First Agile Meetup in Jena

Last Monday we had our first agile meetup at ePages. Since there were no such meetups available in Jena or the surrounding cities, we decided at the end of last year to take the initiative and organise one by ourselves. The feedback from other Jena agilists was great and in the end we were 16 participants from six different organisations.

At the beginning we had an introduction round with a Daily Standup asking three rather unusual questions:

1. Who am I?
2. What am I doing here today?
3. What am I doing in my free time?

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It was a nice ice breaker after which we collected and discussed topics like “agile fixed price projects” and “planning in an agile context”. The discussion about agile fixed price projects was real fun: We had participants who are doing it already to people who have never worked in an agile environment but have customers requesting it. The topic “planning in an agile context” soon switched back to possible contract models. The theoretical Scrum model is basically clear to everyone, but not how to actually work in an agile environment with real customers and contracts.

Next to soft drinks, snacks and pizza, we talked about some contract models. It soon became clear that it is most important to work closely together with the customer. Most customers have only heard of this cool new thing called agile development, but they don’t know what that actually means for them. We concluded that it’s necessary to make the customer aware of his role in agile development. They need to be present throughout the whole development in reviews as well as in between to give feedback and help with backlog decisions.

During the evening, we could not cover all of the topics due to time limits. But we built a backlog for our next meetups. The next topic would be to align our understanding of agile development as such, to have a common base for future discussions.

In the end we all agreed that the evening was a success in terms of exchanging experiences. We’d like to do the meetups regularly every three months with changing locations between the participating companies.

About the authors

Anja B. belongs to the epagesdevs content team.

Fouad-Steffen Nabhan is a Product Owner who loves to work with his team on a great ecommerce product. When he is not in the office, he's out and about with his wife and twins.