As lead developer of Cucumber and author of The Cucumber Book, Aslak gets asked to consult with organisations who want to introduce Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). Time after time, he meets teams who are trapped doing half-arsed agile. They do the easy, obvious, visible agile practices, and none of the powerful, hard-to-master, hard-to-see ones.

When these teams ask for help learning BDD, we get a chance to remind them how important conversations and collaboration are in software development. We teach them to write tests before they write code, as a way to explore and discover the hidden details of a requirement just before they dive in and start building it. This talk will make you wince with recognition, laugh with despair, and finally inspire you with stories of teams that have finally, after years of flaccid scrumming, discovered the true collaborative heart of agile software development. You’ll see patterns you recognise from your own teams, and gain insights about how to fix them.

Scaling Agile is the hot trend these days. There are various options people are currently using to scale agile across their organization ranging from the trendy SAFe through the evolutionary Kanban all the way to classic LeSS. As an enterprise agile coach with straddling both the Kanban and SAFe worlds with experience helping various global enterprises to be more agile at scale I have a wide perspective of the agile scaling approaches landscape which I will share in this session. Together we will look at the various leading approaches to Scaling and understand how they compare, where each is appropriate, how to mix and match them. We will also spend some time discussing change management/implementation aspects of using the  the various approaches and how to move through the selection, kickoff, stabilization and recharge phases and ideally move to improve mode at some point. 

This workshop will help participants to understand how the Kanban method really works.

We will learn how to use the Kanban method to visualize your current process ("start where you are"). Will figure out how to limit work in progress (WiP); define and make process policies explicit; measure and manage flow.

Also we will figure out what does it mean to search for opportunities for continuous improvement. We will learn how to increase your team speed and at the same time decrease pressure at work.

All of these we will touch through extremely hands-on step-by-step simulation using LEGO bricks.

Adopting agile development practices and continuous delivery is becoming a norm in the software industry. Time to market and frequent releases have drastically reduced time available for regression testing. Inspection is considered wasteful. Faster feedback cycles during development is crucial. These have created lot of challenges for testing community, which traditionally relies on manual testing assisted by UI based test automation.

This is an experience report of transforming testing practices across organization, which decided to embrace Agile. Today our testers are not trying to find defects, instead they collaborate with product management and developers to prevent them in the first place. In fact, during the appraisal process, the defects found by them is ignored, instead we focus on how much time they are able to dedicate to collaboration and exploratory testing. The boundaries between developers and testers have faded away and today quality is whole team's responsibility.

We started with less than 20% of our testers with automation skills (mostly UI automation) and rest of them relying on manual testing. However, today, all our testers practice BDD. They have picked up Java & Groovy programming skills. They are able to contribute Workflow tests, Integration tests and Business Logic Acceptance Tests. Early collaboration and pairing is the norm. By the time developers are done with their tasks, all checks are already automated and hence we are able to deploy software every fortnight to production.

Are your testers finding it hard to make this transition to an Agile mindset? This session will give you some concrete ideas based on our transition at IDeaS.  

In order to achieve my goals, as a buyer of your product, I want awesome feature.

AT: make sure your users stories don't get in the way.

Users Stories, the tool teams use to break big ideas into small demonstrable deliverable, are easy to describe and challenging to write effectively. In this hands-on workshop you'll learn how to write great user stories that adhere to the INVEST principle. We'll learn various techniques to slice your stories using the vertical-slicing approach. We will discuss what elements should be included in the stories, what criteria you should keep in mind while slicing stories; why the size of your user story is important and how to make them smaller and efficient.

In fall 2014 there is no question that business agility is required. You will also be hard pressed to find anyone arguing against the core principles of lean/agility or against most of the practices. But most enterprise organizations have not yet reached the levels of agility you read about in books or hear about at conferences. Lean/Agile is now trying to cross the chasm into the mainstream enterprises where effective change management for today’s context is the name of the game. Through stories from the trenches of enterprise change management we will discuss different approaches to change and when each is appropriate. We will see how a combination of the Kanban evolutionary approach to change combined with "free market / pull based change management" helps accelerate the journey towards agility without risking its stickiness, and share some hard-learned lessons that resulted in patterns like “Manager’s first”, “Document/Methodology later”, “Market & wait for Pull”, “Case Study”, “Opt-in vs Mandate”, “Guidebooks OVER guided tours”. 

DevOps is a higher form of agility. It is a blueprint for a great culture and and process between the different groups involved in the delivery pipeline. The big question is how to achieve it. If you are founding a startup today, it can be quite easy to take that blueprint and use it to create your process, hire the right versatile flexible people, and start delivering without any technical/automation debt or friction. But most of us are not founding new startups. Most of us already have a running operation with people, culture, process that matured over the years and despite its flaws is currently the way we do things. Changing that is non-trivial. For things to change people need to understand WHY change, what we are changing, and we need an effective process for managing the change itself (HOW to change). So what ARE we changing to? DevOps is highly focused on looking at the whole value stream from idea to value and ensuring effective flow through this pipeline. Kanban is ONE way of HOW to change. It starts by visualizing all the work flowing in the pipeline, then managing the flow focusing on finishing things end to end rather than starting in order to stay busy. It continues to what we call the “Work in process Diet” – Straining the flow more and more in order to identify obstacles to tighter and tighter DevOps culture/operation and faster feedback cycles. You can expect to come out of this session with ideas how to take your current operation and DevOpsify it in a safe evolutionary way using the Kanban method.

About two years ago, we embarked on our journey towards Agility and Kanban was our vehicle.

But Kanban had people worried.

How can we not have detailed plans?! How can we limit WIP when we have so many things to work on?!

We have due dates to meet! And so on.

We would like to share one of the approaches that we adopted to help move the change along.

In addition to focusing on the Kanban implementation at the project levels, we adopted another route – to work through the individuals and the teams – a grounds up approach. We encouraged people and teams to use Kanban boards to manage their daily tasks.

You have difficulty in managing personal stuff? We’ll help you manage better!

You have issues in managing team level priority? Look what we did within our team- we have a Team Kanban and we are now much better organized!

One by one we saw people getting interested. The movement gathered steam - we worked directly with a handful of people and they in turn got their peers onboard. And we saw various flavors like Personal Kanban, Team Kanban cropping up all over the place – even in our Travel Office and Corporate Office. What this did was give people a safe, controlled environment to experiment and learn in.

As they got used to the ideas of limiting WIP, pulling work, visualizing work and “stop starting, start finishing”, it gave them the confidence to work this way at the project level too. And it made our lives as change agents just a wee-bit easier!

We welcome you to come hear our story about nurturing the change towards Agility by making it a grass roots movement.

A brief introduction to Amdocs - Amdocs is a leading provider of Customer Experience systems and services in the telecommunications domain, typically doing large scale transformation projects.

ScrumBan is a hybrid Lean/Agile approach combining Scrum and Kanban. It combines the team-focused rhythmic nature of the Scrum Framework with the Lean/Flow focus of Kanban to create a winning combination. This workshop provides attendees with sufficient knowledge about Scrum, Kanban and Scrumban to lead or guide a team in their adoption of ScrumBan – from system design through to evolutionary change. They will have an understanding of the principles and thinking behind Scrum and Kanban to help them drive meaningful focused continuous improvement using context-specific strategies/practices.

So, you started adopting Agile practices, maybe you took a course or read some books and articles and decided to jump into the water. Good for you! However, you quickly realize things don’t work the way they used to. It feels like chaos, it is typically painful and frightening and you have many questions and concerns. Over time, you might find a way of working that makes sense, but most likely, you will still stay stuck with some of the pains or avoid challenging some of the things that do not allow you to become truly Agile.

In this workshop we will leverage our vast experience with AgileSparks clients all over the world to provide participants with practical tips and tricks, patterns and anti-patterns and good practices that can accelerate your path to a stable, healthy and sustainable Agile way of working as well as boost your performance.

In fall 2014 there is no question that business agility is required. You will also be hard pressed to find anyone arguing against the core principles of lean/agility or against most of the practices. But most enterprise organizations have not yet reached the levels of agility you read about in books or hear about at conferences. Lean/Agile is now trying to cross the chasm into the mainstream enterprises where effective change management for today’s context is the name of the game. Through stories from the trenches of enterprise change management we will discuss different approaches to change and when each is appropriate. We will see how a combination of the Kanban evolutionary approach to change combined with "free market / pull based change management" helps accelerate the journey towards agility without risking its stickiness, and share some hard-learned lessons that resulted in patterns like “Manager’s first”, “Document/Methodology later”, “Market & wait for Pull”, “Case Study”, “Opt-in vs Mandate”, “Guidebooks OVER guided tours”.

In this interactive workshop we will explore the various techniques in depth through case studies, consider their pros and cons compared to classic change management approaches like the mandatory/perscriptive rollout and establish criteria for when to use which approach in the field.

Why organizations are adapting towards agile? Is it to get most out of their resources or is it about doing the right thing?

Traditional mind set of achieving high productivity and using resources efficiently does not change easily, even when organization moves to agile they remain more and more worried about the team velocity. When I meet agile practicing companies or I attend event on agile I find that most of

the focus is on delivering product backlog efficiently. We see lot of talks on how to make team more self-organizing so that they can do the things faster.  Even after moving to scrum or agile we keep ignoring the warning

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be
done at all.”  —Peter F. Drucker

When most of the organization starts with agile they takes it as an engineering process, and most of the team focuses too much on velocity, while to get maximum out of agile we need to look at Enterprise Agility, we need to look at an organization’s entire value stream—from idea to implementation, from concept to consumption.

My talk would be focusing on need of organization agility and will introduce one of the monitoring tool “Life Cycle Profitability “which can help organizations in getting answers of questions like :

• Should we delay the release by one month to fix the defects ?
• Should we reduce the cycle time by adding one more team?
• Should we delay the release to add functionality?
• Should we delay the project by one month to get more innovative ?

Life Cycle Profitability is based on principle “Take an economic view” introduced in book:The Principles of Product Development Flow , Donald G. Reinertsen . In my talk I will be showing how we can convert proxy variables like cycle time , velocity , technical debts  into Life Cycle Profit.

I presented part of this concept in one of the conference and got good response, but I will create fresh presentation for this talk, since this time I will put more focus on expanding the model to calculate the Life Cycle Profit.

It’s difficult to teach the principles of Lean and Agile simply by lecturing. People need to experience the principles by themselves to get a feeling for how it all works. By playing a game, you can gain experience without messing up your daily work or getting engrossed in the technical details. This is why games and simulations are used to help people learn and evolve in a better direction.

With the Kanban Pizza Game 2015, participants can discover what Kanban feels like. While other Kanban games are usually focusing only on the mechanics of the board and on the flow in an existing Kanban system, the Kanban Pizza Game (initially developed by Agile 42) teaches you how to get from an existing process to a Kanban system.

The Kanban Pizza Game by agile42 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Enterprises big and small are aspiring for agility these days and kick-starting Agile transformations. Agile is mainstream. The movement that started with a manifesto and principles has grown bigger. From product development and startups, agile is now being adopted in mainstream (read legacy) companies for all kinds of knowledge work beyond the scope of pure product development – in services, support, marketing, HR and so on.

With the widespread application, many ways to achieve agility have also sprung up. We have Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, SAFe and probably few more variations. Each have their benefits and challenges depending on the organizational context that they are being used into.

For organizations that are just starting, this plethora of information is quite confusing and intimidating sometimes too. Transformations also involve a lot of investment - both financially and otherwise. Its a big change. Deciding on an approach at the outset is not trivial. 

The talk would suggest an approach to Agile transformations that is based on the fundamental premise of Agile - the empirical philosophy of transparency, inspection and adaptation and provide practical tips and tricks based on my experience with large scale transformations.