Rieke, Joshua and I wish you all a fantastic 2010 - may you have a successful year with plenty of time to enjoy it!

Craig kindly provided some takeaways (notes) from the AUG session on Introducing Agile in a non IT environment. Have a look at them here.

Ok, ok.
I know I am late and this is not really original - but I enjoyed below quotes of the former president of the United States of America (aka 'most powerfull man on the planet') so much that I wanted to share them again with the other three people out there who did not remember them all... I really wonder at times whether there should be some kind of assessment of basic skills BEFORE someone is sworn in - maybe as part of the inauguration and in the form of a TV quiz like 'are you smarter than a five year old?'. I mean, what would George Washington or Abraham Lincoln say...

'The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country.'
- George W. Bush

'If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.'
- George W. Bush

'One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is 'to be prepared'.'
- George W. Bush

'I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.'
- George W. Bush

Thanks to the Canterbury innovation incubator (or short Cii), the Agile Users Group now has a 'proper home' for its meetings. The first meeting to take place at the new venue will be on the 28/01/2009. Due to other bookings, this does however mean we will be changing to Wednesday meetings. Please see the updated details page »here«.

I got a very enthusiastic email from a very good friend of ours last weekend. She is currently working for a development aid organisation (NGO) in rural Bolivia and was talking about her experiences during her Christmas trip, a trip that included place like the biggest salt lake on this planet, Salar de Uyuni, or Bolivias captial Sucre (literally translated 'Sugar'). Apart from the fact that I find it amazing to hear about travelling on the Alto Plano at about 3500 meters, the pictures she took were what really caught me. If you have a moment, surf over to her Flickr pages and have a look at Bolivia & the Andes...

... I just read a (little older) post on Mike Cohen's blog titled "Should a Team Swarm on to One Backlog Item at a Time?". I had some interesting discussions with a colleague over the last couple of weeks around the challenges this provides. This colleague is a new Scrum Master, with a team new to Scrum as well. The team started a lot of stories and did not finish many of them in there first sprint (no surprises there) and in their second sprint tried to stick to keeping the WIP (work in progress) to the absolute minimum - meaning they tried to swarm onto one story at a time. Our discussions revolved around the frustrations this brought to the team as it became almost impossible for all 4 developers to work on the same story.

The Agile Users Group Christchurch is now listed on the Scrumalliance website under the user groups section (here).

I finally put the proposed Agile User Group topics for the first half of 2009 online. Dave, Richie and I sat down before Christmas and came up with a list (hopefully) interesting topics for upcoming AUG sessions in 2009 - along with the proposed dates. Have a look here if you are interested. Proper invitations will follow as usual via the mailing list and will be posted on the AUG landing page here.

Rieke and I wish you all a Happy New Year! Hope you had a great time this season and a fantastic start into 2009.

Google put the street view for Christchurch live some weeks ago and I love it! What an amazying feat considering the effort involved in taking all those images (be interesting to know what kind of camera they used...), geo-referencing everything, streaming the service and so forth.
For a different spin on Street View and privacy concerns in regards to Google in general have a read of this article. Quite interesting if you ask me, especially the part about GA (Google Analytics) data being copied and stored in the US... One might wonder who else thereby could get access to the surf behaviour and patterns of millions of non US citizens (a bit of paranoia doesn't hurt).

For those friends & family far away, have a look at some of our favourite CHC places (be patient, takes a while to load);