agile

Conference Presentations

Ten Things You Absolutely Must Know before Touching Agile with a Barge Pole

As agile continues to grow in popularity, more organizations are experiencing the frustration and pain that accompany attempts to move from traditional to agile practices. With that pain comes the awareness that organizational and cultural change is essential to an agile adoption strategy. Ade Shokoya shares proven approaches for “selling agile” to senior management, colleagues, and all business stakeholders. Ade offers up what he calls “stealth agile” as a catalyst for organizational change. You’ll learn about the three personality types essential to successful agile transformation initiatives and how to avoid the common agile mistake that could cost you your job and/or reputation. Take back a guide to determine the agile transformation strategy best suited to your organization’s size and culture.

Ade Shokoya, AgileTV
The Science of Lean

Science is the building and organizing of knowledge into testable explanations and predictions about the world; lean is an approach which recognizes and leverages many scientific discoveries to enable faster flow, higher value, and greater capability. When thinking about opportunities for continuous improvement, science and lean should go hand in hand. Karl Scotland explores some of the science behind lean-from mathematics to neuroscience-in order to explain why and predict how various practices can have a positive impact on the way we work. Gain a deeper understanding of both the science of lean and how to take a scientific approach to learning in order to reap the benefits of paying attention to people, process, and economics. Leave with richer insights into why and how lean approaches work, and the ability to apply the science-and a scientific approach-to your own teams and organizations.

Karl Scotland, Rally Software Development
Signs Your Agile Adoption Is Off Track-And How to Fix It

Adopting agile is often a difficult proposition with many variables and sometimes uneven results. Recognizing when your adoption isn't working well and taking pro-active actions to put it back on track are essential. So, how do you know if your adoption is proceeding through rough but expected waters or running the risk of failing? Thomas Stiehm describes the signs of serious adoption problems and the steps you can take to fix them. Leveraging ten years of experience helping teams adopt agile, Tom walks through the many successes and failures he’s seen and, more importantly, the mistakes companies and people made that led to those failures. Learn the remediation steps you can take to re-energize and re-center your adoption efforts. Don’t let small missteps cascade into failure. Instead, join in and take back an action plan that’s sure to increase the odds of making your agile adoption a win for you, your teams, and your company.

Thomas Stiehm, Coveros, Inc.
Testing Traps to Avoid on Agile Teams

Why do many agile teams fail at testing? Iterations turn into mini-waterfalls with testing at the end; stories never become “done” and carry into the next iteration with unresolved bugs; testers worry they’re losing control or being set up to fail; customers keep changing their minds after all the tests have passed. However, some teams do succeed with testing on agile projects. What do they do differently? Janet Gregory shares the lessons she’s learned that help teams-and especially testers-get agile right. With examples from her real-world experiences, Janet describes the testing traps and the practice or process to help fix each one. One example is “forgetting the big picture”-so easy when you are testing small, granular stories. A practice to put in place that avoids this trap is implementing feature acceptance tests to supplement story acceptance tests.

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Agile Metrics: Velocity Is Not the Goal

Velocity is one of the most common metrics used-and one of the most commonly misused-on agile projects. Velocity is simply a measurement of speed in a given direction-the rate at which a team is delivering toward a product release. As with a vehicle en route to a particular destination, increasing the speed may appear to ensure a timely arrival. However, that assumption is dangerous because it ignores the risks with higher speeds. And while it’s easy to increase a vehicle’s speed, where exactly is the accelerator on a software team? Michael “Doc" Norton walks us through the Hawthorne Effect and Goodhart’s Law to explain why setting goals for velocity can actually hurt a project's chances. Take a look at what can negatively impact velocity, ways to stabilize fluctuating velocity, and methods to improve velocity without the risks.

Michael Norton, LeanDog
Designing Agility Practices that Last

Every day more agile practices and styles emerge, overlap, and compete. This proliferation challenges you to choose from among XP, Scrum, lean, Kanban, or the ways of the emerging Lean Start Up crowd. Rather than stumbling down one path or another, join David Hussman as he shares tools for assessing and designing an agile process with practices that address your specific needs and constraints. David starts by teaching a simple assessment process to help you understand where you are today. Then, he offers ideas for selecting a meaningful set of practices and moves on to teach you how to create a meaningful and measurable coaching plan. David covers the selection of product planning tools, iterative delivery tools, tracking tools, and more. If you want to clear the fog about which agile practice will really help you, come for some answers. Even if you don’t yet know what questions to ask, David can help.

David Hussman, DevJam
Agile Development & Better Software West 2012: Agile Testing: Challenges Beyond the Easy Contexts

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: agile testing is hard! First, we have to get over the misconception that you don’t need testers within agile teams. Then, we have to integrate testers with the developers and engender a holistic quality approach. And those are only the challenges when the going is easy! In more difficult contexts, testing in agile environments is-well, even more difficult. Bob Galen explores how to handle testing in difficult contexts-lack of test automation capabilities, agile in highly regulated environments, testing when your team is spread globally and real-time interactions are nearly impossible, and more. He describes contexts and approaches for blending existing, traditional testing techniques with their agile counterparts. With real-world examples, Bob describes how teams have achieved a good working balance between the two-for example, in test planning and quality metrics reporting.

Bob Galen, Deutsche Bank
Transitioning Your Team to Kanban: Theory and Practice

You’re familiar with agile and perhaps practicing Scrum. Now, you want to learn about Kanban to see if it is something to add to your development toolkit. Can Kanban help you? How does it differ from Scrum and other agile methodologies? Kanban is quickly being adopted by teams that want to improve their productivity. Kanban focuses on continuous flow and incorporating the theory of constraints which together allow teams to improve and streamline their product delivery. Learn about Kanban-not only the theory, but also practical lessons on transitioning your team to Kanban. Get insight into moving from Scrum to Kanban and pick up techniques that can aid any team. See cumulative flow diagrams, WIP (work-in-progress) limits, classes of services in action, and hear about other ideas from the Kanban toolset. Come and grow your agile repertoire!

Gil Irizarry, Constant Contact Software
Adding Good User Experience Practices into Agile Development

Whose job is it to ensure that the user has a good experience with a new application? As agile processes are taught today, the user experience (UX) design practice is usually left out or at best described as an optional team role. However, the companies that build useful, usable, and desirable software know that UX is baked into the whole development process. Jeff Patton describes what user experience design is and isn’t, and how every person on the team has something to contribute. Hear concrete examples of how companies have adapted their UX practice to work well in an agile context and, along the way, discovered innovative UX practices that work better in agile contexts. Jeff explores pragmatic personas, guerrilla user research, design sketching, lightweight prototyping, and concept testing. Leave with valuable tips for adding UX practices and thinking to your agile process to help you get good user experience.

Jeff Patton, Jeff Patton & Associates
Agile Architecture Practices for Large Scale Agile Development

Although “agile architecture” may sound like an oxymoron to you, the reality is that a simple, elegant architecture is a key enabler of any successful system, particularly large scale ones. Scott Ambler describes agile architecture practices-at both the project and enterprise level-that form a middle ground between the extremes of big architecture up-front and outright hacking. Scott discusses agile modeling practices-initial architecture envisioning, proving an architecture with working code, and just-in-time model storming-that enable agile teams to benefit from architectural modeling without suffering the drawbacks of detailed design documentation. Beyond architecture, Scott introduces agile design techniques-continuous integration (CI), test-driven development (TDD), and refactoring-that build on and provide feedback to an emergent architecture.

Theresa Quatrani, IBM Rational

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