Costa Rica Agile: Let’s bring the revolution here
How the Scrum adoption in Costa Rica is going? How many software companies use Scrum? Which companies?
How many times have you done these questions? I have heard them many times.
The Agile movement -being Scrum the most popular manifestation of it- is having an impressive traction in North America and Europe. In fact, you can see some evidence of that by seeing this job trends chart of Indeed.com that compares RUP against Scrum:
In South America, the movement started in Argentina, Brazil, now it’s getting hot Chile and Perú.
In Central America (no, Central America is not part of North America, and no, Costa Rica is not Puerto Rico) there is not a visible adoption of Scrum, except Costa Rica.
These are some events related to me that shows an increase of interest of Agile in Costa Rica:
- August 2007, I was vital in bringing Stacia Broderick and Tobias Mayer for the first Certified Scrum Master training in Costa Rica, it was a closed activity for corporate upper management.
- October 2008, Mike Griffiths came to give a one-day workshop about agile. I took him to give a presentation at the University of Costa Rica about Agile, it was a full classroom presentation.
- September 2009, Brian Foote paid a visit to Costa Rica and we had a very insightful discussion about possible things to bust Agility in Costa Rica.
- December 2009, I brought Michael Vizdos to do the first open ScrumMaster Certification Workshop [as far as I know, previous workshops done in Costa Rica were closed]. I was intending to have sixteen attendees, but we had twenty two and some in the waiting list for the next workshop in April. About eight companies sent people to get trained.
Costa Rica Agile User Group
On December 17th, 2009, we had our first meeting of the Costa Rica Agile User Group. Michael Vizdos gave a very customized and cozy presentation about Scrum. It started as a normal Scrum presentation but the audience quickly drove the attention to the Costa Rica reality: Scrum in a Near-shore Software Development Company. Michael has so much real life experience around the world so he gave us valuable insights, really unforgettable.
At the end of the meeting, we detailed a list of possible topics for future meetings. Just now I am pinging everywhere the poll [in Spanish] to pick the topic of the next meeting.
We already have our Google Group [in Spanish] of forty eight members so far. We have our location secured in Cenfotec Academic Center. Right now we are working in the website.
In future, we want to register our group at Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance and APLN. We now are looking for sponsorship.
Agile Day Costa Rica
After some talking with Brian Marick, Brian Foote and Michael Vizdos, Carlos Sirias of Pernix Solutions and Gilberto Medrano of Thought Works we finally get close to start to promote the first Agile Day in Costa Rica. We already got the venue, now the hard work ahead is regarding the sponsorship, but we are confident we can make it. It’s going to be a great event.
Now what?
This year is very promising for Agile and a lot of work lay ahead of us.
For me, this year my work will be focused in building near-shore distributed teams effective.
I’ll keep you posted. Stay tuned.
posted in ScrumMaster Training, costa rica, user group | 3 Comments
