Its a very useful group in which you can accelerate learning scrum techniques. The people who turn up are mainly scrum masters, but you get some developers, project owners and people who have not done scrum before.  There are quite a few who are hugely knowledgeable and have seen many different scrum projects for a variety of clients.  Food and drink is supplied by a sponsor.  The last event was sponsored by Rally Software and their representative took part in the event like any other attendee.  There was no Rally sales pitch, very low key!

The format for the evening goes like this.

1. An informal stand-up is initiated and people write questions on cards that they want help with or answers to.  The cards are stuck to a board.
2. Everyone is allocated two votes that they can spend on a topic that interests them.  You can vote for your own question.  Only one vote per question.
3. The top questions are chosen for debate.  Then people break into smaller groups to discuss the questions they are interested in.  The debates are friendly and focus on drawing out the issues from the questions and providing advice on how scrum and agile techniques can be applied.
4. The groups gather in the large forum again, and feedback to the whole what they have learnt.
5. Repeat at step 3 with new questions until either the questions run out, or the evening ends.

Over the course of the evening I joined two discussions.  The problems were genuine issues taken from peoples own projects.  One was an issue that boiled down to a product owner getting too involved, stepping into the scrum manager space and making architectural and development decisions.  The other was a project which was under a lot of pressure to respond to urgent issues mid iteration, that were not part of the original iteration planning.

So, genuine issues and good constructive debate ensued. If anyone is working in a scrum project and has some areas they want to improve come along.  If your sitting there in a perfect scrum project then you probably have much to offer.  I certainly found it useful.  See you at the next one.