Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference West 2011

When adopting agile software development, many of the agile roles and practices focus on the team and its members. So, where does that leave the managers-project managers, software managers, IT directors, etc? Based on his many years as an agile coach, Skip Angel answers these questions and explores the role of leadership in software development. Skip discusses common challenges agile team face and how managers within the organization are needed to address those challenges.

The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging one. Too much design often results in overkill, complexity, and wasted work. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that require rework, additional complexity, and wasted effort. How can we know what the right balance is? Alan Shalloway shows how to use the advice from Design Patterns coupled with the attitude of not building what you don't need from Agile.

Backlogs, story point planning, sprints, and retrospectives-Scrum describes processes that work well at the team level. But more is needed to integrate multiple scrum teams that must work closely together. Although the traditional response is to hold daily Scrum of Scrum meetings, planning and executing multi-team, multi-sprint efforts require more coordination and defined practices than a Scrum of Scrums offers. Gil Irizarry describes how his organization combined the best of Scrum and Kanban to manage large development efforts.

What allows some teams to deliver results that far exceed expectations? How do these groups differ from most others? What can group members and leaders do to enable these extraordinary experiences? Geoff Bellman, along with his partner Kathleen Ryan, spent four years diving deeply into self-declared fantastic teams.