Play at Work for MCN in Austin, October 27

Alon Salant ·

Dana Mitroff from SFMOMA and I are running a workshop October 27 at I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In, the annual Museum Computer Network conference held this year in Austin, TX. The workshop is Play at Work: Applying Agile Methods to Museum Website Development.

Our goal is to give attendees a taste of some of the novel activities we use to encourage collaboration, communication and fun while engaged in the messy business of creating web software. The workshop is designed to be interactive – we want attendees to try some of this out with us.

Resources

Here are some follow up resources for attendees who are intrigued and want to learn more.

Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/presentations/52-effective-user-stories-for-agile-requirements
This series of slides by Mike Cohn is a good introduction to user stories as a means of capturing project requirements. We often use this presentation to introduce folks new to agile to the ins and outs of user stories.

Agile Estimating and Planning
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/books/1-agile-estimating-and-planning
This book by Mike Cohn is an excellent guide to the planning side of agile software development and what you do with those user stories.

Art of Agile
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Agile-Development-James-Shore/dp/0596527675
This book by James Shore covers the breadth of agile practices, both in planning and development, and includes many activities like those we cover in this session for helping your team collaborate and communicate effectively and efficiency.

Tasty Cupcakes
http://blog.tastycupcakes.com
Tasty Cupcakes is collection of games and activities designed to help illustrate the value and effectiveness of different agile practices. Rather than being specific techniques used in running an agile project, they are more targeted at teaching agile practices and values with short illustrative games.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development
http://agilemanifesto.org
This is a historic document (2001) in the Agile software movement where a group of folks advocating new values and practices in software development came together to recognize their shared goals and values.

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Pivotal Tracker
http://www.pivotaltracker.com
Tracker is an web-based tool for capturing and managing stories and their workflow on an Agile project.

Story Mapper
http://www.trackerstorymaps.com
Story Mapper is a web-based tool for creating story maps from stories managed in Pivotal Tracker. Brought to you by Carbon Five!