agile

Conference Presentations

User Stories for Agile Requirements

Expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable techniques introduced by the agile processes. User stories are an effective approach on all time constrained projects and are a great way to introduce a bit of agility to any project. Mike Cohn describes the six attributes of good stories-independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, sized appropriately, and testable. Explore how user stories help a team shift from more documents to more discussion, encouraging the right mix of both. Learn practical, proven techniques for gathering user stories. Discuss how much work should be done on a user story in advance and by whom and see why a just-in-time, just-enough approach aids a team in becoming agile. Discover the relationship between user stories, epics, themes, and conditions of satisfaction.

Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software
Small is Beautiful: Business Agility Through Adaptive Governance

In this economic downturn, is your company looking beyond knee-jerk cost cutting to focus on creative ways to solve business problems? When businesses tap the innovative capabilities that agile development teams possess and scale up through adaptive governance, they can produce game-changing solutions. Sanjiv Augustine shares how leading businesses are using agile to jumpstart and scale their new product development by incorporating user-centered product design and a user story “maturity progression” to support the creative evolution of system development. To optimize their project investments, these businesses are adopting incremental funding and portfolio-level feature prioritization, reducing team churn by creating stable teams with embedded specialists, and tracking and monitoring project portfolio progress across multiple teams in a visual, agile fashion.

Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
The Scrum Product Owner Demystified

A Scrum product owner's job is challenging, to say the least. Unfortunately, the specific concepts and techniques required to succeed often aren't spelled out in books and training classes. And being referred to-in Scrum jargon-as "the single wringable neck" is enough to discourage anyone from signing up for the job. While there's no silver bullet, Jeff Patton helps fill your Scrum tool-kit with valuable approaches that help product owners succeed: the basics of collaborative discovery sessions to identify business and user goals; how to create effective user stories for better planning; how to split and thin user stories to support iterative/incremental development; approaches for reducing the risk of late delivery; and techniques for keeping users, stakeholders, and the team involved from inception through delivery.

Jeff Patton, Independent Consultant
Sustaining an Agile Culture

In Scrum, the product owner manages the product backlog-seems simple enough. But what principles are required to make seemingly straightforward agile practices really work? Mitch Lacey suggests courage, trust, commitment, and simplicity are those principles. Courage: Do I have the courage to say no to this stakeholder for the overall benefit of the product? Trust: Can I trust the team to sustain their velocity? Commitment: Are all team members working everyday to improve? Simplicity: Are we doing only the things that bring value to the product? These are real-life questions that agile team members face daily. It's not enough to just say you're agile because you work in iterations. Truly being agile weaves these principles into the fabric of our projects. Join Mitch to learn how he has applied these principles in his projects and the failures that have occurred when the principles were misaligned or absent all together.

Janet Gregory, DragonFire Inc.
Navigating Conflict on Agile Teams: Why "Resolving" Conflict Won't Work

On many agile development teams, conflict lurks under the surface and can erupt as a volcano of destruction and suffering. On many agile teams, conflict is viewed mostly as a distraction that keeps the team from getting the job done. However, on great agile teams, conflict is constant and welcomed by all as a catapult to higher performance. In all these situations, conflict is not a mechanistic system one can simply take apart, fix, and put back together. It is not about mechanisms; it is about human beings working together, day after day, in the maelstrom of constant collaboration and change. In this turbulence, how can teams chart a course through conflict and turn it into a force for greatness? Lyssa Adkins reveals a conflict model that helps you do just that, walking you through five levels of conflict from "Problem to Solve" to "World War" with each step finely tuned to view conflict in a deeply human and humane way.

Lyssa Adkins, Cricketwing Consulting
Agile Brushstrokes: The Art of Choosing an Agile Transition Style

Agile software processes vary in detail, depth, impact and endurance as much as painting styles like graffiti differ from Baroque or Impressionist art. What can artists teach us about successful agile transitions? And what can past agile transitions teach us about styles that endured or faded away? Joshua Kerievsky will map agile transitions to art styles and identify elements that lead to success or failure. We will look at palettes of principles and practices, how and when agile styles may be effectively blended, when or how to do a sketch before jumping to the canvas, how initial transitions can morph into wholly different styles and whether to spread a consistent or varying style across a department or organization. Joshua will focus on four fundamental agile transitions styles as he walks you through case studies from the past decade.

Joshua Kerievsky, Industrial Logic
Agile: Resetting and Restarting

The Agile Manifesto-ten years in the making-was published in 2001. Now, with more than eight years of practice, the manifesto has greatly influenced the process of software development. It has influenced the IEEE's software contracting models, the Project Management Institute's view of software project management, the Software Engineering Institute's CMMI™ assessment model, and helped change the development process for thousands of organizations around the world. During these years, agile practices have moved forward and continued to mature, adopting ideas from lean manufacturing and the theory of constraints to add more rigor to our work. Still, many agile projects today tend to fail because they are overly tactical and do not take the long-term view.

Alistair Cockburn, Humans and Technology
Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: Rethinking Performance Measures for Agile Development

A recent Business Week article proclaimed, "There is no more Normal." With businesses in the throes of pervasive change, the traditional emphasis on "following the plan with minimal changes" must be supplanted by "adapting the plan to inevitable changes." If agile development practices are about focusing on and delivering customer value, then how can adherence to traditional scope, schedule, and cost be a good way to measure performance? It can't. Jim Highsmith explains the need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to instead focus agile software development success on value, quality, and constraints. Even today, many agile teams are asked to be flexible and adaptive and then are told to conform to planned scope, schedule, and cost goals. They are asked to adapt-inside a very small box. If we are to truly bring agile values to our organizations, then we must change our performance measures.

Jim Highsmith, Information Architects, Inc.
Toward 21st Century Automation for Agile Testing

As more companies move to agile software delivery approaches, new challenges and dynamics are impacting their testing practices. Organizations face many issues when implementing automation, including selecting tools that are usable and flexible, encouraging non-technical and non-testing staff to contribute tests, enabling open-source integration, and promoting test-driven development. Dietmar Strasser shares his experiences tackling these challenges as many organizations shift from traditional test automation to agile. Learn about the increased importance of testing in the agile development environment; the role that process and tools play in supporting the agile team; the differences between traditional and agile test automation; how to develop fast, automated test scripts; the use of agile and traditional testing methods side-by-side; and how to deal with test automation in a distributed development environment.

Dietmar Strasser, Micro Focus
Seven Factors for Agile Testing Success

What do testers need to do differently to be successful on an agile project? How can agile development teams employ testers’ skills and experience for maximum value to the project? Janet Gregory describes the seven key factors she has discovered for testers to succeed on agile teams. She explains the whole-team approach of agile development that enables testers to do their job more effectively. Then, Janet explores the “agile testing mindset” that contributes to a tester’s success. She describes the different kind of information that testers on an agile team need to obtain, create, and provide for the team and product owner. Learn the role that test automation plays in the fast-paced development within agile projects, including regression and acceptance tests. By adhering to core agile practices while keeping the bigger picture in mind, testers add significant value to and help ensure the success of agile projects.

Janet Gregory, DragonFire Inc.

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