Just seen it - the next Scrumtisch Berlin has been scheduled for 25th August 2010 at 18:30 Uhr. So far, no official talk has been scheduled, so please expect two topics on Scrum and its application to be selected for discussion according to Marion’s agile topic selection algorithm.
Please talk to Marion Eickmann if you would like to attend the next meetup.
This evening at Volkspark Friedrichshain, Café Schoenbrunn the next NoSQL summer Berlin (organised by Tim Lossen) is meeting to discuss the paper on Amazon’s Dynamo “Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store”. The group is planning to meet at 19:30 for some beer and discussions on the publication.
This evening yet another Apache Dinner took place in Berlin (this time Schöneberg), location booked by Simon Willnauer. As it was announced less then a week ago (see post below) we were expecting no more then some 7 people … we ended up being a group of 15 attendees: There was Michi Busch from Twitter together with Tanja, Uwe Schindler from Bremen joined us. With Matt and Josh some of our local Hadoop users from Nokia joined our group. We had Sebastian Schelter from Mahout. In addition there were the usual suspects, that is Jan Lehnardt, Simon Willnauer and Torsten Curdt.
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Indian food at Yogi Haus was great and very tasty - though we should introduce a sharing algorithm for the various dishes next time around. Speaking of next time: If you would like to be part of the dinner, subscribe to our Apache Dinner mailing list. Best way to make the location suit your needs is to simply send out the next proposal yourself.
As usual the Lucene guys are the last to leave: Currently they are on their way to X-Berg for further drinks, some food and lots of fun. Looking forward to the pictures you promised, Simon 
Update: Images added. Thanks for forwarding them.
Staying in town after Berlin Buzzwords? Interested in meeting with the Apache folks here? Torsten Curdt kindly organises an Apache Dinner on Wednesday evening after Berlin Buzzwords. If you would like to participate, contact Torsten for details on when and where it will take place.
Though named Apache dinner, there is no need to be Apache committer or even member to participate: Being generally interested in Apache projects and in meeting the guys behind the project is totally sufficient.
This evening a bunch of Apache committers and friends gathered in Berlin Kreuzberg at “Goodmorning Vietnam” for tasty food, nice drinks - or put another way, for a very nice evening. Simon had booked the table - we were expecting no more than eight people. However, as with any user group these meetup tends to grow. Shortly after the appointed time we had to move to another table to fit everyone around. See below for a quick shot taken while eating (Thanks to Eric for taking the picture):
Counting attendees quickly I guess we were about fifteen people.
Looking forward to the next meetup that will be scheduled to take place shortely after Buzzwords. Please talk to Torsten Curdt if you want to get notified or simply subscribe to our mailing list.
Today, the April Apache Dinner took place in Berlin. We met at Sadhu - an Indian restaurant in Berlin X-Berg. We were six people: Lars Trieloff from Day Software, Simon Willnauer and Vera from Lucene, Torsten Curdt - currently Freelancer and Daniel Naber from Lucene as well.
With great food, nice discussions and a first glimpse on the submissions for Berlin Buzzwords it quickly got later and later
If you are Apache Committer/Member yourself or are simply interested in learning more about this crazy bunch of software developers meeting each month in a different restaurant, please contact Torsten for more information on the meetup - and to be included on the next meetup schedule. As we are by far more than ten people interested in delicious food and meeting other “indians in Berlin”, I created a Dinner mailing list - please join, if you plan to take part in the dinner in the near future.
Next Monday at 7p.m. the April Apache Dinner Berlin is scheduled to take place. Thanks to Torsten Curdt for organising the dinner - as in: Contacting people, finding a suitable data, booking the location etc.
Looking forward to another nice evening at an awesome restaurant with tasty indian food. If you’d like to join us, please contact Torsten to be included in the next announcement mail. The dinner is not restricted to Apache people from Berlin: Anyone who is fine joining a group of geeks and free software hackers for dinner is invited to join us. If you are Apache developer planning to visit Berlin in the coming months, please contact Torsten so we can try to schedule the respective dinner to match your calendar.
Today, the Scrumtisch organised by Marion Eickmann from Agile 42 met in Berlin Friedrichshain. Though no talk was scheduled for this evening the room was packed with guests from various companies and backgrounds interested in participating in discussions on Scrum.
As usual we started collecting topics (timeboxed to five minutes). The list was rather short, however it contained several interesting pieces:
As prioritised by the participants the first topic discussed was on coaching self organising teams - with a heavy focus on team buy-in. The problem described dealt with transforming water fall teams that are used to receiving their work items into self organising teams that voluntarily accept responsibility for the whole project instead of just their own little work package.
The definition of self organising here really is about teams, that have no (and need no) dedicated team leader. On the contrary: leadership is automatically transferred to the person who - based on his skills and experiences - is best suited for the user story that is being implemented at any given time.
The problem the question targets is about teams, that really are not self organising, where developers do not take responsibility for the whole project, but just for their little pieces: They have their gardens - with fences around that protect them from others but also protect themselves from looking into other pieces of the project. Even worse - they tend to take these fences with them as soon as work items change.
Several ways to mitigate the problem were discussed:
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A great way to explain Scrum really is as a two-fold process: First half is about getting a product done, reviewing quality by the end of each sprint during the review. Second half is about improving the process to get the product done. Meeting to review the process quality is called retrospective.
The second topic discussed was on the role of management in scrum - and how to convince management of Scrum. To some extend, Scrum means loosing power and control for management. Instead of micro-manageing people it’s suddenly about communicating your vision and scope. To get there, it helps to view lean management as the result of a long transformation:
To establish a more agile management form, there are several tasks to keep in mind: First and foremost, do talk to each other. Explain your manager what you are doing and why you are working in pairs, for instance. Being a manager, do not be afraid to ask questions - understanding what your developers do, helps you trust their work. Scrum is established, however there needs to be a clear communication of what managers loose - and what they win instead.
Scaling can only be done via delegation - however people need to learn how to delegate tasks. In technology we are used to learning new stuff every few years. In management this improvement cycle is not yet very common. However especially in IT it should be.
Being able to sell Scrum to customers is yet another problem: You need good marketing to sell Scrum to your customers. “Money for nothing change for free” is a nice to read on formulating agile contracts. Keep in mind, that the only way to really win all benefits is by doing all of Scrum - cherry picking may work to some extend, however you won’t get the full benefit from it. In most cases it works worse than traditionally managed projects.
After two very interesting and lively discussions moderated by Andrea Tomasini we finally had pizza, pasta and drinks - taking some of the topics offline.
Looking forward to seeing you in F-Hain for the next Scrumtisch in April.
Uwe and Simon were so kind to take some pictures of the last Hadoop Get Together in Berlin:
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Thanks for the pictures.
At the last Hadoop Get Together in Berlin Bob Schulze from eCircle in Munich gave a presentation on “Tips and patterns with HBase”. The talk has been video recorded. The result is now available online:
HBase Bob Schulze from Isabel Drost on Vimeo.
Feel free to share and distribute the video. Thanks to Bob for an awesome talk on eCircle’s usage of HBase - and on providing some background information on how HBase was applied to solve your problems.
Another thanks to Nokia for sponsoring the video taping - and to newthinking for providing the location for free.
Looking forward to Berlin Buzzwords in June. Early registration is open already. Several great talk proposals have been submitted already. If you are a Hadoop Get Together visitor (or even speaker) and would like to have a community ticket, please contact me.