With the world working remotely, I have managed to join a few meetup sessions which I would not normally have access to. A couple of days ago I was talking with James Coplien1, who along with the likes of Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Grady Booch, founded the the Hillside group2. Inspired by the architect Christopher Alexander3 work in pattern languages they have been running PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programming) writers workshops.

With Jeff Sutherland4 and several other authors, Coplien has documented and collected patterns related to how Scrum teams organise and create value into a scrum book5. Most of these patterns are available online6. It includes all your favourites, from Sprint Goal and Daily Stand-up, to some more guild like patterns, i.e. Birds of a Feather (where similar roles, i.e. BAS or QAs, from different teams get together to share knowledge).

Cope runs two-day courses which explain how the pattern language is built up combining and building upon base patterns. The next course being at goto; Copenhagen7 costing £1,100/1'300 CHF. On Monday 26th October 2020 he has offered to run a one-day condensed version of the course for me via Zoom, which will be in the £350/400 CHF price range, which is much nicer for my pocket. If anyone else would be interested in joining give me a shout.

If you need your appetite wetted a little, here are a couple of his talks on YouTube so you can see his unique style:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Coplien ↩︎

  2. https://hillside.net/home/history ↩︎

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander ↩︎

  4. https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/profile/jsutherland ↩︎

  5. https://amzn.to/3m0eyPm ↩︎

  6. http://scrumbook.org/ ↩︎

  7. https://gotocph.com/november-2020/masterclasses/281/2-days-scrum-patterns-training ↩︎

  8. https://youtu.be/LYs119xEvzM ↩︎

  9. https://youtu.be/2k10j-mQKnE ↩︎