Agile On Tap

This month's Agile on Tap has two interesting talks from local businesses. Both talks are direct responses to feedback from the suggestions box requesting talks around Lean UX and Agile in SME's.

The zombie guys will be back again to paint another canvas depicting themes from the talks and we'll be holding another live competition for prizes on the night!

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Talk Descriptions:

Title: "Rapid Product design in the wild"

Speaker: Michele Ide-Smith

Company: Redgate

Synopsis:

How do you know you're developing the right product? This talk will help you think creatively about how to do customer development using Agile and Lean User Experience methods. I’ll share what we learned about using rapid, iterative prototyping techniques to design a product in just 3 days.

In August 2012 we attended Kscope, a conference for Oracle developers. Instead of doing the usual product demonstrations, we turned out stand into a "live lab". We took Agile development processes out of the office and in front of our customers. Over 3 days we ran 9 sprints and conducted 25 customer interviews, using a paper prototype to get feedback. We collected invaluable information about our customers' development environments, how they work with their teams, their processes, tasks and pain points. By the end of the conference we'd developed an interactive prototype (using HTML and CSS) for customers to evaluate. The team went through several rapid "build > measure > learn" cycles to improve our product concept and validate the market need.

I'll cover the benefits and pitfalls of doing live design and development in front of potential customers and competitors. The talk will illustrate how opening up our development process at a conference provided visitors to the stand with an opportunity to experience Agile and Lean methods first-hand, and that marketing teams can learn a lot from Agile development teams.

This talk will appeal to anyone directly involved in product design, development and marketing, including: designers, product owners, developers, testers, project managers and marketers.

Biographies

Michele has worked in web and software development since 1997, starting as a web developer and gaining experience in project management, information architecture, web channel management and user experience.

Michele is currently a User Experience Specialist at Red Gate, designing tools which help make delivering software simple. Michele organises monthly events for her local UX community and blogs occasionally at ide-smith.co.uk (http://www.ide-smith.co.uk/).

Twitter: @micheleidesmith (https://twitter.com/micheleidesmith)

Title: "Agile and the partner model - how it works for us, and how it can work for you."

Speakers: Mark starling & James Ford

Company: MMT-Digital

Synopsis:

Agile processes are not just for internal teams; they’re also an excellent way for you to partner up with suppliers and clients from other teams, so that you can work with them to understand requirements and collaborate on solutions from ‘sprint zero’. In this talk we’ll be discussing how it works for us, so that you can see how it can work for you.”

Biographies:

Mark Starling: Mark is a Solutions Architect at MMT Digital who has been coaching Agile teams over the last couple of years and bringing the development techniques in line with the fast-paced Agile environment that we work in.

James Ford: James ( http://about.me/jamesford ) is a front-end web technologies ninja, who has been working as part of Agile teams for the last year and a half and dreaming of it for several years before that.