Description:

I see that a lot of organizations use metrics in inappropriate ways to measure teams. At the heart of these metrics, nine times out of ten, are velocity and story points. These metrics lead to a lot of mistrust, fear, and bad technical practices. This talk will focus on shifting the focus to diagnostic metrics.

 Before shifting focus to diagnostic metrics, we need to understand what inappropriate metrics are. When questioning teams about why their velocity was lower from one sprint to another, teams are more likely to inflate their estimates to avoid questions in the future. This is one of my scenarios. We will explore this case and my other top-ten based on the 165 teams I have interacted with. Focusing on one metric does not provide a balanced view of the team.

For balance, I promote five metrics. The combination of metrics balances each other. These five metrics are lead time, quality, happiness, agile maturity, and business value. Focusing on these five metric areas can be used as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. During the session, we will use my Excel-based tool and visual model to simulate this balance.

When you push shorter lead times (how fast) on a team with a lower agile maturity, the first thing to change is quality, followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, if a team focuses on TDD, the first thing to change is quality, followed by agile maturity, reduction in lead time, and increased delivery of value.  

Teaching teams to harness data in a positive way will help them to flourish.

For too many organizations, Agile is primarily seen as merely an IT delivery system. Within this archaic and limited mindset, New Product Development is so manageable with Scrum. We amble along with 30-day Sprints, a single product owner, a neat product backlog, and a collocated Scrum team. But, today’s business environment is a tsunami of global hyper competition, with companies entering and being forced off the S&P 500 every 15 years. The classic Innovator's Dilemma is now even more pressing, and quite candidly, archaic Agile is of limited use.

 To be competitive now, organizations need to look at the gestalt ... the entire value-stream of activities that are required to bring solutions to market. In this session, we will show concrete examples of how major organizations have innovated along the full path from product ideation to requirements to budgeting to delivery and to operations. Each part of a typical value-stream will be explored to show how agility has impacted these traditionally silo'ed functions and how forward-thinking organizations have reached the next level of performance through tight integration and agile thinking.

Learn the essential steps to conquer the entire value-stream from the “fuzzy front end” of innovation, product discovery, lean experimentation, and modern requirements discovery, to pipeline management, to agile budgeting and incremental funding, to high-performance product-centric teams, and enabling agile engineering techniques.

The result is the architecture of an entire organizational system that is designed to rapidly and effectively discover what customers want and delivery with utmost efficiency.

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

1. people,
2. process, and
3. follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's next to impossible to succeed. Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you. For everyone else, join us to explore the current trends of employee engagement, how they overlap with agile retrospectives, and the true opportunity each team member has to improve the quality, speed, and outcome of their work. 

Speed.

It's been a driver in our industry before it was even an industry. The more Agile becomes more mainstream, the more we think it's part of the package. Books are out promising that certain frameworks can deliver twice as much in half the time. And yet, teams still struggle delivering what's expected of them.

Once I started asking people of all levels of leadership what they thought speed would give them, it allowed me to develop some experiments around those expectations.

Please join me for a case study where we discuss the need for speed, the origins of that desire, and the ways it manifests itself into deliverables. My desire is for the audience to take away some powerful learning into their places of work. Only by understanding the expectations around speed can we reset them into an environment built around trust and support for motivated individuals.

In spite of all of the nuanced discussions, debates and frequent diatribes, scaling agile is about one thing: getting large groups of teams to deliver value in an organized fashion while maintaining empathy, rapport, trust, safety, and ownership across the enterprise. During this session, we will explore the case study of the Value Steam Container, looking at organization design, challenges and success. Focusing in on topics ranging from

• Organization designs used by WL Gore, The Dunbar number

• Delivery Triads - Product, Delivery, Technical Excellence

• Venture capital style funding

• Focusing on business value

The second half of the session is a workshop focused on creating a Value Stream Container and resource based on team funding 

If you haven't heard of The 12 Factor App, you probably will soon. Think of it as "the agile manifesto for DevOps." This talk helps you quickly become familiar with the basics of the 12 Factors that make applications cloud ready or "cloud native."

This talk allows you to trade 10 minutes of your time in order to get a bit smarter. Learn *just* enough to be dangerous, and use that knowledge to impress developers by spewing buzzwords like persistence, disposability, statelessness, and port binding. At least be able to push back intelligently when someone is telling you the app can't be put on the cloud. Learn what is meant by "livestock, not pets" and where to find out more if the talk sparks your imagination.

All companies tell lies. All executives endorse lies. And all employees live lies.

We must pretend we are amazing, and brag to our peers about how much farther ahead we are, than they are. We change the narrative to suit our lies. We have reports to prove our lies.

This happens at EVERY company.

When you look at Facebook feeds – all you see is pictures of vacations. Smiling kids. BBQs. Clean pools. You never see the miserable couple, the dirty laundry, or the crying kids.

Enter Facebook Agile.

We are conditioned to hide the bad $#!t that is going on around us. There’s no reason anyone has to know what’s really going on (even though most people know what’s going on).

Our leaders are afraid of what other peers might think. Or worse, what other “senior management” might perceive or judge. So they choose not to be leaders, despite the obvious need for leadership.

This session will provide an experience report on what leaders can do to embrace transparency, trust, and courage. Building a culture of continuous improvement starts with embracing the things that aren't working, instead of hiding them to avoid overhead.

Test automation is hard. Adding test automation to a complex existing application is harder. Worry not, a pragmatic, incremental path to roll out automated testing does indeed exist, despite what some developers will tell you. 

The talk lays out the process to get started small, with working automated tests on day 1, and work from there. We describe and demonstrate the tools, including cucumber, selenium, rspec, and more. We discuss how we start simply, then gradually integrate tests into an automated process, i.e. your CI pipeline.

The talk is mostly practical. A few overview slides provide context of the moving parts. Most of the time is spent on giving you the path to begin testing tomorrow!

Every developer has used a boolean flag to solve a problem with their code.

This is wrong and it should stop

Unlike most government agencies, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) uses open source to develop their public website.  They have evolved a set of best practices to help manage the mostly remote contributors over the 5 years of developing the site.

This talk will focus on what works and what other agencies can do to emulate their success. It will also talk about current pain points and ideas for mitigating these

Retrospectives are one of the events in Scrum which give opportunities to a Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvement. However, very often, this event tends to become boring and get away from the answers to three basic questions, What Went Good, What Went Bad and What To Improve. For that matter, at times team may not have food for thought and hence they disengage from these questions. So, what needs to be done or in fact, what can be done in such scenarios? Well, Retrospectives are all about figuring out what needs to be done. But, how do you know what to do, if you do not know what you did?. For starters, measuring a team’s progress on Sprint by Sprint basis might be a solution. Having such data might not solve many problems, but, it could certainly expose them. There are three basic metrics, which have been found to be beneficial for teams’ progress and also thought triggers in Retrospectives. As Mike Cohn once said, measure only what can be measured. Metrics can be misleading, hence it is up to us to measure what makes sense and use it to improve the team.