Scrum-India Yahoo Group

I moderate the Scrum-India Yahoo Group founded by Pete Deemer. If you would like to join the group, please go the group URL http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Scrum-India/ To sign up for the Scrum-India group without having to go through the full Yahoo! registration process, just click the button below that says “join this group”, and then on the web page that loads, look for a link at the bottom that says “join the mailing list instead”– click that and you would be subscribed.

The group will be a place to Meet other people using Scrum, at product companies and services companies, big and small. Primarily, the group would answer questions you would be hesitant to ask in bigger groups. Some of the topics that would be discussed in the group include:

• Scrum and fixed-bid contracts,
• Scrum and CMMi,
• Reporting business metrics in Scrum,
• Techniques for Agile planning and estimation,
• Introduction to Scrum,
• Product Backlog,
• Product Owner,
• IT Services and Scrum,
• Advice on organizational change.

Biweekly posting of Scrum events throughout India would be posted as well.

Review : Agile Conference at NCR

I started for the conference at NCR from Chandigarh at about 10 AM on 7th. I had hired a taxi and ASCI, was kind enough to sponsor the to and fro fare. We reached Delhi at around 4 PM and it took us one hour to reach Green Park and another 04 hours to reach Ansals Institute - the conference venue. The problem was as usual traffic. The new toll bridge does not seem to have worked. I sometimes wonder how life would have been without it, if its so difficult with it. Needless to say, Gurgaon at night is quite a sight but no greenery makes it a very dry city. I reached the campus and immediately slept.

Waking up early on 8th, I rearranged my presentation and slides and got ready and went to the venue. By the time, Pete was already speaking. I have listened to Pete many time and as usual he was in his elements. After Pete and some tea, I saw Naresh, president of ASCI, speaking for the first time. He is a good speaker. After that I attended Shreekanth from Sabre’s talk on Distributed Development. It was a decent talk as well. After that I attended two talks back to back : Jagdish Shri’s talk on CMMi and Agile as well as Deepak from Intelligrape’s talk on Metrics for Agile Projects. Both were brilliant. Finally, it was my turn and I was able to complete only half of the content I prepared [mental note: keep presentation short]. After my presentation, the open space was held where I went for “Is India suited for Agile”. Interesting comments were made for and against the motion. Not sure, if we concluded anything.

Overall, the conference was a good start, although not sure why it was on 5th floor when a ground floor venue would have allowed use of parks and open spaces. However, a great start.

Agile Conference NCR

I will be presenting at Agile Conference - NCR. The topic I selected was “Agile Collaboration Schemas”. It would an interesting event. Currently, the presentation is being peer reviewed by Guido and Priyanshu from Xebia.

I will post the abstract submitted for the conference in my next post.