The first session I sat in today was titled 'Encouraging Change w/ Agile Examples'.  This session was the combination of a few others and we took all the ideas and redirected into this. 

The intent of the session was to attempt to flush out ideas that will allow us to move our business and our development teams down the path of adopting agile.

The conversation was awesome, we had tons of solid feedback and we able to talk about various real word scenarios.

Below are my notes, sorry they are not in a long descriptive form, but they are notes :)

Resources:

Scrum and XP in the trenches
http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.pdf

Quotes:

'How are you going to test that?'
'Test to reproduce bugs first'
'If it is hard you're doing it wrong'

Questions:

1. Moving a team (10 or 11) to move to scrum/xp
   - forced team to switch to scrum/xp
   - this caused 100% turn over on the team
   - forced to move into a team room
   - he laid down the law, did not waiver
2. Team with no process, no methodology
   - team struggles with lack of direction
   - team struggles with lack of delegated authority
3. Getting started with TDD/agile process
   - start by asking where are your tests
   - start by keep mentioning that tests are needed
   - using tests to explain intent of code via completed tests
   - mentoring developers
   - Small pieces, baby steps
   - explaining the value
4. What can we do that provides the most bang for the buck in the short term
   - remove scope
   - create priority of items that MUST be delivered
   - force the company to make decisions, or you will make the decision

General Thoughts:

Done/Releasable is defined as 'what is good enough to be able to produce a release'

Learn to use metrics to lean to convey the status of the project and how
if they want more features in less how this may or may not be possible.

Need to get everyone on the same page in terms of business terms.
- how did you did do your job before we had 'technology'

Rant:

We need to remove the term 'The business' and turn it into 'our business' (Tom Poppendieck on his soap box)

Till next time,