Pesentation deck is now available at http://www.slideshare.net/Managewell/what-next-31791295

Modern management methods are still based on the then seminal work by Henri Fayol some 200 years back, followed by Frederick Taylor's work some 100 years back! Sadly, those models were predominantly based on industrial work, and don't really work that well in knowledge industry and today's sociological dynamics at workplace. Classical Agile methods codify several people practices that allow for a self-organizing team to evolve, but doesn't offer a lot of guidance on how to develop and groom leadership for agile organizations beyond a software team. Management 3.0 takes this issue further and develops it into a separate discipline altogether. On similar lines, Holacracy seeks to create social technology for purposeful organizations, though not specially targeting software organizations. So, the issue of leadership still continues to be unresolved and rather left to pave its way on its own. Unfortunately, when we want to achieve true end-to-end agility, it is not enough for software teams to be charging at top speeds but leadership not evenly matched to support them well in their endeavors. We clearly have a problem at hand...

In this talk, we will study how the role of leadership has evolved and what does it look like for agile organizations at present. Many agile methods take an extreme view that limit leadership to team-level collective ownership of leadership. However, that might not be enough because of various reasons. In any non-trivial organization, whether a software organizations or any modern business employing software for business advantage, the reality is that organization units beyond a plain-vanilla software teams do exist. So, how does one go about grooming their top talent for playing an effective part in this process?

Finally, we will also try to take a shot at some of evolving paradigms. For example, all these management thoughts are still based on the kind of outdated premise that an organization is based on 'boundaries' of operations. However, already we see that model being broken down, and the future teams look more like boundaryless entities bound with nothing but a unifying purpose that brings a bunch of volunteers together for a period of time. If our success increasing depends on such teams being able to effectively self-manage themselves, what role does leadership have to play in it, and are we getting ready for it? 

"Release Early, Release Often" is a proven mantra and many companies have taken this one step further by releasing products to real users with every commit a.k.a Continuous Deployment (CD).

Over the years, I've built many web/infrastructure products, where we've effectively practiced CD. However at Edventure Labs, when we started building iPad games, we realized there was no easy was to practice CD, esp. given the fact that Apple review takes a few days.

Our main question was: As mobile app developers, how should we architect/design our apps for CD?

We were a young startup, learning new behavior about our users (kids aged 5-8) everyday. We could not afford any delay in releasing latest, greatest features to our users. To solve this problem, I believe we've built an innovative solution to enable any mobile app developer to achieve CD.

If you are building real products, which have platform/3rd-party dependencies and you want to practice CD, this session is for you.

Over the life of an application as requirements change, application usage patterns alter, load and performance changes the need to change database and database architecture is inevitable. There are patterns of these changes such as

1. 1. Encapsulate Table with View
2. 2. Migrate method from database
3. 3. Replace method with views
4. 4. Introduce Read only table
5. 5. Split table
6. 6. Make column non-nullable
7. 7. Drop column
8. 8. Add foreign key constaint
9. 9. Merge columns
10. 10. Replace columns

In this talk we will discuss the above database refactoring patterns and different implementation techniques to enable blue, green deployments, allow for legacy applications to work with fast changing database and enable the teams to effectively refactor the database to fulfill the changing needs of the organization.

A Coding Dojo is a fun and social way to become a better programmer. Johannes is an experienced coding coach who will guide you through a few hours of programming that will transform your understand your craft and yourself as a programmer. In the workshop you get to try out pair programming, test-driven development and continuous refactoring for yourself and you get lots of recommendations on how to improve your coding and testing. You will need to bring your own computer with a development environment of your choice. Recommended for Java, Ruby, JavaScript and C# developers.

This is what previous participants say about the workshop:

• What did you learn? New tools, pair programming and fun exercises; Ide tricks, programming language basics, testing tools, using tests as a reasoning tool; you can comfortably pair with strangers.
• What surprised you? Small steps work better than planning; It's easy to get started when you pair program; Pair programming is nice
• What do you plan to do next? Using TDD every day; Listen to partner more carefully - he may already have solved the problem.

Can you maintain agile engineering practices with a distributed team?

Johannes is the Oslo based Chief Scientist for the Sri Lanka based company Exilesoft. In order to promote agile engineering practices, he uses remote pair programming to connect with teams halfway across the world.

In this talk, we will go through a practical approach for remote pair programming adopted for high-latency situations. We will demonstrate remote pair programming with a live example and we will discuss the advantages and usages of the approach. We will also cover the practical parts of remote pair programming, such as tools and setup.

After seeing this talk, the audience should be able to remotely pair with members of their distributed team. They will also get a lot of tips on how to use pair programming effectively in both local and remote settings.

Fixed price (and fixed scope) projects dominate the offshore industry. These projects have offshore/onsite teams. They often have large team size (over 100s of people in one team).

Agile thinking uses team velocity/ throughput and uses that to project an end date (Kanban system) or how much scope can be accomplished in a given time duration (number of sprints in SCRUM). They assume a stable team. However, this is not applicable for projects. They experience resource and productivity ramp-up issues. Often, resources keep changing as new projects come in. Projects do not have past velocity or throughput data. Extrapolating historical data from other similar projects, though possible, is inaccurate for multiple reasons.

This talk is based on our experience of working with such project teams. They want to adopt agile methods. We show how they can adopt the Kanban Method and yet do: A) Initial Capacity Planning B) Assess the impact of scope creep to the project end date.

The session assumes a basic understanding of the Kanban method.

Traditional models of management and corporate governance are failing to keep up with the needs of the modern economy. Change, both technological and cultural, is occurring at faster rates than ever before. In this climate, modern enterprises will live or die on their ability to adapt. This is where Agile, and Agile Business Management, come in. Agile is change; changing how you think, changing how you work and changing the way you interact. This is important whether you are a software developer or a CEO.

In this presentation, Evan will provide engaging and enlightening case studies of Agile beyond IT; from lean startups to large enterprises. These will be reinforced with practical approaches for the leadership of teams, divisions and businesses. 

Taking the successful concepts and methods from the Agile movement and Evan's new book, Agile Business Management is a framework for the day-to-day management of organisations regardless of industry, size or location. We will discuss processes, techniques, and case studies for the 4 key domains from Agile Business Management;

1. You, the Agile Manager - What makes a good manager and how do their responsibilities change?
2. Integrated Customer Engagement - Collaboration and communication techniques to build trust and deliver Customer needs efficiently, with minimal waste, and to everyone's satisfaction.
3. The Structure of an Agile Organisation - Efficient, transparent and collaborative techniques to manage empowered staff.
4. Work, the Agile Way - Managing all types of business functions, from software, HR, finance to legal, by using Just-In-Time planning and Incremental or Continuous Delivery processes.

Ultimately, the goal of this presentation is to make you think about your role as a leader. 

At times we have great product ideas but the biggest barrier to entry lies in answering few questions such as:

- How do I define and validate Problem hypothesis, Solution hypothesis and Underlying assumptions?

- How do I quickly setup a platform for people to register their interest?

- What will keep the potential customers engaged, excited until the first release (or beta) is out?

- How do I get feedback from the early adopters?

- And eventually when I have answers to some of these questions, how do I make a decision to persevere or pivot?

If you've faced a challenge while answering any of these questions while building/validating your product idea, this session is for you. We'll look at tools and techniques to validate the product hypothesis early-on without spending months or fortunes. We'll also look at a case study to highlight how some of these tools, techniques helped us validate our product idea.

Scrum, XP, Kanban and related methods have been proven to provide step changes in productivity and quality for software teams. However, these methods do not have the native constructs necessary to scale to the enterprise. What the industry desperately needs is a solution that moves from a set of simplistic, disparate, development-centric methods, to a scalable, unified approach that addresses the complex constructs and additional stakeholders in the organization—and enables realization of enterprise-class product or service initiatives via aligned and cooperative solution development.

Feedback is perhaps the most important aspect of the overall agile lifecycle. If the feedback is too wide and shallow, it won't give enough actionable feedback. If it is too narrow and deep, it might fail to register feedback outside its focus area. So, how does one go about designing feedbacks that enable agile learning. We call them agile feedbacks.

In this brief session, we will share an experience from designing agile feedbacks for agile trainings and workshops. The objective was to get most critical feedback in shortest amount of time to enable quick action planning. We created feedback that took a maximum of 5 minutes and enabled the most important learning in both, focussed as well as open-ended manner that allowed us to focus on the most critical items. We employed elements of Design Thinking and Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) to improve the process and quality of feedback themselves. We will also be touching up these concepts and how effective they were.

Here is a case study of how agile outsourcing can be practically applied even when the business domain is very complex and alien to offshore teams.
The example is a project in which Exilesoft provided for a leading Norwegian producer of Robotic warehousing solutions. The project involved transforming their legacy application, produced using multiple suppliers and methods, into a newly cast application solution. This project also had its own share of typical challenges.

• Lacked definitive and reliable documentation,
• Domain knowledge was limited to a few very busy individuals,
• Development and redeployment could not interrupt attention to current customers,
• Complexity was high and design was fragmented, and
• Focus heavily invested on current product and customer support

These limitations along with the lack of understanding of agile methods strongly suggested the use of a method adaptive in nature, and not heavily vested in large inflexible legacy elements.
We commenced the engagement with two pivotal elements; client awareness (agile orientation) and a roadmap of committed involvement. To lay credibility this had to be backed up with proven result delivery in the very early stages. It allowed for flexible adaption, and the creation of an atmosphere that fostered client interest.

During this session, we will take the audience through a small video clipping of such a warehouse. We will elaborate how the customer and offshore developers worked together using agile in a highly integrated team collaboration model to achieve success within a very short time frame.

The session will cover the following key areas:

How such projects can be initiated

- What type of team model and contract type we used

- How we did the agile transformation with the customer

- How the roles were assigned between offshore and onshore team members

- To improve remote collaboration the tools and techniques we used

- Techniues learned to get teams up to speed with the new domain

- As we go along, the process changes we identified and implemented to make things work better.

- Agile engineering practices and team dynamics that helps in such situations

On Agile projects we estimate user stories in order to allow team to

1. 1. Track velocity
2. 2. Decide scope for the Iteration
3. 3. Help Prioritize stories
4. 4. Help Release planning

But most of the time we faced issues with estimation. It takes lot of time in estimating user stories, managers tend to relate estimate to number of days it will take to complete the story, in some teams estimate is equal to deadline. Most of the teams which use story points to estimate the work face these issues. This results in lack of confidence on development team when stories are taking more time to complete.

Here I am going to talk about better alternative for both the suppliers of software products (financially and ethically) and their customers (internal and external). This alternative is being used in real companies delivering to real customers with great effect where team uses count of stories completed in an Iteration as measure of progress. Will talk about how this alternative can be used to track velocity, prioritize stories, planning Iteration and for release planning.

I will share some exmples from my past projects where team did not use story points/velocty but used count of stories completed in Iteration to measure progress and also as best indicator of future performance.

Many product companies struggle with a big challenge: how to identify a Minimal Viable Product that will let them quickly validate their product hypothesis?

Teams that share the product vision and agree on priorities for features are able to move faster and more effectively.

During this workshop, we’ll take a hypothetical product and coach you on how to effectively come up with an evolutionary roadmap for your product.

This 90 mins workshop teaches you how to collaborate on the vision of the product and create a Product Backlog, a User Story map and a pragmatic Release Plan.

This is a sample proposal to demonstrate how your proposal can look on this submission system.

Can you go faster with less weight?

We have all learned the benefit of reusing application servers like JBoss, ORMs like NHibernate or dependency injection frameworks like Spring that "solve all the plumbing code for you", but how real are these benefits really? Most developers struggle using techniques like test-driven development and refactoring effectively in their day to day project. Many developers spend a majority of their day finding out which magic incantations will make your framework solve your requirement.

Yes, frameworks probably will reduce the size of your code base. But will their reduce the time it takes to develop that code base? And perhaps even more pressingly: How certain are your estimates when you know that a the majority of your work is to find out exactly which few lines of code you need to change by debugging, reading documentation and searching for answers on stack overflow?

When I was first learning math, my dad told me that I didn't to use a calculator before I could do the math without it. In the same tradition, this talk builds on the premise that you shouldn't use a framework that you can't do without: I will create, live, a realistic web application without generators, without frameworks and without bullshit. Instead, I will use test-driven development to ensure steady progress to a solution with no magic.

Agile promotes empiricism and change, yet many practitioners continue to scope out and estimate delivery times and costs for software products and projects.

Defenders of the art of estimation claim that we need to estimate software projects in order to answer common business and customer questions such as:

• Should we go ahead with this project? (go/no-go)
• How much will it cost? (bottom line)
• When will it be done? (predictability)
• Should we do project B instead of A? (prioritisation)

This session challenges participants to flip these questions on their heads and seek alternatives to estimation rituals. It covers the many risks inherent with an estimation culture and demonstrates real, practical alternatives, both at the portfolio and the sprint level.

There is nothing ‘Agile’ in the current distributed Agile project management systems, which is focused towards passively capturing and providing information to teams, they are traditionally designed for people who have no choice but to use, which are ‘transaction oriented than ‘relationship oriented’ this is really ‘anti Agile’.

This discussion / talk is inspired by Geoffrey Moore concept of systems of engagement . This discussion / talk is intended to

a)      Provoke thought on how to bring ‘Agile’ values and principle in transitioning from current Agile project management system designed around discrete pieces of information ("records") to systems which are more decentralized, & relationship oriented which embraces social behavior of a team.

b)    Talk also brings out following uniqueness of Systems of engagement and how can we achieve it in distributed Agile context

Software development estimates are considered to be evil. If you have attended Agile India 2013 you know what I’m talking about! Both we use user stories and points or Gantt chat and hours, we have never discovered that magical formula for the right estimation.

But is it something you dare to tell your project board?

The bad news is that the software industry may not be able to forgone Estimate for a foreseeable future. The good news is that agile estimation techniques provides some kind of balance between need for estimates and inability to predict future.

Still, our Agile Estimates can be really challenging when the receiving partly has no clue about Agile Software Development, specially the customers, members of project control boards and senior management.

In this case study, I would like to draw the experience on how we used certain techniques and invented some tools to convince a non-Agile, traditional project board to use Agile Estimates.

In lot of agile teams, often times, all the team members will be doing the grooming and planning exercise as a team. Often times, defining the behaviors is either ignored, overlooked, skimped or done by individuals on their own without a common understanding as a team.

To solve this problem, I have used this hands-on time-boxed activity for all of my teams to define behaviors as they move along in the sprint. This will help all the team members to have a shared understanding on their users and their behaviors as it relates to their user story. This is an activity that any agile team member can take and implement the next day at work.

In the challenging context of offshore Agile Software Development, not everything in the book would work. In this experience report, I would like to discuss how the teams can tailor the current so called standard Agile methodologies/practices (within the guidelines of the Agile Manifesto), yet become successful in deliveries.

In the session, I would like to discuss some of the agile practices the audience is using and then discuss the challenges they face when it comes to Agile Offshore Development. Then I would like to draw my experience on offshore software development projects where we successfully used Agile concepts and demonstrate how to customize those standard methodologies/practices within the Agile Manifesto Framework.

Company culture, or its DNA, is one of the most important factors to determing if a company succeeds.  Many companies claim to have great company culture.  But what does this mean, how can you know if your company has a great culture, and how can you go about improving the culture?  This talk will explore what great companies have in common, and share experiences I have had in helping to develop engineering culture during my career.    

Will also explore how Agile principles help to foster creating the best possible culture for your organization.