Posted by Stuart Preston on October 23, 2011 under ALM, Application Lifecycle Management, UKALMUG | 
Has been a long time since I posted on here (sign of the times I think, most of my updates are relegated to 140 characters these days). I’ve been very busy in the UK, India and other countries helping a very large company get a hold of their deployment engineering practices as part of an ALM overhaul.
It’s nearly November and RippleRock are sponsoring the ALM Summit in Redmond. If you are and you’re from the UK, drop me a note in the comments – we might even organise a mini UK ALM User Group over a beer whilst we are out there…
Posted by Stuart Preston on February 14, 2010 under ALM, Application Lifecycle Management, SDLC, Software Development Lifecycle, Team Foundation Server, UKALMUG |
The inaugural meeting of the UK ALM User Group was held on Thursday 11th February at Microsoft’s Cardinal Place offices near Victoria in London.
The session was deliberately left with an open agenda, and after we had made our introductions we shared many anecdotes from our collective experiences with ALM, the discussion on the day mainly focusing around people and process rather than the tools.
As the majority of people in the meeting were practitioners using Microsoft ALM tooling – there was widespread support for bringing in presenters on non-Microsoft ALM tools to ensure that the group kept abreast of the latest developments.
Some of the wider questions about the group included:
– What is the vehicle for the UK ALM User Group message?
– Should the UK ALM User Group have a “voice”?
– How do we spread the word about ALM and ‘make it stick’.
Lessons learned were that we need to prioritise the topics and also timebox them! Hopefully in future sessions this will be easier to achieve.
It was agreed that each member of the group should try and post a session topic to the User Group website (http://ukalmug.ning.com/forum/topics/discussion-topics-for-uk-alm). The most popular session topics will be determined and we can then find presenters for them.
There was also broad support for having the UK ALM User Group more regularly than the initially proposed (quarterly). More details on this will follow soon. If anyone can recommend a bar or other venue in London with presentation facilities then please let me know.
Drinks, socialising and continuation of some of the discussions were then had at a local bar…
Thanks to Microsoft for providing the venue and for the enthusiastic attendees some of whom had travelled from out of London to come to the meeting. Hope to see all of you and more at the next meeting.
Please remember to tag anything related to the user group on twitter with #ukalmug. There is also a list of members on twitter at @ukalmug/members
Posted by Stuart Preston on January 13, 2010 under ALM, Application Lifecycle Management, SDLC, Software Development Lifecycle, UKALMUG |
This post is to announce the UK ALM User Group that I have created. This has been a personal objective of mine for some time and I have decided that now is as good a time as any to actually make it happen!
The UK ALM User Group is for practitioners of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) in the UK to get together and discuss and share ideas, tools and techniques, as well as to socialise somewhere other than Agile and Software Development conferences!
Initially we plan to meet quarterly, the first dates are already lined up for February and May. Membership is free and we have some venues in mind in London to visit to start off with – not to say that if there is enough interest those of us in the south will travel to other UK locations too!
ALM Practitioners and enthusiasts from all technical disciplines are welcome – we’re an agnostic bunch!
To sign up, visit: http://almug.org and join in the discussion – especially welcome are presenters for our first meeting planned for February 11th 2010.
Hope to see some of you there!
