Wednesday evening 25 August we had yet another well attended, educational and fun Gauteng AgileSA event.

As usual we started off with some drinks and snacks (thank you to our sponsor Rally software) before moving into the auditorium (thank you to our sponsor BCX).

Arrie van der Dussen, AgileSA chairman gave all new folks an introduction to AgileSA as an industry led gathering of Agile minds with the aim to promote and provide thought-leadership on Agile to organisations and individuals in South Africa.

New faces from various organizations made up a fantastic 30% of all 74 attendees! It is good to see Agile grow in South Africa.

Arrie then introduced us to the Agile technique Kanban. It was an interesting talk dealing as much with the history and principles of Kanban as with the practical realities.

[ click here to download the presentation - Kanban for Software Development - Arrie vd Dussen ]

What struck me most during Arrie’s talk was just how much the world of software development still has to learn from the seemingly unrelated world of manufacturing and consumer products development. All these lessons learnt from other industries apply very much to software development:

- Be careful of inventory since it becomes stale, decreases in value, becomes hard to sell, clogs up your working processes, hides inefficiencies etc.
- Don’t try to build many things at once. Focus and Finish. Stop Starting and Start Delivering.
- Focus on your value streams and optimise the whole
- Plan, Do, Check, Act
- Focus on Flow, not resource utilization. “Who cares if you are busy all the time. Are you delivering value to customers?”
- How autonomation and “single minute exchange of dies” relates to automated testing and continuous integration

Thank you Arrie!

There were many interesting questions from the audience, and some from Arrie…. and the attendees that answered first and correctly won 1 Agile Academy training course voucher to the value of R5 000.00 as well as four 10% discounts to any Agile Academy training course. Winners please make use of those prizes!

Then it was off to the bar for some more food and drinks. There were multiple engaging and passionate discussions on everything Agile and the SA software industry.

Another great AgileSA event.

Thank you to all that attended and we look forward to seeing you all again end October!

[ click here to download the presentation - Kanban for Software Development - Arrie vd Dussen ]