Author: Rob Bowyer

This author has written 10 articles

Board Elections 2017 – One more week to vote!

This year we had 6 positions on the ballot: President, Secretary, and 4 Members at Large. We received one nomination for President and one nomination for Secretary. As a result, Tina Fletcher has been acclaimed as President and Sabina Simons has been acclaimed as Secretary. Congratulations to both of them!

We had 5 candidates nominated for the 4 Member at Large positions. The candidates are:
Ed de Graaf
Jared Small
Kyle Lewis
Graeme Harvey
Scott Acker

An email was sent out earlier this month inviting members to vote in this year’s board election.

There is a little over a week left to vote (voting closes at 8pm on Friday May 26). Members are encouraged to take a moment to cast their ballots if they have not already done so. Results will be announced on the website and at the May Kwality Talk.

If you have any questions or did not receive an email inviting you to vote, please contact info@kwsqa.org.

Continue ReadingBoard Elections 2017 – One more week to vote!

Board Elections 2017

Vote with chekmark

It is that time of year again that we select our Board of Directors for the upcoming year. This year there are 6 positions being voted on:

  • President*
  • Secretary
  • Member-at-Large (4)

Nominations are now open, if you would like to nominate someone (or yourself) please send an email to info@KWSQA.org. Please include the following details:

  • Name and email address of the nominee
  • Position being nominated for

* Eligibility requirement for president: Nominee must have held a KWSQA board position within the last 5 years.

Continue ReadingBoard Elections 2017

Change is Constant and Testing is Required

We started on the journey to update and have better control of our website about eight months ago. Some of the changes have been extremely beneficial. We can easily make updates to the site. We have better control of our back-end. And we don’t have to rely on someone else to do technical updates for us.

However, what we have learned is that we are not web designers. Creating a dynamic, current and most of all helpful website is not easy. Even with the best tools on the market.

Change is constant though, and change we do. The other constant that we don’t shy away from is learning. We’re not web designers, but we are learners. We are testers.

We experiment with changes, we study the results, do more testing and experiment a bit more.

Our site reflects that. So if you see lot’s of changes – don’t be surprised. If there is something you’d like to see – let us know.

Continue ReadingChange is Constant and Testing is Required

Join us at our October meeting to hear Andrew Annett speak on “Planning Delivery Like You Mean It”

TOPIC: The theme song of adaptive development teams isn’t “Qué Será, Será” – planning delivery like you mean it.

PRESENTED BY: Andrew Annett

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY: Andrew Annett is a seasoned facilitator and coach who believes conversations are the operating system of organizations and anything that promotes flow of quality work is a good thing. Andrew has experience working within agile teams and on large, complex multi-year programs and his passion is for helping the world communicate more effectively (especially with LEGO®.)

He’s a founding member of Leanintuit; a collective of coaches dedicated to improving software product delivery. He’s currently working as the enterprise agile coach at D2L Corporation – an edtech product company whose mission is to make the world smarter.

MEETING OVERVIEW:Despite our best efforts the practices of iterative development seem no better at answering the age-old question of business sponsors: “When am I going to get it?” And we seem to be making the problem worse by insisting on talking in language that means nothing to people outside the team.

This interactive discussion will challenge current thinking about story sizing and planning, tracking progress and forecasting delivery. We’ll be leaving the fantasy deterministic world and visiting our scary probabilistic reality. For the Matrix fans among us it’ll be a red pill/blue pill moment…but don’t worry, where we’ll be going they speak English.

Folks will leave this session knowing how to better assess the capacity of their team(s) and make more reliable promises.

Meeting Details

Date: October 28th

Time: 11:30am – 1:15pm.
Doors open at 11:30.
Announcements start at 11:45.

Lunch: Provided

Place: University of Waterloo
William G. Davis Computer Research Centre
Room DC1302

Maps: See http://www.uwaterloo.ca/map/map.html for a Campus/Parking Map

RSVP: Send an RSVP email to RSVP@kwsqa.org if you plan to attend.

Membership Fees

Cash/cheque accepted at the door. Credit cards accepted via our payment page https://kwsqa.org/other-events/lecture-series/

(a) Seasonal Membership: $80.00

(b) Seasonal Student Membership: $30.00 for students of an accredited college/university

(c) Single Attendance: $20.00

(d) Single Attendance Student: $10.00

Continue ReadingJoin us at our October meeting to hear Andrew Annett speak on “Planning Delivery Like You Mean It”

A word about MVP

A lot of times in the agile world we hear about MVP – Minimum Viable Product. What this means is you perform the smallest a amount of work to get the base level of the product out the door. The idea is get something usable out and then build on that.

This is what we are doing with this site. We could have spent months crafting the site. We could have gone through a full waterfall process of requirements, design, tons of review and late delivery. Or we could have hired someone to build us the most beautiful website ever.

We could have done any of these, but we would have lost value, time, and control.

Instead, we’re working in an agile way – bringing together a small team to incrementally build a site that adds value to the membership of the KWSQA.

With our new platform, there are tons of opportunities to better serve the membership of the KWSQA. Our initial MVP may not be as beautiful as we would like, but it’s functional.

We hope you like the changes – please check back often to see the updates.

Continue ReadingA word about MVP