Core Agile practices establish visibility, remove impediments, and promote collaboration at the team level. Standup meetings, physical task boards, and focus on clearing impediments are well known practices to keep a team focused on the work, and establish a sense of flow towards frequent, tangible, and sustainable results.

What about an entire program, when a large number of teams are involved? How can a large organization exploit the same core practices when there is highly interdependent work, and when there may be hundreds of people involved? How can Scrum be used to improve delivery times, increase quality, and promote sustainable development at a program level? How the can practices provide executive leadership the visibility they need into program progress?

This workshop will introduce valuable, proven Scrum practices for large programs. Among the topics that will be discussed are:

• What program management challenges are ripe for improvement through Agile practices?

• The Program Impediment Board: Visible impediments, dependencies and milestones at a program level

• The Program Stand-up: Lightweight activities to promote visibility, clear impediments and collaboration across the program

• What does it look like when it’s working?: Improve delivery time, increase quality, and establish collaboration across the organization.

User Experience design is a product design discipline which sits throughout a product's lifecycle, from inception to development to maintenance and all the way to retirement. Waterfall enabled the discipline to have ample time and produce extensive design, in a "big design upfront" approach which rarely involved technical capabilities, and resulted in difficulties in build. The adoption of agile by product development team has offered UX a unique opportunity to work in a much more joined-up manner, and expend the design into the development, enabling the entire team to react to change.

As a UX designer, I have over the last 7 years developped a solid appreciation of working embedded in an agile development team, and would like to share my experiences through 3 specific projects, sharing my learnings to help development team on-board the UX practitioner, their tools, practices and skills.

This session will be a case study over 3 projects, highlighting the learnings and steps of the integration of UX into the development cycle. I'm taking Alistair Cockburn's sequence of SHU-HA-RI to detail the progress of my practice and will pay great attention to sharing sufficient context that my experiences and outcomes can be translated to your own projects and team setups.

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.

Agile transformation in any organization will go through myriad of challenges that involves people, existing organization culture, technology/domain etc. Instead of seeing these challenges as obstacles, if you view them as opportunities to grow and improve, transformation will be more impactful and long-lasting. If neglected, the very same obstacles would severely damage the motivation and trust of employees.

In this experience report we would like to walk you through the agile transformation journey in a Mainframe product development enterprise by unraveling the challenges and the remediation steps that has helped us in keeping this journey alive. Specifically we would like to touch upon 

1. Self-organizing teams
• Resistance to change
• Culture shift
2. HR
• Lack of role clarity and
• Effective R&R in agile space
3. Agile Engineering Practices adopted in Mainframe product development
• Unit test automation
• Continuous Integration

Along the presentation we’ll highlight few anti-patterns and the effects of ignoring them.

Since the late nineties, the Agile books in the non-fiction aisle have steadily increased in number. It's common to see a book or three about Agile on a colleague's desk. It's also common to see such a book look practically new, the book spin showing no sign of having been opened. Non-fiction books are great at providing bullet points of things to do and reasons why. But non-fiction books are poor at:

• inspiring,
• creating emotional attachement (so the reader finishes the book), 
• creating a full sensory environment for the reader,
• describing a holostic environment, or
• 'intriguing' a reader who is un-interested in the topic. 

(This bullet list above is a good example of how non-fiction can excite thoughts who already know the story behind the bullets, but doesn't inspire much if the reader hasn't any context or background.)

Fiction is well positioned to do the above because its number one job is to give pleasure and entertainment.  It can't be successful if it can't do this. The oral tradition of fiction has been part of human culture for millions of years, since a Cro-Magnon passed on a story to another, and upon re-telling some details were forgotten and the storyteller had to make them up.  Fiction is in fact is the most successful format for culture change as this is the format of the world's religious works and is responsible for guiding or changing the behaviors of billions of people.  The CIA and the Pentagon use fiction to develop scenarios which are used to create simulations to test preparedness.

What force could be stronger than fiction for giving an individual the courage to initiate an organizational change in the face of uncertain co-workers and often antagonistic corporate environment?  What tester, developer, PM, director could not use the courage of knowing a "David verses the Goliath," "Legend of the IpMan," or "V for Vendetta" to not only understand the bullet points, but to have the stedfast to sustain in the face of resistance because they believe in the change as if they've lived that life, due to reading stories which placed them in one or many virtual versions of that world.

Often we hear that estimating a project is a must. "We can't make decisions without them" we hear often. In this session I'll present examples of how we can predict a release date of a project without any estimates, only relying on easily available data.
I'll show how we can follow progress on a project at all times without having to rely on guesswork, and we will review how large, very large and small projects have already benefited from this in the past. At the end of the session you will be ready to start your own #NoEstimates journey.

How can teams that have to deal with large, complex legacy systems get through planning and get to work? The title character of the classic American horror film, "The Exorcist" was a master at this..

Pecha Kucha Talk Summary:

• Introduction: Creating understanding through conversation can be very difficult for teams dealing with complex, legacy systems.
  
  
• Introducing Regan McNeil: Poor Regan McNeil was starting go insane, but a team of doctors and specialists in close, face-to-face collaboration, couldn't solve her problem.
  
  
• The Exorcist: The Exorcist knew how to have just enough conversation to get to work, so his team could deliver the value everyone had been working and praying for.
  
  
• Summary: "In life, understanding is the booby prize". Sometimes the quest for understanding can be an impediment to delivering value. Having faith in self-organization, sometimes its best just to get to work.

Transforming an organization's delivery model from quarterly or monthly releases to continuous delivery requires changes in requirements gathering, development, QA/ testing, and operations. Lean principles are a powerful guiding light into discovering what problems need to be addressed and how to get started. In this talk, I will describe how Lean principles can be applied to achieve a transformation to continuous delivery, and then provide a cycle model. At the end of the talk, is a workshop where the attendees will apply the Lean Principles to the cycle model and then analyze their own project for how to improve toward continuous delivery.

Everyone will learn more than one new way to examine their project.

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.

How to effectively use Behavioral Driven Development in your Scrum process, from idea inception, backlog grooming, to Sprinting, and Sprint Demonstration.

Panel Discussion : Agile Adoption Trends and challenges  in the near future

 I wish to moderate an interesting panel discussion with a panel of 4-5 experts . Would like to discuss trends and challenges for agile adoption in the near future.

Agile has been around for more than a decade now and surely is relevant but how to we adapt (if at all) for Agile adoption to some of the global trends like more distributed teams and millennials joining the  workforce.

Specifically would want to touch the topic - is successful agile adoption possible for distributed teams? since more and more organizations are going global and therefore find teams working out of different cities, different countries, different timezones, different cultures. How this posess a challenge and ideas to make agile work in this context.

 Trend on the people front- We see millennials joining the workforce . In context of Agile implementation - what the benefits they bring on the table as compared to Gen X.

Looking out for appropariate panelists . Discussed with Naresh Jain to help out with the panelists as well.

Planning to make an interesting and informative panel discussion with group of 4 or max5 panelists from the industry -sharing with the audience their experience and ideas