Duchess
Globally Connecting Women in Java Technology

Tuesday January the 20th, many Duchesses from several countries traveled to Utrecht to attend the Duchess Agile Event. I was the first non-IProffs employee to arrive. Slowly everybody trickled in. Just past six the catering arrived to bring the food. (Very good Chinese food!) Not everybody was there yet, so we decided to wait a while longer and chatted. Sabrina and Michael had arrived and were honored for coming all the way from Paris. When we could no longer wait for fear of starving, we started the dinner with everybody who had arrived. During dinner the other people trickled in, but unfortunately I was so distracted by my food that I didn’t get to greet everybody properly. *hangs head in shame* Some fine chairman I make. I promise to try and do better next time. I didn’t even get a chance to talk to Angela Sindic from Germany.

After diner we had to get started on the workshop for fear of running out of time. By then everybody had arrived. Michael Franken started off with a presentation about why we need Agile software development. Comparing software development to preparing food. Saying that there are two types of project. One was following a recipe from a cookbook, and the other creating a new recipe. It was rather obvious that software development falls into the second category. (Seeing how the cookbook style is rather like following a tutorial, nice to figure out how certain tools work, but useless to create actual software.)

After this presentation the actual workshop started where we got to try out planning poker. Our tasks weren’t software related, as such tasks would take too much time to complete three iterations in one evening. Instead we had to do sums, fold boats and inflate balloons. The tasks may have been trivial, but planning poker is not. After only three iterations all three teams could accurately estimate how much work they could do in one iteration.

All in all it was a successful workshop and a great evening.

Of course not everything went according to plan, so here are some plans to improve our workshops. Please feel free to chip in with more ideas in the comments.

- Make a planning and communicate it up front.
- Related to the above, mention whether there will be dinner or not.
- Make a list of people who attend and make sure who is actually present (nice way of also making sure to talk to everybody).
- Mention the attendance fee and communicate the bank account number.
- Prepare a proper thank-you speech.
- When planning a raffle, make sure you have time for it. (As I now had to take all the goodies home again.)