MidMoSoftwareDevelopment Group
Some of you may have attended the MidMoXp usergroup which I began organizing on behalf of CARFAX in September of last year. Although the usergroup always had very good meetings and even a couple notable speakers, it’s always suffered from on again off again scheduling, mostly in part due to my own rather haphazard, sometimes conflicting schedule.
Luckily, the on again off again scheduling will be gone as the group will no longer be solely organized and put together by yours truely… in other words, if I fall off the face of the earth, the next meeting will still take place. 
But, that’s not the only news, there is much more activity afoot! When we met to plan the next meeting, we discussed several topics, and a specific question came up.
Why cater only to the eXtreme programming?
Which is a good question… only one organization in town (that I know of at least) does XP, while most might just be doing a few of the practices. By focusing just on XP, perhaps the group is a bit too narrow. We then decided perhaps it’s best to broaden the scope to include all things agile, but again, why stop there? There are quite a few people in town I know of who have no interest in agile, but they are interested in some of the agile practices or software development in general.
Which is why the group will be undergoing quite a bit of evolution. It’s no longer just focused on XP or agile anymore, but Software Development Best Practices. The topics will be a mix of technical, hands on activities (we will be organizing tutorials and coding dojos) with process related practices. You’ll still find a lot of agile related stuff, but as best practices versus promoting one methodology or another.
Our next meeting will be December 9th at 6:30 P.M. at CARFAX’s Columbia, MO data center. A co-worker of mine will be giving a presentation on Kanban boards with hands on exercises illustrating some of the advantages of using Kanaban boards to communicate progress. Hope to see you there! 
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November 23rd, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Sounds great, I’ll plan on it.