Jean Tabaka offers straightforward advice on how agile teams can mature and learn to scale up to larger and larger projects. The three steps of her approach emphasize a path based on principles of Lean Thinking--Flow, Pull, and Innovate. Flow is about creating smooth delivery of value. Pull is the way teams pull ready items for delivery, and the business pulls ready, tested, and valuable features into productive use. Innovate is about how the organization drives improvements rather than merely responding to issues. For each of the three steps, Jean outlines practices for growth and identifies pitfalls to avoid and roadblocks to navigate around. You can apply the disciplines discussed in this class to a single co-located team, a team of teams, or an entire organization eager to take advantage of both agile and lean approaches. Join Jean and learn to achieve the greatest innovations with a much lower risk of failure.

An agile team needs a workspace that supports highly collaborative ways of working together. The team needs to be able to sit together and have visible "information radiators" of the latest status on planned work and code quality. Some teams also boost their spaces with "eXtreme Feedback Devices" such as lava lamps and audio signals linked to automated processes. It is vital to ensure that feedback mechanisms within the agile workspace are easy to interpret and low maintenance. Join Rachel Davies to explore different ways to set up your agile workspace for maximum fun and productivity. Discover different ways to present information to the team and some snags to watch out for. If you or your team is new to agile development, this class is for you.

Agility is often described in terms of iterative development. In fact, it's more of an iterative analysis process with the code being written and tested immediately after the requirements are discovered. The heart of this process is the user Story, a collection of requirement descriptions, value statements, cost estimates, architecture designs, and test cases-all rolled into one. While at first glance user Stories seem simple, they play a key role in all agile methods. What makes a good one? How do you write it? How do you make them the right size? Alan Shalloway answers all of these questions and more in this thought-provoking class. Unfortunately, it is not enough just to create a collection of stories. We need a way to organize them and to plan for their release. Alan concludes by discussing these important organizational issues.

The phrase "working together" is based on a team collaboration metaphor. However, Stacia Broderick and Lee Devin have found that most teams don't actually collaborate-rather, they consist of modular parts that are steeped in competition and oriented to reward the "stars." Stacia and Lee use a metaphor drawn from theatre art, a form of group work that requires collaboration, encourages interdependency, eschews competition, and emphasizes the project rather than any particular member of the group. Going from simply "working together" to "innovating collaboratively" requires a quantum shift in our thinking about teamwork. This is not a "techniques" workshop--in the kind of work they advocate, there are no quick fixes. However, Stacia and Lee introduce a frame of mind that's necessary if a person or group wants to break out of the box of conventional teamwork.