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Pragmatic Personas: Putting the User in User Stories When making choices about a system's functionality, the easiest thing is to ask yourself, "What would I like the software to do?" Unfortunately, when a team uses this approach, the result is usually constant argument, uncomfortable compromises, and that never-popular "designed-by-committee" feel. A persona is a simple model that describes an example user of a system. It's easy and fun for a team to create pragmatic personas that describe what we know about our users so we can talk about the product from their perspective. A good set of personas help us avoid the trap of self-referential design, and the act of building personas helps us identify what we don't yet know about our users. Jeff Patton shares the basics of creating simple personas and leads you through an exercise of creating one during class.
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Jeff Patton, Independent Consultant
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Coaching Agility and Producing Value Why do some agile communities succeed while others are struggling or failing? Communities that struggle often do so because they are prescriptively follow processes instead of descriptively adopting practices and principles that amplify their existing strengths and address their challenges. David Hussman shares successful coaching techniques he uses to grow sustainable agility that lasts beyond the early iterations or the first few agile projects. David begins with a series of initial adoption tools-assessments, pragmatic practice selection, personas and story maps, chartering, and development manifestos. He then moves on to discuss ideas and tools for keeping the agile spark alive and glowing. As a full time working coach, David uses coaching stories and experiences to discuss establishing strong, sustainable delivery cadences while also building the essence of coaching and coaches.
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David Hussman, DevJam
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Going Agile - How It Affects People, Teams and Process Agile development provides the opportunity for new levels of productivity and value for software delivery-yet the agile approach brings new challenges that impact people, teams, and processes. Joachim Herschmann describes how a traditional waterfall-oriented development organization can become more agile and how software delivery can be transformed into a managed, efficient, and predictable business process. Using the real-life example of the Borland Linz development center, a traditional organization that has been undergoing an agile transformation for more than two years, Joachim shares the company's experiences throughout this culture shift. Because not everything in this transition was easy and straightforward, Joachim discusses the pitfalls and challenges that the Borland Linz development center encountered-short sprint cycles, shared quality responsibility and accountability, and an increased need for test automation.
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Joachim Herschmann, Borland Software
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Realistic Test-Driven Development: Paying and Preventing Technical Debt Are you considering implementing Test-Driven Development (TDD), or have you tried it and failed? If so, this class is for you. Rob Myers describes the basic mechanics and components of TDD. In addition, he explains the real long-term benefits to the individual, team, and organization of using this technique. Teams find that their defect rate is considerably lower (compared to no unit testing, or unit testing after coding). Even greater rewards are gained in future enhancements and releases. As developers build a “safety net” of automated tests around the growing product, the team can rapidly modify the design and add features required by changes in a dynamic market. The TDD tests guarantee that any defects introduced in those modifications are quickly detected. Rob shares first-person stories of how TDD provided astounding returns.
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Rob Myers, Agile Institute
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Growing Pains: Why Scaling Scrum and XP Hurts - and What You Can Do Do you have a large scale program with multiple agile teams? If so, you may have experienced some of the growing pains we encountered when we scaled Scrum and XP-conflicting priorities across teams, handling dependencies across multiple backlogs, planning a release date for teams with changing velocities and backlogs, inconsistent technical practices, and ineffective cross-team communication. Ed Kraay presents his organization's experience working on a large, complex Scrum program with multiple, interrelated Scrum teams. Learn the secrets of what to avoid and ways to minimize the pain so that your teams can reduce defects, improve delivery, and have more fun. Ed’s practical tips include synchronizing sprints across teams, using multi-team release planning, building a cross-team roadmap, embedding architects and coaches, and facilitating vertical transparency using a meta-scrum framework.
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Ed Kraay, SolutionsIQ
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Instill Scrum Values to Build High-Performance Teams Your teams are using agile practices well and starting to understand the principles behind them, but they are still not high-performing. Although they're getting a bit better with each sprint and they're meeting commitments, they are not producing the great results you thought agile was supposed to create. Come learn the framework for guiding teams to those great results using the Scrum values as the root and ground of the journey. The Scrum values that lead to high performance and the fruits of high performance teams are put into a context that causes teams and people outside teams-even senior managers and executives-to "get it." They get what makes agile work and what we are moving toward when we talk about high-performing teams. Lyssa Adkins offers an interactive experience for you to learn and practice how to teach your team to use this Scrum framework so they, in turn, can chart their own paths toward high-performance.
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Lyssa Adkins, Cricketwing Consulting
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CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both? Agile development methods and CMMI® best practices are often perceived to be in conflict with each other. Some even argue that the Agile Manifesto was largely a counter response to the original CMM®. Hillel Glazer explores ways that CMMI® and agile champions can work together to derive benefit from both approaches to dramatically improve business performance. Arm yourself with the knowledge to address any Agile-CMMI® rift within your organization and learn ways to benefit from both practices. Hillel fills in some of the missing details that led to the original perceived conflict and discovers that CMMI® is missing components that agile provides and agile is missing components that CMMI® provides. He presents examples of how CMMI® can help propagate agile ideas and propel them towards fully optimized performance levels.
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Hillel Glazer, Entinex, Inc.
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Determining Business Value Agility focuses on delivering business value to the customers as rapidly as possible, and user stories are a common way to describe the features and functions that define value incrementally. However, to concentrate on delivering most business value earlier in the project, we must determine and assign the relative business value to each of those stories. Through lecture and interactive exercises, Ken Pugh presents two methods for quickly estimating and assigning business value for features and stories. Ken explains the relationships between business value estimates and story point estimates, and how to chart business value for iteration reviews. Ken demonstrates what estimates really represent in both dollars and time. On a larger scale, he shows you how to use business value assessment as a portfolio management tool to prioritize feature development across several projects.
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Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
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Agile Development Practices 2009: The Power of Retrospectives One principle in the Agile Manifesto states, "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." Retrospectives are a powerful, repeatable tool to help your team continuously learn and improve. Linda Rising shares techniques for project retrospectives to help teams discover what they're doing well and identify what should be done differently. Not finger pointing or blaming sessions, retrospectives are structured interactions in which team members reflect on the past in order to become more effective in the future. Linda shares her experiences with leading retrospectives-both successful and unsuccessful. Learn ways to apply her positive experiences and a proven retrospective model to your projects.
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Linda Rising, Independent Consultant
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Agile Development Practices 2009: Rightsizing Your Project in a Down Economy In tough times, both shoes drop simultaneously and "scarcity thinking" takes over in senior executives, managers, and development teams. In this environment, dysfunction can wreak havoc on your projects in the form of scope greed, death-march deadlines, and budget cuts. Often, the tendency is to say "yes" to impossible dates, take on too much, suffer the budget cuts, and pray that heroics might save the day. This is a disaster waiting to happen. It takes a skillful manager to "rightsize" critical projects-right team, right scope, right dates-at the beginning. Scarcity thinking threatens all three. Michael Mah describes how to lead difficult conversations and discuss the "undiscussables." He shares how to artfully frame trade-offs for stakeholders to set priorities. Learn how to get buy-in by using a blend of common sense, essential measurement concepts, and rules of software estimation.
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Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
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