• Transparency in compensation
• Using Scrum to run a Scrum consultancy
• Elements of Scrum and Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction

• Kanban in your personal life
• Kanban in work life as a one-man team
• Personal kanban can help save your marriage
• Personal insights from Kanban
• Personal Scrum?
• Personal Kanban boards
• Burnout

• Star teams over star individuals
• Need for individual performance reviews?
• Team decisions
• Individual and team compensation, now and in the future
• Cultural change in organizations
• Ways to give individual feedback

• StrengthsFinder 2.0
• Playing to your Strengths
• Introducing Strengths to your team
• Strengths and self-organizing teams
• When Strengths go wrong

• Lots of companies dealing with unknowns
• Product teams
• Release early, release often
• Validate, Experiment, Iterate
• Culture preventing engagement?
• Executives communicate with teams
• How to get the “C” level to change
• Eric Ries “Lean Startup” / Steve Blank
• Is it a panacea?
• Radical culture problems abound
• Confusion about what lean startup means
• Risk adverse culture problems when you have golden egg to protect?
• Alignment across enterprise
• Cross functional teams
• How do you maintain it?
• Give freedom, be creative
• Innovation team (I’m a special snowflake)
• Executive support mandatory

• Do we estimate defects?
• How do I get “credit” for doing defects?
• What counts as a defect?
• New defect comes in what do we do with it?
• How should defects effect velocity?
• Why so defensive?
• How to deal with predictability?
• Definition of done factors in.
• Transparency is what is important.
• Use the retrospective Luke.
• Please don’t punish me.
• Person that writes the check decides.
• Zero defect mentality.
• Hardening sprint.  Say What?
• Developer Hat v Scrum Master Hat

• Managers in Agile
• Environments to enable innovation
• Experimentation in Agile
• Self-organizing teams
• How to help organizations change
• Stoos

• Agile outside of software
• Lean in healthcare
• Lean as management principles
• Lean is not cost cutting
• Risk and quality in Lean
• Bad processes and lean improvements
• Improving flow

• Getting kids interested in programming
• The Microsoft stack
• Traveling pair programmer
• Meandering programmers
• Software Craftsmanship
• TDD and experience
• Global Day of Code Retreat
• Code Retreat Community Contribution Fund

* Impossible!?
* How do you define what is potentially shippable?
* Does the product need to be pollished and perfect?
* Focusing on small problems (rather than the whole system) helps us deliver value sooner.
* It’s not an excuse to code yourself into a dead end.
* Value does not necessarily have to be targeted at Users, it might be the CEO or some other stakeholder.

* What do you do when someone clearly doesn’t fit in with the team?
* How do you get to the point where you can let a team be self organizing and still mitigate the associated risk?
* Should you hire quality people or try to get the most qualified people for a particular position?

* Do you throw out the process?
* How do you break it to the product owner owner?
* Would removing the overhead of the process make things better?
* At what point do you, as a Scrum Master, step in and prevent the team from self organizing themselves in to fatal failure?

• Obtaining feedback
• Encouraging continuous learning
• Feedback vs praise
• Just jump in and do it
• First Lego League
• People are people
• Understanding and detecting patterns
• Iterating, engaging and stabilization
• Collaboration for tighter feedback
• Leadership makes a difference
• Learning is joyful
• Layered learning / Video Games

References:

Mindset by Carol Dweck

First Lego League

Teaching Kids to Program

Lost in Space

• Inertia against change
• Leadership matters
• Self-Organization
• It’s okay to fail
• People matter during transition
• Managers tell people what to do.. Any objections? Compliance.
• Guilt trips
• Mindless drones
• Self selection
• Using games
• Observe and learn from other teams/organizations

• Benefits of physical vs digital boards
• How our brain wiring works
• Visibility instead of hidden data
• Mind playing tricks on me
• Visual speaks volumes
• Don’t have to fight tools to try new things
• It takes a long time update the board
• Overhead, saving paper, distributed team
• Historical data
• Lack of team trust
• Lines of code and function points
• Self Organization should rule
• Working with other teams
• Serendipity happens
• Simulate colocation

References:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

Forget Why You Walked Into the Room?

• Last years reflections
• Early adopters dig deeper than process
• Leadership will come into focus
• Companies will become aware industrial age is behind us
• Training will have more depth and options
• Community will fracture further before it gets to good stuff
• Increased competition will raise the bar for Agile
• Training for the wrong things
• This is the year of storming…
• Alan commits to writing more
• Perry is going to read 30 books this year
• Derek is going to explore leadership/systems thinking frameworks
• Saving the Scrum Alliance
• Jade is going to champion creative culture creation

• Kanban, Agile, Scrum are among top trends of 2011
• What do you get a ScrumMaster for Christmas?
• Getting turned down for a ScrumMaster role because you are too experienced
• Water-Scrum-Fall and ScrumerFall
• Scrum is a diet, Kanban is a Mirror
• When do you use Agile Methodologies and Techniques like Scrum
• Is it nuts to invest in specialization when Scrum is generalizing the team
• Are story points a proxy for time?

• Treating people as resources can cause long term problems
• Specialization can discourage team members from taking ownership of a project
• Team members complaining of too many meetings is a red flag indicating that developer is probably on too many projects
• Product Owners are not exempt from suffering in capability and quality from working on two many projects
• Human beings do not context switch as easily as we pretend to be able to

• How can we encourage customers to participate more?
• Do we really need customers to participate more?
• Are there things we can do to mitigate lack of product ownership?

• Managers promote people that are most like themselves
• Both positive/negative traits start to feedback on themselves
• Innovation decreases as the organization becomes Homogenous
• Larger organizations have greater inertia so the culture needs to have more disruptive members in order to change
• It is extremely difficult to try to eliminate inbreeding within an organization from within
• Reckless attempts can be met with blacklisting

• Is it better to have a shorter iteration and close the feedback loop
• Is it better to have a longer iteration to decrease the overhead of the Scrum Ceremonies?
• Sprint Review seems to be the only ceremony not proportionally decreased with sprint length
• Retrospectives do not have to occur every week, or perhaps have an extended retro every other sprint
• The cost of deploying is sometimes an argument for longer sprints
• Deployments and releases should be unhinged from sprints
• The team agrees that shorter sprints are generally better

Please contribute your thoughts and ideas at the new Scrum Coach Retreat Wiki.

• The Scrum User group is a monthly meeting of people interested in Scrum
• Non-Scrum related User groups can also provide lots of value by providing alternative viewpoints
• XP groups are also available in most locations
• Agile 2011 had many community building activities
• Scrum Alliance has “Find a user group in your area” functionality
• If there is nothing available, start your own
• Open Spaces force you into interacting with new people

• Resources for software craftsmanship have increased in availability
• Measure the results so you know if you improve
• Industrial Tourism – exchange program between companies to refresh perspectives
• Important to be disciplined to work in tiny increments

• Formallizing the start of a project or team
• Chartering a team increases the communication
• Helps align the team around the project vision

• Implementing Scrum causes impediments
• Technical Excellence practices can remove these impediments
• Sometimes the leader can mandate some practices if they can demonstrate the benefits
• Leaders should know how to do the practices they advocate

However, one area where there isn’t a lot of discussion happening is around “building” Agile teams from a Human Resource perspective. Many Human Resource departments are very strict on interview processes and find it difficult to adapt to the effective ways to hire people for a self-organizing team. On such teams more importance is put to how someone reacts within the team than on their individual skill set. This is much more difficult to interview for and requires some non standard approaches to get a view of a persons compatability to the companies values, culture and the existing team.

Some resources on this topic can be found at:

Articles
“We’re Hiring” by Lisa Crispin
“Improving Our Interview Process” by Lisa Crispin
“Hiring for a Collaborative Team” by Esther Derby
“Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, More than a Title” by Esther Derby

Blogs
Hiring Technical People Blog by Johanna Rothman

Books
Agile Hiring by Sean Landis
Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers by Johanna Rothman

Tell us about your story getting hiring practices changed in your journey towards an Agile Organization!

• Displaying a sense of urgency to the customer so they feel important.
• Creating a sense of urgency to the developers so they stay focused.
• No urgency is unmotivating
• Perpetual urgency is unsustainable

@PMOObserver: “Always deliver what you commit to. No more; no less.”
@elizabethraley: “Scrum Rule: No Additional Requirements Can Be Added to a Sprint!”
@scrumology: “Comparing velocity between teams: Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything th…”
@rslawrence: “In case you missed it over the weekend: ‘Why Longer Sprints Probably Won’t Help’”
@rramirez4444: “What are the TWO best qualities of a good Scrum Master? #agile #scrum (non-SM respondants given more weight on this one..)”
@alechardy: “Purpose of sprint review is to inspect and adapt. Demo during review is to prompt inspect and adapt conversation.”

• Manifesto says to not favor tools and process
• Tools remove the “Human-ness”
• Distributed teams are often a big reason for wanting to use tools
• Digital tools severely decrease visibility
• Tools can prevent/impede conversations
• Writing something physically forces your brain to engage
• Blank index cards are more flexible than any tool
• Tools become a crutch for bad decisions

• Compare stats against planning poker
• 80 stories
• 5 minutes to discuss process/application
• 25 minutes to do estimation
• 10 minutes to get velocity
• Team is moving around and more enganged
• Everyone had to be active
• Nobody can set the tone
• Disagreements were resolved quickly
• Made easier by having a trusting team
• Link to blog post: http://blog.mikepearce.net/2011/05/02/how-do-i-estimate-how-long-an-agile-project-will-take-before-we-start/

• A leader bring the people around him/her
• Teams can have multiple leaders
• Leadership is based on trust
• People will step up to fill a leadership vacuum
• What is the value in identifying the leader?
• Having trust/respect makes it easier to lead
• Improving the team can be to the short-term detriment of the leader
• The more self organizing a team is, the less important the leader is.
• Leaders are willing to take responsibility for the team

• Rigid up front
• Flexible with experience
• Inspect and Adapt
• Breaking rules is usually to avoid a deeper issue
• Learn through imitiation, then improvise
• Set in stone Scrum is not ideal
• The uncomfortable parts of Scrum will expose issues
• Culture can stand in the way of Scrum adoption

Enjoy this video as we talk to Alix Holmes about her Open Space on integrating user experience design with agile processes.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Chris Scripca about his Open Space on Game Programming for Fun and Keeping Thousands of People Happy.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Ainsley Nies about her Open Space on “Agile Chartering“.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Scott Dunn about his Open Space on Strengths Based Team and Personal Growth.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Jason Kerney about their Open Space on using creative processes to drive development.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Julie Smith about her Open Space on reluctant team members and participants on agile teams.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Marsha Garczewski about her Open Space on ”Getting Started with SCRUM“.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Woody Zuill about his Open Space session titled “Intro to Agile“.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Darrin Ladd about his Open Space on How Can I Help My Teams Continue to Improve?.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

• Retrospectives
• Define the roles
• Scrum Primer
• Roles and Ceremonies
• What is necessary to improve
• Strict SCRUM
• Without experience it’s difficult to know
• It’s not about experts, it’s about learning
• SCRUM in 10 minutes
• It’s not a panacea
• User Stories Applied, Agile Estimating and Planning, Succeeding with Agile
• Don’t get discouraged, focus on improving

• why people don’t want to do standups
• what if they go longer than 15 minutes
• core protocols
• avoid status meeting mentality
• take things off line
• how are you exposed
• dealing with people that are late
• sit or stand?
• talking token

• “The Development Team”
• Commitment vs Forecast
• Burn down charts
• Release planning not necessary
• Sprint backlog items bye bye
• Ordered vs prioritized

In our rails log we found that the request was being processed as:

Processing by FooController#index as

We would have expected to see:

Processing by FooController#index as HTML

At the top of our controller we saw that our respond_to was defined as:

respond_to :json, :html

We found that when the request type was missing, the first option was being used. In our case this was JSON. When we changed the respond_to call to list :html first the page was rendered as HTML like we expected.

Moral of the story, order matters.

Roy van de Water, Derek Neighbors, Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Drew LeSueur, Chris Coneybeer and Jade Meskill discuss John Hagel’s article on “The Trust Paradox“.

• Patrick Leonici’s Five Dysfunctions of Team
• Trust is important
• Way we try to build trust is backwards
• Perfection not the way to trust
• Mike Cohn’s pair programming story (as recounted over a few beers)
• Availability to express vulnerability
• Never let them see you sweat?
• Expose strength, show weakness.
• Vulnerability unlocks creativity and bonds the team
• Climbing corporate ladder encourages for self preservation
• Lead by example.. Be transparent to others..
• People believe success is in their ability instead of increasing the ability of those around them.
• Management needs to model open behavior and reward authentic behavior
• Team members be a beacon of humanity for your peers

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water, Derek Neighbors and Jade Meskill talk about an experience playing paintball as a team and how it relates to agile principles.

• Inspect and adapt
• Iterations felt natural
• Focused on us not external factors
• beat ourselves not the other team
• exposing vulnerabilities
• bite size
• self-organizing
• accountability
• communication
• hitting impediments before they show up through using “i feel exposed” during standups
• getting to point where vulnerability is okay
• core protocols – check-in protocol
• perceptions can be reality
• feelings aren’t facts
• shared vision minimizes politics
• learn healthy conflict

We showed up to pack of pre-teens with custom, top of the line gear. We could smell our asses being slaughtered before we even took the field. With that, guns were loaded and the six of us were put up against the six of them. Game 1 was completely chaotic. We were doing our best to not get hit and just squeezing the trigger whenever something moved. Somehow, we ended up winning with two of our guys left standing. It was ugly and we were out of breath.

We switched sides of the field and a funny thing happened. We had a retrospective on the match without even realizing it. We decided for game 2 that we would pair. We quickly grabbed a buddy and the whistle blew. We ended up losing. We headed off the field for our first break. We all admitted that though we were pairing, we were not a team, but rather three individual pairs. Before taking the field for game 3, we decided to keep pairing but added some general strategy on how we could be more of a unit. We won, leaving two guys on the field. For the first time we no longer felt panicked and rushed.

Before starting game 4, we made major adjustments and defined the goal for each of the pairs to be considered success. Not only was movement of each route defined and the roles to navigate it, but they were done in 20-yard increments. We were much more paced and won, leaving 3 members on the field. This time during break, we reloaded and started talking about how we were becoming more of a team and the opponent was starting to fall a part, becoming less of team.

Heading back in for Game 5, we had heated discussion on how to agressively challenge the target. Each pair defined its own objective and coordinated it back with the team. Most notably, each pair was verbally talking the entire time while advancing on the target. The target was taken and 4 members were left standing on the field. At this point we were dying to improve. We could feel that our team work was making us not only tough to beat, but tough to get a kill against.

Before heading into Game 6 we did an assessment of the other teams technique and tactics. We reviewed that our cover fire had been weak because of a poor choice of angles and bad initial first steps. Each pair set a new objective. At this point we had full trust in each other to cover and communicate. This trust allowed us to be beyond aggressive. We grabbed the target, taking each of their team members out at a 10′ range. All of our team members were still standing untouched. Complete and utter dominance.

So what changed between game 1 and game 6? We became a highly functioning self-organizing team that trusted each other.

How did we get there?
Mini retrospectives between each game.
Finding weaknesses to improve and focusing on fixing them.
Iterating towards a better outcome even when successful.

What did we learn?
Trust within a team allows them to tackle problems more aggressively because they are less afraid of what happens if they fail.
Decisive victories when up against tough challenges strengthens a team.

Ultimately excellence is hard work. Teams willing to not settle for winning but seeking decisive victory make adjustments and build one another up to achieve it.

The best part was at lunch afterwards. The entire team was so chatty in line, having a great time and joking so much that the owner of the restaurant asked if we had been friends a long time because they hadn’t seen a group of people get along so well in so long.

The presentation, ‘There is No Spoon: When Agile Becomes One with the World of Work’, is part of the New Horizons & New Voices stage and is scheduled for August 10th at 11:00am.

Derek’s talk addresses the failure of many to apply the principles outlined in the Agile Manifesto to entire organizations, seeing the values as applicable only to software and customers. His presentation will encourage attendees to see Agile as it applies to entire communities, systems and society, collaborating towards a common purpose.

• Accountability
• Requirements
• Cover your ass
• Avoiding conflict
• Turn over safety blanket
• Alternatives
• Documentation isn’t bad
• Communication trumps documentation
• Trust helps prevent need for documentation
• Siloing / Lack of cross functionality
• Team members are people not widgets
• Limiting communication pathways
• Documentation as a wall to avoid interaction

• Obie Blog Post
• Crazy Bob Martin
• Test everything all the time
• To what degree
• Not breaking things
• Verifying value delivered
• Market vs quality
• What’s right level of coverage
• BDD as a technique
• How much risk can you tolerate
• Prototyping
• Technical debt
• Whats your testing comfort level
• Communities have different testing tool competency levels
• Irresponsible?

• Retrospectives
• Pairing
• Continuous Integration
• Warning Signs
• What is effective
• What is quickest
• Deployments are a pain
• Can haz confidence
• XP & TDD
• It depends

• There’s always money in the banana stand
• Linked to purpose
• Why it’s so important
• Shared vision unifies the team
• Decision making is easier with vision
• Vision plus implementation is magic
• Cost of misalignment

• What is an interruption?
• Culture of interruptions
• How does it effect prioritization?
• Planning impossibilities
• It has to be on fire to get done
• It kills teams
• Poor decision making
• It’s contagious
• Loss of innovation
• Balloons for everyone
• Solutions

• Individual, Team, Organization
• Human Resource priorities
• Rate of change
• Performance reviews
• Emotional response
• Personnel turnover
• Conflict
• Champions

• Is it necessary (to have a single product owner)
• Problems with multiple product owners
• Priorities
• Who determines done
• Proxy product owners
• Accountability issues
• Delegation of authority
• Dealing with multiple products and a single development team

• Padding
• Precision vs. accuracy
• Hard conversations
• Assurances
• How to get better at estimates
• Hours vs points
• Story estimates vs estimated velocity

Nearly three out of four CIOs with a leverage mandate expect changes to their internal collaboration processes to have high transformative potential for their organizations.  Internal collaboration and client interaction are their principal goals. “We need to cope with change by re-engaging with our internal customers in a more intimate way,” said one Government CIO in Australia. “The solution is part structural and part cultural.”

CIOs have begun to recognize that transparency is key to success.  Nearly two-thirds of top-performing leverage mandate CIO’s identified sharing more information with clients as a key customer relationship initiative.  In addition it’s all about having the right talent, “We need our IT staff to be more business-centric to build trusted relationships with business units,” one Education CIO in Australia told us.

Collaboration is the key to Expanding focused CIO’s as well. “For CIOs in top-performing Expand mandate organizations, collaboration and integration are especially important. More than two-thirds of those CIOs said they would focus more on internal collaboration and communication, compared to less than half in underperforming organizations with an Expand mandate”

Amazingly two key principles of Human Software Development are Collaboration and Learning/Teaching. They also happen to be two of the linchpins for a successful CIO.  “Collaborate beyond what is currently imagined Get everyone talking, via new channels, on new schedules and with new tools. Teach and enable your entire enterprise to connect as often and as effectively as possible with their own most important stakeholders.”

We are excited to see that IBM has verified what we already knew.  If you are a CIO that is looking to transform, engage or pioneer in your organization we can help, just give us a call.

• What are some smells?
• Using same activities all the time.
• Bad facilitating
• Use the “F” word more
• Why does it take so long to get peoples guard down?
• Inspect and adapt applies to retrospectives too.
• SMART goals crossfire style
• Things to remove
• Speaking on behalf of others
• People not expressing themselves
• Phrase questions to get the most out of participants
• Tips and tricks
• Read more (GameStorming, Agile Retrospectives, Thinkertoys, Coaching Agile Teams, Innovation Games)
• Take a risk
• Add alcohol

• Should we certify people?
• The WOW factor
• When does it jump the shark?
• Broken hiring practices
• HR vs real community
• Who is doing the certification?
• There is a demand…
• Scalability
• Certification mill problems
• Why not in universities/schools
• Certifications will evolve

• What does it mean to do BDD?
• Agile as the Hope killer, the tools give you hope
• Diving In vs Deliberate Discovery
• Are we too focused on tools instead of the reason’s they exist?
• Tactile Tools and their benefits over Digital in the Process
• Tools as a blame catcher
• Assuming you’re wrong

• Historically products were projects
• Release planning
• Lean methodologies
• Team management
• Organizational changes
• Overnight competitors
• Things have to change

• Deliberate practice
• Mentoring team members
• Practice new skills
• Mentorship
• Openmind
• What’s the motivation
• Saturated market
• Culture
• Shared goal

With over 500 people for the first time, Desert Code Camp‘s first event of 2011 was a rousing success. The Integrum team represented with 18 of the 100 sessions and received some great reviews from the attendees. Check out the photos from the event on Flickr and stay tuned for the next Desert Code Camp coming up in the fall.

• What is a code retreat
• Sometimes wrong is better
• Mocking, flow and learning new languages
• Microsoft cloud offerrings and exposure to new tools

• Challenges of design in iterative development
• Pace and lead time
• Mutual respect
• Everyone’s a designer
• Design tools suck
• Backlog overwhelms
• Ship early and often
• Crossfunctional teams
• Style guides
• Light weight wireframes

Notes:

Thoughtbot article on Everyone’s a Designer

The Mike Cohn’s “I’m always right card” is a joke from a training session with Mike.

Check out the list of sessions below from our team and come learn from the community at Desert Code Camp:

HTML and CSS
You Don’t Have to be a Ninja to Learn HTML5! – Clayton Lengel-Zigich
CSS 3 – Steve Swedler

Game Development
Facebook Game Architecture – Steve Swedler

AJAX/Javascript
Javascript 101 – Drew LeSueur
CoffeeScript – Drew LeSueur
Introduction to Node.JS – Drew LeSueur with Chris Matthieu of Tropo

Mobile
Making Android Development Less Painful – Kyle Stewart
Intro to Windows Phone 7 Development – Chris Coneybeer
Building the Desert Code Camp Windows Phone 7 App – Chris Coneybeer
Playing nice with other Android Apps – Roy van de Water

Agile
Everyday Extreme Programming (XP) – Clayton Lengel-Zigich
How to Manage Self Organizing Teams – Jade Meskill

Software Development
Git: Intro to Version Control – Roy van de Water
Ruby on Rails 101 – Clayton Lengel-Zigich

Business
Sales for Non-Salespeople – Chris Conrey
Using LinkedIn for Personal and Business Gain – Chris Conrey
Managing Client Expectations – Chris Conrey with Matt Brooks of DevFu
Big Shop vs Small Shop – Chris Conrey with Matt Brooks of Dev Fu

• What is done?
• Works on my machine.
• Real data.
• Workflow verification.
• UI/UX completeness.
• Responsibilities.
• Whole product thinking.
• Planning Meetings & Acceptance Criteria

• Is agile just for teams?
• Pairing good traits
• Pitfalls found while pairing
• Good pairing habits
• Pairing in a chaotic environment
• Various pairing techniques
• Physical pairing station setup
• Remote pairing
• Dealing with distractions

• Reading recommendations for SCRUM Basics.
• How do I recognize a dysfunctional team?
• How do I deal with team members with wildly different schedules?
• What is the agile response for a Request for Proposal?
• What happens when the team is agile but the company is not?

• Getting specific information
• Dealing with multiple small teams (2-4 people)
• Problems doing retrospectives using the lowest common denominator amongst teams

• What is the most promising concept/idea?
• What do we see in the way of Agile community?
• Who will be the biggest winners/losers?
• What are new things you plan on trying this year?

Microsoft wanted to provide a easy way for users to stay up-to-date with the latest news and resources from the site. In addition, they wanted to group and present these resources in a way that mimicked what users saw on the site so it was familiar.

Chris Coneybeer was assigned the project, having joined the Integrum team in October to lead Windows Phone 7 efforts. “I really enjoyed using Agile methods to deliver the project on schedule to our client, as well as keep them involved and excited during the process.”

Integrum adapted the website using the new WP7 platform to provide a seamless transition for users. This included finding the best ways to present and group data inside the application, along with building a favorite system into the application to entice users. Combine that with the easy to use search function, giving users a powerful tool in performing their daily jobs.

“We faced a few challenges designing and laying out the app so that it was easy for users to navigate,” said lead developer Chris Coneybeer. “The new Metro interface and standard UI controls allowed us to give the users a really simple flowing experience, with a wealth of information at their fingertips.”

By having the Springboard for Windows app on their phone, IT Professionals will have the ability to see the latest news, articles and videos anywhere. Content is separated into the same Lifecycle Stages as on the website: Discover & Explore, Pilot & Deploy and Manage.

The WP7 application also provides the ability for users to search TechNet based on Keywords, Knowledge Base article IDs and Event/Error Codes which gives them a great tool for working in the field. Another great feature is the ability to save favorites inside the application for when users come across a great video, article or find a search result you want to keep for later you can.

The Springboard app went live on December 23, 2010 after Integrum’s first submission to the marketplace.

Back in the fall, the Integrum team decided to switch to an 8am-5pm schedule, with 7:45am morning standup.

To encourage employees to arrive on-time and help get them going, Integrum leadership worked with local restaurant Yoli’s Cafe to serve breakfast each morning for staff members.

Each morning, Integrum employees walk through the back gate to access Yoli’s, anxious to see what delicious delights lie in store. Menu items range from oatmeal and sweet rolls to biscuits and gravy. The atmosphere occasionally takes on the aura of camp, as tables are moved to form one large table with benches for seats.

Taking care of your employees means they will take care of you. Partaking in french toast and sausage at the same time is just gravy.

What about being the best at your job?

Part of Integrum’s mission is to promote employee growth. Use of pairing techniques and weekly retrospective achieve these goals and are already cornerstones of the company. For 2011, Integrum is taking that one step further.

Head pragmitist and Scrum Master Derek Neighbors created a series of professional development classes for employees that are scheduled for Tuesday evenings. Employees receive professional development credit for each class they attend. displayed on a board.

Classes focus on current pressing topics and issues raised during retrospectives. Topics include issues like Commitment Driven 101 and Feature Development.

“I attend the classes because they provide a deeper understanding of our process,” said Director of Client Development, Chris Conrey. “I have better interactions with clients as a result of the professional development because I better understand what the developers are doing, and more importantly why.”

The Savage Love mobile application allows fans of the column by the same name to access Dan Savage’s unique discussions from any platform.

“You’d never know what you’d read or see each day,” said Roy. “It made the development process interesting to say the least.”

Kyle and Stewart tested on an Android phone, with development taking only two weeks. “Savage Love shows the power of mobile browsers,” said Roy. “Savage Love proves it’s a viable medium for Android applications.”

Additionally, the sleek design of the application by Goldman Designs assisted in keeping development time short. “We were fortunate to work with a company that provided great design,” said Kyle.

The Savage Love application is currently in beta, and will be available XXXX.

In addition to having daily standups, employees gather every Friday for Retrospective. This is an opportunity for Integrum as a team to reflect on the week’s progress and discuss what improvements can be made for the next week. These meetings allow us to stay agile and adapt to our customers needs.

The meeting begins by each team member giving a thumbs up, thumbs down or a sideways thumb to express general feelings on the sprint for the week. Agile Coach Derek Neighbors then divides the large whiteboard into three areas, (+) (-) and the delta symbol. The (+) stands for behaviors or strategies we should start, (-) for stop and the delta for change. Team members pass around a ‘talking stick‘ to indicate their turn to provide ideas, promoting respect of everyone’s feedback.

Once the columns are full, voting follows to narrow down the feedback to what the team feels is most important to work on. Three or four topics are chosen and then open to discussion. Team members have an opportunity to clarify their opinions or ask questions. After another voting session, one smart goal is chosen for the next week and the team breaks out into smaller groups to focus on solutions. A SMART goal is defined as: specific, measurable, attainable, reasonable and timely.

Retrospective ends with team members sharing appreciations – thanking other team members for their help during the past week.

Having a time for team reflection, such as a Retrospective, is a useful way to allow your employees a time to be honest with their coworkers, as well as keep the team solution driven.

The majority of the work was on improving administrative management of the site. Developers Steve Swedler and Andrew Bowerman made management of routes easier, as well as provided more options for administrators.

On the public end, consumers of the site will notice updates to the interface to make it more user friendly, with a redesign by IMP Designs.

“This project is a chance to make the system more about the customers and userbase, as well as correct any issues,” said Steve.

Integrum employees are actively involved in promoting the Downtown Chandler community. Located just south of Historic Chandler, Integrum frequents local establishments for team outings, staff lunches and client meetings. Additionally, CEO Jade Meskill sits on the Chandler Cultural Foundation, while co-owner Derek Neighbors is board member for the Downtown Chandler Community Partnership.

Gangplank, the collaborative workspace founded by Integrum was recognized as part of the company’s efforts to impact Chandler’s economic development. The workspace brings in small companies, local talent and thought leaders to spark creative growth in downtown.

The is the second time Integrum has been recognized by the Chandler Chamber. Earlier this year, the City of Chandler named Integrum as the Small Business of the Year.

AuthorityLabs, SEO software and simple rank monitoring service founded by Chase Granberry, has been a long-time Gangplank member. Chase came up with for the idea for Authority Labs at a Gangplank event in October 2008, as well as secured funding from Gangplank, LLC for his venture.

Chase has seen his business grow over the last year and when it came to expand, he looked inside the Gangplank community to Integrum.

Due to such tremendous growth and attracting large client deals, Chase needed expand his core infrastructure to offer new web services and scalability for his clients.

Jade Meskill had already developed much of the infrastructure that allowed the site to achieve such rapid growth. AuthorityLabs and Integrum have worked to design an easy SEO software that’s simple enough for the small business, but scalable enough for the enterprise. Integrum and AuthorityLabs have also created features that make the software perfect for agencies.

“A lot of the growth has to do with the simplicity of the design,” said Chase. “The fact that the system is flexible enough that an enterprise can pull insights out of the volume of data that they have.”

Many of the Integrum staff attended the Windows Phone 7 Unleashed event and had an opportunity to develop a small app for the software. Jade Meskill, CEO, sees a lot of potential in development on the Windows mobile platform, and is excited to be able to offer a full range of modern smartphone platform development services for our clients.

Quoted in the Arizona Republic back in 2008, Meskill expressed his desire to “build a place I and everyone who works with me wanted to come to every day. I like to make people laugh and have them enjoy coming to work.”

That goal has been recognized by the Phoenix Business Journal in this year’s ‘Best Places to Work’ awards.

Integrum employees enjoy an open work environment, free of cubicles, to encourage interaction and exchanging of ideas. The pairing technique utilized by staff varies the work day, in addition to providing practice for employees looking to improve their skills in certain areas.

Of course, the access to video games doesn’t  hurt either. Between stories, Integrum employees challenge each other to quick Street Fighter and Off Road battles. Even software issues are addressed with a little bit of fun. Staff members with a bug are required to wear a sombrero until the error is fixed.

And at the end of a hard week, Meskill and Integrum co-owner Derek Neighbors, treat employees to a team lunch at a location of their choosing. The Friday ritual let’s the team wind down, promotes camaraderie, as well as reminds the team their hard work is appreciated.

Designer William Price saw the project as an opportunity to really hit a niche market. “The application SoChurch hired us to build takes what’s successful about social networking and applies those ideas to a new market.”

Of course, building an application with that many moving parts isn’t easy. Essentially, Integrum was tasked with building a large application that has as many features as Facebook, in only nine months. Programmers Chris Irish and Robby Colvin rose to the challenge, with the website and application set to launch by November 30, 2010.

Roy Van de Water and Kyle Stewart worked on the Android application. One of the few projects to do so, the developers followed Googles’ styling guide to rebuild the app from the ground up. Integrum also did significant work on the iPhone application, providing the client with a comprehensive mobile solution under one roof. Much of the design for the applications was done by Goldman Design, while Integrum completed implementation.

The iPhone and Android applications are available for download from the AppStore and Android Market.

Invalid Binary.

Gee thanks Apple for that insightful, descriptive message. Surely with all your advanced binary scanning, static analysis, Application Uploader, etc. all you can give us is a most unhelpful “Invalid Binary”?

If you are suffering from “Invalid Binary” issues, and have done everything short of sacrificing small farm animals, try this trick.

If your Entitlements.plist file was generated with an version of Xcode prior Xcode 3.2.3, remove Entitlements.plist and regenerate it using Xcode 3.2.3. You don’t need to change any of the options generated on your new Entitlements.plist file, just recompile and submit again. Hopefully this helps someone.

This is a part of the cryptic “etc” Apple speaks of with the possible reasons for an “Invalid Binary” app rejection reason.

We’ve been very happy to work with Nick and the team at Digital Qpons as they’ve expanded from iPhone to Android and beyond.

Good luck to Denny Hamlin in his next race, and we’ll be excited to see Integrum and Digital Qpons in the winner’s circle in the future!