The biggest Agile event in South East Asia is only about 6 weeks away. If…
Thursday saw the latest instalment in the Agile Malaysia journey. After an extended hiatus, we got together at the MYOB office courtesy of Jeff Au. We had a good turnout with a mix of folk from MYOB, iProperty, Experian, GrassValley and more. MYOB very generously provided food and drink to start the evening off and there was a chance to chat and meet new people.
After a quick introduction, we handed over to Ryan from ThoughtWorks who is currently visiting MYOB’s Malaysia operations. He facilitated the ball point game which is a great way to break the ice and get the group talking. It also illustrates some excellent points about continuous improvement and is a good refresher on some of the techniques we use in agile software development. After 5 iterations, the team had improved from scoring just 1 point to scoring over 70. The team were really engaged in the task and I think they enjoyed it.
After completing the game, I gave a brief, unprepared talk on iProperty and our journey with Scrum so far. I touched on some of the challenges we’ve faced and also gave an overview of some of our work on automated deployment to our environment at AWS. It was fantastic to receive a number of questions and comments from the group and we started discussions on testing (and TDD), on how to use metrics and measures in a development team and on the ups and downs of pair-programming. Each of those are large topics in themselves and hopefully something that we’ll cover in more detail in one of our future sessions.
We then wrapped up the evening and sent everyone on their way. I think the meetup was a success and I hope that those who attended got value from it. If you’re in Malaysia and interested in agile software development then we’d be delighted to have you join the group and come along to our next meetup. Tentatively we’ll be hosting the next event at the iProperty office in Mid Valley towards the end of January 2013.
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