experiences and draw parallels
with everyday work. It may be that you are already aware of the
politics around you. In that case the game can help you understand
more about your behaviour. It may be that you believe your work has
nothing to do with politics. Think again… it may be that you are a
“spoiltician” – someone who has ‘delegated’ that ‘dirty’ politics
to others (e.g. your boss . This game will show you how political
many common project decisions are. Whether you care about corporate
politics or not, they have an impact on your work life. Regardless
your status, be it an opinion leader, a reckless reformer or “just a
programmer” in the silent crowd, this workshop is for you!

me.andering.com/?s=agile+politics

* Flying Horses

“PHP, Ruby, Python, Smalltalk, Java, C#, who cares!? It’s all the
same!”… Well now, Is that true? We disagree. We have learned quite a
few new ideas using different languages in the past 10 years. But then
again we might be just fortunate. A lot of developers might be stuck
in one language for years and years. So if you are stuck, this is your
2 hours intensive workshop to get you out of your comfort zone. If you
are lucky to work in different languages, this is your 2 hours of fun,
playing around. For both of you, this is your 2 hour hands on learning
and exchanging ideas experience.

www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/Program.html

We also offer all workshops mentioned in this newsletter inhouse; we
can tailor workshops to solve specific issues for you. Would you like
to know more? www.qwan.it/contact

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6. Events
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15-16 October, Scandinavian Agile Conference (Helsinki, Finland),
www.scan-agile.org

20-21 October, Practical Product Lines (Amsterdam, NL),
www.practicalproductlines.org/ppl2009

30-31 October, Devopsdays ‘09 (Ghent, Belgium), www.devopsdays.org

7 November, Devnology Community Day (Baarn, NL),
www.devnology.nl/bijeenkomsten/details/15-community-day-01

11 November, J-Fall 2009 (Bussum, NL), www.nljug.org/jfall

23-24 November, XP Days Benelux (Mechelen, Belgium), www.xpday.net

26-28 November, XP Days Germany (Karlsruhe, Germany), www.xpday.de

7-8 December, XP Day London (UK), www.xpday.org

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