A great talk and an agile retrospective this month, plus free food and drinks will be provided at the event thanks to our sponsors.

No tickets required, just turn up - it's free!

Supporting Teams When the Tech is Unknown

by Emma Jane Hogbin Westby

In this session you'll learn the steps needed to support a team through their first development project with a new technology. The lessons learned here can be applied to any team working outside of their comfort zone.

Specifically, we'll talk about how to pace your team to success by:

Breaking down a project into achievable components and structuring an Agile schedule to deliver them
Promoting radical transparency between stakeholders and developers
Mitigating the learning curve of a new platform by building on known best practices
Limiting the avalanche of new information through just-in-time learning
Keeping each person on the team motivated and in the zone by customising how you engage, and by addressing -head-on- the anxiety which comes from building software when it feels like all your tools have changed

The lessons are based on Emma's own real-life experiences overseeing teams as a technical project manager with developers who were working with new technologies.

From this session, you'll get practical take-aways as well as food for thought on how to succeed at one of the most difficult parts of software development: the people.

About Emma

Emma Jane Hogbin Westby (@emmajanehw) has been developing Web sites since 1996 - initially as a developer, and now as a technical project manager.

She has been teaching Web-related technologies since 2002 and has delivered over 100 conference presentations, courses, and workshops around the world on front end web development, accessibility standards, theme development, distributed version control, virtualisation, and change management. She has authored two books on Web development, and written countless articles for open source publications.

She is currently working on her third book for O'Reilly Media - Git For Teams - which focuses on developer workflow and source code repository management using Git.

Slides

An Agile Retrospective

by Andrew Seward

The retrospective is one of the most important elements of any Agile development process, it is a mechanism for celebrating successes, acknowledging failures and then improving and optimising.

Your host, Andrew Seward (@MrAndrew) will demonstrate the power of the retrospective by running a retro session on Tech Nottingham as an event.

As an outcome we'll all get to experience and participate in the retrospective session and we'll all get to work together to make Tech Nottingham a better event.

About Andrew

Andrew Seward has been working in software for 12 years, he is the organiser of Tech Nottingham & Hack24 and is Technical Product Manager at Esendex, a global SMS provider based in Nottingham.