Richard Lawrence, April 28, 2008

Stealth Agile

What do you when you don't have the power to change your non-agile organization to adopt agile? How do you carve out space to try agile safely? What agile practices can you introduce in what scenarios? How do you interface with the rest of the organization in a familiar way? What are the risks of adopting agile in this way and how to you mitigate them?

Agile at Avanade started out as a few practices scattered on traditional projects, grew into one experimental agile project that reported to the rest of organization in the traditional way, and eventually got to where we are today with a number of agile projects and growing management acceptance. This session will draw lessons from our experience for you can introduce agile under-the-radar in your organization.

As always, our monthly meetings are free to attend and open to local software professionals, students and faculty. Feel free to pass this announcement along to your colleagues.

Speaker

Richard Lawrence is Solutions Manager for Agile Delivery at Avanade, Microsoft and Accenture's joint venture. He has been practicing agile software development with XP, Scrum, and Lean since 2001 and is passionate about helping software teams work more productively and more sanely at the same time. Richard is a Certified Scrum Coach and was a speaker at the Agile 2006 and Agile 2007 conferences.

Sponsors

The April 2008 meeting sponsors are:

	Mountain Goat Software is a Colorado-based process and project management consultancy and training firm. Offering Certified ScrumMaster, agile estimating and planning, user story, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and other courses to help companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques in order to build extremely high performance development organizations.
	Our on campus sponsor is The Games Club, a tri-institutional (MSCD, UCD, and CCD) club that seeks to unite the campus and provide a closer-knit college community to Auraria Campus. The Funds raised by the games club through sponsorship of events like Agile Denver is used to help fund scholarships to club members and to encourage participation in the Homeward Bound project.

Location

The meeting will be held in the Tivoli Student Union (TV) building, in Room 320AB on the third floor.

The Tivoli is located on the Auraria Campus, within walking distance of Downtown Denver via Larimer Street crossing Speer. You can reach the campus from the I-25 south Colfax or Speer exits.

Please review or print out the parking map for reference.

Parking on site costs $5 to attendees of our event and there should be parking available in the lots off of Auraria Parkway and Ninth Street. Be sure to mention that you are attending an on campus event otherwise they might assume you are there for a sports event.