Agile Staffordshire

Details 

Backbone by Paul Garland, on Flickr

Date: Monday 26th March 2012

Time: 7:15pm start to 9:15pm

Location: http://themorrismanpub.co.uk
Google Maps: http://g.co/maps/ptzt5

Theme: Practical Session

New Venue

Please note the new venue. It’s our second meeting at The Morrisman. Follow the links above for further information.

At last months meeting, we sampled a selection of the menu and found it to be delicious and excellent value. The beer was pretty good too.

Backbone.js

In the modern web, great usabilty is vital. I believe Ed Yourdon (@yourdon) recently suggested that User Experience is as important a differentiator between websites / services as Transactions Per Minute was in the 90s.

Users are getting more sophisticated and more demanding. Web developers are embracing and pushing the boundaries of client side scripting to:

• improve responsiveness
• increase scalability
• enable great user experiences

This has provided difficulties in the past, Javascript has had it’s challenges – accessibility, performance, cross browser issues and lack of suggested architectures. There have been some great libraries (Prototype, jQuery) to address some of these concerns. I’ve still struggled with how to apply consistent structure to Javascript heavy applications.

Several months ago, I watched Single Page Apps and the Future of History by Michael Mahemoff. It’s a great intro to the subject of Javascript centred web applications and the idea of client side templates, hashbang uri’s and frameworks like Backbone.js.

In this practical exercise I will introduce Backbone.js using underscore templates. Some Javascript knowledge is assumed but we can pair up accordingly. Also, please bring laptops with your favourite Javascript/html/text editor. I’ll be uploading the exercise to GitHub later this week, but will also bring the exercise on a memory stick.

Lightning Talks

As yet (usual!) their are no volunteers for a lightning talk. If you have any topic you’d like to share with the group then you can have a 10 minute slot at the beginning of the meeting. Please email the group or mention it at the venue before we start.

Hope to see you there,
Paul Williams

Details 

Golf Balls by walknboston

Date: Tuesday 28th February 2012

Time: 7:15pm start to 9:15pm .

Location: http://themorrismanpub.co.uk
Google Maps: http://g.co/maps/ptzt5

Theme: Practical Session

New Venue

Please note the new venue. It’s our first meeting at The Morrisman. Follow the links above for further information.

When I called in, the menu and food being served looked excellent. The beer was pretty good too.

Coding Golf

Shaun Finglas has kindly offered to run this months session. His proposal email was as follows:

My proposal is simply Code Golf. We’ll spend an hour (ish) solving a fairly trivial problem in the style of a kata as normal. The twist is you must then refactor your code to an extreme level so that you can solve the problem in the least amount of characters possible.

Rules:
- The code must compile/execute
- You can use any language you want as long as you can accept user input/display output – think simple console application
- The code must implement the required functionality

The challenge will be revealed on the night so there is no prerequisites apart from laptops. The more laptops we have the better. People can work solo/pair if they want but as long as we have enough machines we should be fine.

“Golfing” real life production code is not something you would want to do, but I’ve found Code Golf challenges very fun, and they show just what sort of merciless refactoring you can do once you have a good suite of tests to back you up. These sort of challenges are incredibly hard without a good suite of tests, so you can often win over people who maybe do not see the value in unit testing production code.

Lightning Talks

As yet (usual!) their are no volunteers for a lightning talk. If you have any topic you’d like to share with the group then you can have a 10 minute slot at the beginning of the meeting. Please email the group or mention it at the venue before we start.

Hope to see you there,
Neil Kidd

Intensive Air Flow © Paul Shannon 2010

Details

Date: Thursday 30th June

Time: 7:15pm start to a 9:15pm (doors open at 6:30pm and close after last orders).

Location: http://www.pieandale.com

Theme: Flow and F1 In Paediatric Intensive Care

Guest Speakers

For the first time in a few months we have not one but two guest speakers (rather than members’ contributions). Our guests are both internationally renowned speakers and doctors of their respective professions.

Flow – Dr. Kevin Rutherford

Kevin’s experience in the software development industry and wealth of knowledge on the subject of Agile and related topics makes him the finest Agile Coach for miles around. He will be demonstrating the theory of constraints and the benefits of concentrating on batch sizes using a simple dice game. This great way of illustrating how agile methods can improve the flow of your value stream and make your work life easier and simpler is not one to miss. I’d recommend that everyone at your organisation should attend this talk as it has relevance in all areas of business, and is a great way to convince senior management that agile methods can work in your organisation.

F1 In Paediatric Intensive Care – Dr. Harriet Shannon

In 2005 Harriet took up a post as research physiotherapist at the UCL Institute of Child Health to investigate respiratory physiotherapy techniques in intensive care at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.  Harriet’s PhD work focussed on the safety and efficacy of on-call physiotherapy treatments in intensive care and she is now a primary tutor for the MSc Course in Advanced Physiotherapy at UCL.

Harriet’s talk, “F1 In Paediatric Intensive Care: Reducing Bottlenecks in Time Critical Environments”, comes from a partnership created at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children between the intensive care teams and the pit crews of Formula One teams. Both environments require precision in preparation and planning with constant analysis of process speed and obstacles. The talk should give you a good insight into the observations and changes made in these time critical arenas, where a slow reaction could be a matter of life or death (and winning or losing).

Agile North

Following a successful presentation by Agile Staffs regulars Paul Shannon and Neil Kidd they managed to shamelessly plug the June meeting so it seems appropriate to point out the information for New Members to show any “North” converts everything they need to know to come and join in the Staffordshire Agile fun.