Real agile delivers real value

Holiday season is over! It's time to kick it up a notch and do we have some great speakers to get you started!

Tonights meet up will feature presentations from authors Ben Linders (Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives) and Sander Hoogendoorn (This is Agile: Beyond the basics). It starts at 18:00 hours with a buffet graciously sponsored by our location host Ordina. Presentations start around 19:00.

Please note: due to the availability of the speakers this meet up is scheduled on Monday instead of the regular Tuesday.

Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives

The book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives (http://www.benlinders.com/getting-value-out-of-agile-retrospectives/) by Ben Linders and Luis Gonçalves provides many exercises for facilitating retrospectives, supported with the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they bring, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives.

An agile team consisting of highly motivated and professional volunteers has made a Dutch translation titled Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives (https://leanpub.com/gettingvalueoutofagileretrospectives_NL). The foreword of this 1e Dutch book on Agile Retrospectives has been written by Arie van Bennekum (https://twitter.com/arievanbennekum). Arie is elect chair of the Agile Consortium International and he is the only Dutch author who has contributed to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Ben Linders takes you on a journey about writing and self-publicing books. He wil talk about how the book started, explain how he works remotely with his co-author Luis Gonçalves and how the book has been translated to Dutch by a self-organized agile team of volunteers.

This is Agile: Beyond the basics

Sander Hoogendoorn does not shy away from the complexity of how real work gets done in an enterprise, yet he addresses these complexities with breathtaking simplicity, speaking with the off-hand authority and confidence of someone who has spent many years with his sleeves rolled up, elbow-deep in the day-to-day world of enterprise agile.

Here you won’t find ivory-tower musings on the virtues of any one methodology. Hoogendoorn is no agile evangelist—he is too salty and experienced to have stars in his eyes over methods and frameworks. His approach is to detail every possible situation an enterprise might encounter during an agile project and apply the fix, technique or bit of reasoning that is best suited to solving the problem at hand, regardless of whether it belongs to any particular school of thought. Hoogendoorn can do this, because there aren’t any problems he hasn’t encountered—not once, but ten times over. He approaches agility with the attitude of a veteran field medic who has seen it all and knows exactly what will get the job done every time.

Ben Linders is a Senior Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Process Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality (https://leanpub.com/WhatDrivesQuality)

As an advisor, coach and trainer he helps organizations by deploying effective software development and management practices (http://www.benlinders.com/services/). He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers.

Ben is an active member of several networks on Agile, Lean and Quality, and a frequent speaker and writer. He shares his experience in a bilingual blog (Dutch and English) (http://www.benlinders.com/) and as an editor for Agile at InfoQ. You can find him on twitter: @BenLinders (https://twitter.com/@BenLinders).

Sander Hoogendoorn is the author of the best-selling book This Is Agile, and is a highly appreciated dad, programmer, software architect, speaker, and writer. In his roles as principal technology officer and global agile thought leader at Capgemini, Sander is a catalyst in the innovation of software development at Capgemini and its many international clients. Sander has coached organizations, projects and teams, has written books on UML and agile, and published over 250 articles in international magazines. He is an inspiring speaker at many international conferences, and presents seminars and training courses on a variety of topics such as agile, Scrum, Kanban, software estimation, software architecture, design patterns, UML, .NET, writing code, and testing.

Websites: www.sanderhoogendoorn.com (http://www.sanderhoogendoorn.com/), www.smartusecase.com (http://www.smartusecase.com/), and www.speedbird9.com (http://www.speedbird9.com/). Twitter: @aahoogendoorn (https://twitter.com/aahoogendoorn)