LADG is 100!!!!

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday London Agile Discussion Group,
Happy birthday to you.

 

Last week, the London Agile Discussion Group held its 100th session. It all began over 4 years earlier …

On Tuesday 20 August 2012, I climbed the stairs to a tiny room above a pub in Victoria, London, for a discussion entitled “Story Points or Ideal Days: which is better?”

This was the inaugural session of the newly formed London Scrum Discussion Group whose aim was to discuss books on agile and Scrum. Seven people turned up on that first night. A fortnight later we met again, this time to discuss “Should testing be included in the Sprint and in estimates?” This time 20 people turned up. The following session two weeks later saw another 20 people turn up to discuss “What makes a good retrospective”.

Since then, we have changed our name (to London Agile Discussion Group) and moved venue (to The Savoy Tup, just off The Strand). We’ve used many different formats, from debates to group exercises, from 4-chair fishbowl (you can only speak if sitting on one of the chairs and one of the chairs must always be left empty) to role-playing. One thing has remained unchanged throughout the 100 sessions: “We value discussions and debates over presentations and lectures”. That’s our strapline because we are a discussion group; we don’t do presentations.

This has tripped us up on a couple of occasions when we set a topic for discussion, only to find that it was unlikely any of the attendees were likely to know about the topic. It’s very hard to have a discussion about something that nobody knows anything about. For example, the session on 5 April 2016 was entitled “What is Crystal Clear?” It’s creator, Alistair Cockburn, was one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto and, when the Manifesto was formed in Snowbird, Crystal had more traction amongst the signatories than Scrum did. But where is it now? Nobody who turned up for our session knew anything about it. Fortunately, we’d pre-empted this, spoken to Alistair, and come up with novel ways to both hold a discussion AND explain what Crystal was about. However, that took a lot of effort.

After 100 sessions, the organisers have reviewed how we should run the group. We are going to keep the focus on discussions, we are going to keep it free, we are going to keep the topics varied and engaging. But, we are going to change the cadence to monthly, focusing on quality over quantity.

And what quality we have in our future. We have Georg Fasching running a session on team dynamics, another looking at whether we should focus more on descaling rather than scaling agile, and a workshop with Dan Ashby on writing BDD scenarios in the new year.

Thank you to everyone who has helped run sessions at LADG over the years, and thank you to everyone who has attended a session too. Afterall, a discussion is nothing without participation from you.

Please go to London Agile Discussion Group for more information of upcoming events.

 

Photos from past LADG meetings

The last 100 sessions

20 Aug 2012	Story Points or Ideal Days: which is better?
4 Sep 2012	Scrum discussion: should testing be included in the sprint and in estimates?
18 Sep 2012	What makes a good retrospective
2 Oct 2012	Promoting Scrum to non-believers
16 Oct 2012	How to build the best Scrum board
30 Oct 2012	Scrum sucks! Kanban rules!
13 Nov 2012	Does Scrum really work for remote teams? What are the tricks to help?
27 Nov 2012	Quick-fire questions (Christmas Special)
22 Jan 2013	Quick-fire questions
5 Feb 2013	Agile & Scrum for beginners: an introduction
19 Feb 2013	Kanban
5 Mar 2013	How to manage bugs when they appear mid iteration
19 Mar 2013	Release planning: what is it and how do you do it?
2 Apr 2013	What makes a good user story?
16 Apr 2013	How to fit interaction design into a user story
30 Apr 2013	Is being cross-functional really best? What does it mean?
14 May 2013	How to estimate
28 May 2013	What is Lean?
11 Jun 2013	The best bits of agile
25 Jun 2013	Your one piece of advice
9 Jul 2013	Using agile with external teams
23 Jul 2013	Scrum boards: electronic v physical
6 Aug 2013	Dealing with technical debt
20 Aug 2013	Iteration zero – what is it and should it exist?
3 Sep 2013	Does Scrum really work for remote teams?
17 Sep 2013	How to split user stories
1 Oct 2013	How to be an agile coach
15 Oct 2013	Planning poker
29 Oct 2013	How to introduce Scrum to an established team (including sceptical management)
12 Nov 2013	Stories don’t ALWAYS need to be broken down to fit the iteration
26 Nov 2013	When is waterfall a better framework to use?
10 Dec 2013	Christmas dinner
7 Jan 2014	What is the difference between an epic, theme, story & task?
21 Jan 2014	No Estimates
4 Feb 2014	How to sell Agile to middle managers
18 Feb 2014	The most effective ways to explain Scrum
4 Mar 2014	What’s the difference between a Product Owner, Product Sponsor, Product Manager?
18 Mar 2014	Scaling up Scrum with a growing team/product
1 Apr 2014	Setting Sprint Goals
15 Apr 2014	MVP. MMF. MMP. What?
13 May 2014	Mapping a project’s progress
27 May 2014	What is Scrumban?
10 Jun 2014	What is the meaning of “commitment”?
24 Jun 2014	Kanban reports
8 Jul 2014	Testing as an activity rather than a role
22 Jul 2014	#LeanBeer
5 Aug 2014	Low tech burndown charts
19 Aug 2014	Debate: “There is no longer a need for a Product Owner”
2 Sep 2014	What is TDD and BDD?
16 Sep 2014	What bits of agile/lean are most effective for producing quality?
30 Sep 2014	Techniques to make planning fun
14 Oct 2014	User stories: is the “As a <who>, I want <what> so that <why>” format harmful?
28 Oct 2014	Debate: XP is the best of all agile approaches
11 Nov 2014	The 5 dysfunctions of a team
25 Nov 2014	Are testers seen as lower status than other members of the team?
9 Dec 2014	Christmas Dinner
6 Jan 2015	Do we really need to estimate?
20 Jan 2015	Metrics: help or hinderance?
3 Feb 2015	What do you do when your dev team is agile, but the rest of the business isn’t?
17 Feb 2015	Debate: “We should get rid of sprints”
3 Mar 2015	Debate: “QA is responsible for quality”
17 Mar 2015	Can agencies be agile?
31 Mar 2015	Debate: “We should get rid of Sprint 0” or “You should deliver in Sprint 0”
14 Apr 2015	Design Thinking: An Emerging Problem Solving Approach
28 Apr 2015	Should ScrumMasters be software developers?
12 May 2015	What distinguishes a self-organising team?
26 May 2015	Debate: This room believes that DevOps should be a person not a team-wide skill!
9 Jun 2015	How to approach a new project using a lean startup approach
23 Jun 2015	Estimation approaches
7 Jul 2015	Debate: Scrum is dead!
21 Jul 2015	What do we mean by ‘value’?
4 Aug 2015	Debate: “You don’t need to scale agile”
18 Aug 2015	Iterative and incremental approaches
1 Sep 2015	How to explain agile without using words!
15 Sep 2015	Debate: Technical excellence is more important than frequent delivery
29 Sep 2015	How do you get away from being a “puppet Product Owner”?
13 Oct 2015	Why do we need acceptance criteria?
27 Oct 2015	Should Scrum Masters line manage the team? If so, how?
10 Nov 2015	What are the different approaches for “scaling agile”
24 Nov 2015	Self-organising and self-managing: is there a difference?
12 Jan 2016	Agile pub quiz
26 Jan 2016	What technical (development) knowledge should a PO have?
9 Feb 2016	#NoEstimates
23 Feb 2016	Debate on the Agile Manifesto: do we really value the items on the left more?
8 Mar 2016	Should you ever let a defect go live?
22 Mar 2016	How do you estimate a project when you know barely nothing about it?
5 Apr 2016	What is Crystal Clear?
19 Apr 2016	Guest session with Morten Elvang: Game Changing Beliefs
3 May 2016	An introduction to systems thinking
17 Mar 2016	How do you use velocity if your team changes?
31 May 2016	Debate: Release plans are NOT needed
14 Jun 2016	Returning to the Heart of Agile with Alistair Cockburn
28 Jun 2016	How to deal with dependencies
12 Jul 2016	Anti-patterns: the smells of bad ceremonies
26 Jul 2016	How do you compensate for an absent Product Owner?
9 Aug 2016	Should an agile team be able to do whatever it chooses?
23 Aug 2016	How can we overcome the challenges we face when we have distributed teams?
6 Sep 2016	Feedback loops
20 Sep 2016	Splitting user stories (workshop)
18 Oct 2016	100th session of LADG!!!!