On Agile teams, collaboration is the way of life. Our leaders want their team members to work closely with each other, have shared goals and even think as one entity. Why? Because we believe that collaboration leads to happier, more productive teams that can build innovative products/services.

It's strange that companies use the word collaboration very tightly with innovation. Collaboration is based on consensus building, which rarely leads to visionary or revolutionary products/services. Innovative/disruptive concepts require people to independently test out divergent ideas without getting caught up in collaborative boardroom meetings.

In this presentation, Naresh Jain explores the scary, unspoken side of collaboration and explains in what context, collaboration can be extremely important; and when it can get in the way or be a total waste of time.

The role of Leadership in organisation's Agile transformation is a critical piece. Yet many organisations struggle to find the right balance between top-down vs. grass-root transformation. I would like to share an experience where we were able to achieve fairly good grass-root movement, but had serious challenges building the agile mindset at the leadership level. While the leadership was trying to help with the best of their intentions, certain actions, behaviours and patterns did affect the spirit of agility. If you are keen to hear about typical leadership anti-patterns during agile transformation and some pointers on how to avoid them, this session is for you.

About the company

Philips is a healthcare multinational company that focuses on building complete health care products and solutions for emerging markets, in addition to developing solutions and products for global markets, across the three sectors Healthcare, Lighting and Lifestyle. Using the expertise of its nearly 2000 engineers in Bangalore and aligning the marketing and sales teams the campus is responsible for creating and rolling out a complete set of products that include a whole host of solutions for global customers. It also contributes to global solutions in critical health care component development for connected consumer devices and renewable energy.

Executive Summary

Beginning of 2014, an external survey brought out the issues wrt time to market and code quality. Taking the survey results positively, the Leadership embarked on an Agile/SAFe journey with pilot projects. The results were amazing and with the currently learning from the pilots, the organization is running 25+ deployments within. The journey has started and Agile release trains are delivering periodic value to our customers at defined frequencies.

Background Objective/Challenge

Product quality, consistent & predictive delivery and quicker time to market are the key challenges the organization is trying to address today. Continuous Innovation is constrained due to the above issues and hence there is need to find a new way of product development which can meet the dynamic business needs, foster people engagement and deliver meaningful products to the world.

Target

ScaledAgile has been used as a framework for product development across the organization global. The whole organization is undergoing a transformation from waterfall way of working to the SAFe agile way of working and roadmap is till 2019.

Agile Initiative

The Framework used for the transformation can be summarized into 4 major steps

1. Develop products in the Agile way with focus on Basic Agile practices (Scrum)
2. Establish Product Ownership with focus on Enabling Scaling aspects (SAFe practices)
3. Establish a release pipeline with continuous integration (supported by Automation)
4. Adopt a DevOps Culture with focus on Continuous delivery (to production environment)

This includes a comprehensive diagnosis of the various business processes, agile practices and behavior, engineering practices, delivery maturity and recommendations for the transition. A coaching and tooling plan is also an outcome of the diagnostics.

 Measurable Impact

• Predictable Releases to customers (hitting the market with features every three months with features and business criticial bugs with less than 2 weeks with all the regulatory compliance)
• Capitalization
• Feature planned vs Feature delivered per program increment > 80%lose
• Defect reduction co t 45%
• Team velocity – Baseline vs actual.
• Very high sense of ownership and high levels of engagement

Transformation team Profile

Global team

• Agile Capability program manager -1 FTE
• Agile Deployment Program Management – 1 FTE
• Communication expert – 1 FTE (Today we are 0/1)
• Coordination - 1 FTE
• Enterprise Agile Coaches – 16 (Today we are 9 /16)

We have been discussing a lot regarding Agile transformations and how such transformations can help organizations. The key is to base such a transformation on the concepts of agility such as self-organization, intrinsic motivation, collaboration, etc. But still the puzzle of how those can be used in practice is less discussed. This is where the emerging concept of "Learning Organization" from Peter Senge can help a lot.

The five disciplines of a Learning Organization lies in the heart of an agile organization. Therefore, exploring the learning organization within agile organization aids us find the "truly" agile organization.

This is an experience report of a journey where a mid-size offshore software development organization moving towards to become a learning organization.  

I want to be controversial for a moment and propose an end to IT projects, project management & project managers. I propose that the entire project process is flawed from the start for one simple reason. If you need to run a project, you've already failed.

By definition, an IT project is a temporary structure to govern and deliver a complex change (such as a new product or platform) into an organisation. However, to be truly competitive, an organisation needs to be able to deliver a continuous stream of change. Managed properly, this negates the need for a project and the associated cost overheads.

This is fundamentally what #noprojects is. The approach, structure, tactics and techniques available to successfully deliver continuous change. At its core, #noprojects is predicated on the alignment of activities to outcomes, measured by value, constrained by guiding principles and supported by continuous delivery technologies.

This presentation will introduce you to #noprojects. You will learn how to define an outcome and create an Outcome Profile. You will also learn how to manage change within the context of an outcome through the Activity Canvas.

Whether a team is brand-new or seasoned veterans at working together, explicitly defining and/or refining a team working agreement will help the team to align on how they will work together effectively to meet their common goal. In this fast-paced hands-on session, participants will go through the process of building a team working agreement using LEGO Serious Play (LSP).

Creating a team working agreement helps team members set the stage for effective communication and high performance by making assumptions about ‘what really matters to us’ and ‘how we will work together?’ explicit and negotiable.  Great working agreements address some difficult topics - what values do we share? how do we want to deal with conflict when it comes up? how will we handle problems within the team? - which are often challenging to discuss openly and honestly, especially when a team is first assembled.  

This session will show you how to use LEGO Serious Play to encourage a frank and fearless discussion in order to kickstart these discussions so that a team can quickly create a powerful set of simple guiding principles for working together.  Participants will learn about the importance of team working agreements in creating team cohesion and common understanding of shared values and operational guidelines, and experience hands-on how to use the LEGO Serious Play cycle of build-share-reflect to have a participatory discussion to identify shared values, explore reactions to conflict, and build a set of simple guiding principles.

The #NoEstmates twitter hashtag was intended by Woody Zuill "..for the topic of exploring alternatives to estimates [of time, effort, cost] for making decisions in software development. That is, ways to make decisions with ‘No Estimates’."  Based on twitter traffic it has been successful at generating activity.  It's a bit debatable as to whether it has really spawned much exploration.  In this talk Todd will actually do some exploration using real data from over 50 projects at companies ranging from startups to large enterprises.  In addition to the analysis of the data, Todd was able to build a simulation model of the software development process to both replicate the data to and explore the conditions under which estimates add value and when they do not.  Based on the findings from the data and the simulations, along with an analysis of the types of business decisions that organizations need to make, Todd will provide some pragmatic advice for estimators and #NoEstimators alike.

With business agility being the new watchword in senior management circles, many enterprises are looking for ways to adopt this into their technology practices. However, it is imperative for such an initiative to go beyond the mere adoption of agile in a few projects.

To run an effective enterprise there are different  systems and applications in every value streams.  There is no one size fit for all. There could be a broad pattern/ classification  like 'Money making applications' 'Applications which bring efficiencies to their operation' and 'Applications which are critical from a regulation and compliance perspective'.

My session is going to focus on experience and patterns that helped in  achieving Agility in the above categories of applications   with respect to  key 'Movers & Shakers' in the system.  

Agile is a radical evolution in how we think about work flow – AND how we engage people’s intelligence and commitment in the process. So now we’re doing a faster, better, more engaging job of ….. What? And Why? The “What” and “Why” questions are the stuff of strategy – purpose, vision, customer value, competitive advantage and sustainable financial performance.

 OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are the missing link between agile practices and alignment with the larger mission and purpose of your enterprise. Developed in Silicon Valley and adopted by industry leaders including Intel, Google and LinkedIn, OKRs are the framework for individuals and teams to set their own goals and align agile action with overall business strategy.

 In this workshop, we will explore

• How business strategy is evolving from a waterfall model to an agile approach
• Extending the idea of “cadence” to include ceremonies for enterprise-wide strategic conversations that create “line of sight” for individuals and teams
• The use of OKRs as goalposts for strategic alignment and agile action

This is a concept I devised a couple of years ago, and it seems there is a new #NoEstimates audience that would like to know more about it.

A Slicing Heuristic is essentially:

An explicit policy that describes how to "slice" work Just-In-Time to help us create consistency, a shared language for work and better predictability.

The Slicing Heuristic seeks to replace deterministic estimation rituals by incorporating empirical measurement of actual cycle times for the various types of work in your software delivery lifecycle.

It is based on the hypothesis that empiricism leads to smaller cycle time duration and variation (which in business value terms means quicker time to market and better predictability) because it requires work to be sliced into clear, simple, unambiguous goals. Crucially, the heuristic also describes success criteria to ensure it is achieving the level of predictability we require.

Its application is most effective when used for all levels of work, but can certainly be used for individual work types. For example, a User Story heuristic can be an extremely effective way of creating smaller, simpler work increments, allowing teams to provide empirical forecasts without the need for estimating how long individual stories will take. However, if you are able to incorporate this concept from the portfolio level down, the idea is that you define each work type (e.g. Program, Project, Feature, User Story, etc.) along with a Slicing Heuristic, which forms part of that work type’s Definition of Ready.

This talk will equip teams and organisations who are established on their Agile journey with a robust, clear and repeatable method for improving the quality and time-to-market of their software development efforts.

Leading in an Agile environment is all about mindset and understanding what motivates people. This interactive workshop will unpack the superhero archetypes of Agile leaders with their related Agile leadership anti-patterns.

Many leaders come into an Agile environment and feel threatened by a perceived loss of control. Successful Agile leaders empower the team and acknowledge that they can choose their own work and solve their own issues, pull themselves out of the detail and focus on supporting the team, know that if the team succeeds they do too, and are emotionally mature and are not constrained by ego.

The best paradigm to frame the concept of leadership in Agile is that leadership is encouraged at all levels. As such everyone working in an Agile environment is a leader. In smaller organizations this is probably easy to encourage. In larger organizations, where the “Title” or “Position” predominates defines who is a “leader” and who is not, anti-patterns tend to emerge which do not support an Agile culture, even if it is the organisation’s stated vision to become Agile.

In this instance the physical manifestations of Agile are put in place such as physical boards, Scrum ceremonies and an attempt at co-location are put in place. The danger here is that the Agile adoption will be a shallow one and will remain superficial. When the awesome magic of implementing Agile right is not achieved then people blame Agile as being the problem. It is not Agile that makes teams, projects and adoptions fail; it is people that cherry-pick those aspects of Agile that they like and are easy to implement that put the adoption on the path to failure.

All too often leaders dismiss Agile as something the development teams do, rather than as something which affects them too, and that their role is important for its successful adoption. The role of leaders cannot be underestimated to turn a shallow adoption of Agile and make it a deep and lasting change for the organisation’s benefit. In this case, adoption in a small team or program will start the journey toward the tipping point that will make it a lasting organizational change.

This may cause confusion, manifested as cognitive dissonance, in the leader. They may be asking themselves these questions:

- How am I supposed to behave in a changing environment?

- What behaviors am I supposed show to support the values and principles of Agile?

- How do I support support the teams now?

This workshop is based on my learnings and experiences as line manager of a development team in a large organisation, and Agile coach in large organisations in how leaders can in many instances unknowingly "sabotage" Agile initiatives, as well as experiential insights on what the enabling leadership behaviours and characteristics are.

As part of this talk I will share the following:

• What are the superhero archetypes of Agile leaders.
• What are the related Agile leadership anti-patterns?
• Discover the antidote to these anti-patterns (or the good patterns to replace the anti-patterns).

Code quality is being a topic in discussion for ages and we developers have been in the receiving end every time. The criticism developers receive on this is always subjective and representing someone's view rather than any objective decision. This is a case study of how those subjective comments can be transformed into Objective measures with some practical indicators. The example is a Project in which Exilesoft provided for a leading Norwegian Vendor of Learning Management Solutions. The project involved transforming their legacy application into a newly cast application Solution. During this session I will take the audience through the journey of the Case study on what are the challenges we faced during the implementation in terms of code quality, what are the measures we used to prove the code quality and the approach we took for improving the quality of the code base

The use of software development methods has changed many times up history. Since the early 2000 the Agile methods have been dominating the arena and have been investigated in several aspects regarding failures, success and critical success factors.
When it comes to Enterprise Software development, outsourcing plays a major part. It has become almost a norm in the world during last fifteen years. Research show that, during last few years outsourcing software development organizations have made a tremendous effort to gain advantage of agile methods and practices.

Most the software outsourcing organizations today carryout various projects in cross-cultural, cross regional and cross-company context. The practitioners argue that use of one agile process or template across projects does not work in such organizations. Still, due to scaling, training and other business and operational requirements of outsourcing companies, we see that there is a trend of bootstrapping agile projects in such organizations.

We will in this paper share our findings from investigating cross-cultural, cross-regional and cross-company projects in terms of critical success factors for bootstrapping agile projects in outsourcing companies. We will discuss the success and failures of bootstrapping agile projects in this context. Through quantitative data gathered from projects conducted, combined with qualitative data from interviews with developers and key staff from project management, we shed light on an less emphasized, but highly crucial, part of agile project management. 

“If a task takes 1 hour; it takes 2 hours in pair programming.”
“This fix is needed urgently; it is better done alone to save time.”
“It is good only for complicated tasks; there is no need to pair program on simple tasks.”

These are some of the statements you may be hearing around you from experienced developers to even managers. Sadly, there is lack of understanding of dynamics that make pair programming a key agile engineering practice. This, in turn, resulted in lack of its acceptance in teams adopting agile methodologies. Our mission is to dissect the myths around pair programming which brings continuous learning, productivity, quality, and the joy of collaboration to countless developers every day.

It’s a dream come true if every team has Super Heroes. But is that reality?

Gone are the days when there was a demand for super heroes. Agile has helped to overcome this issue with the environment it creates. The power that a strong agile team creates, goes beyond the power of super heroes.

The leadership skills that agile instills in the members, make them converge as a super team that has more power than a super hero.

This presentation shares the techniques and learnings, on how to create super teams in an agile environment, when the members are not super heroes.   

Providing a quality delivery quickly is the way to keep the customer happy.  This is where a stream lined DevOps framework comes into play. Having a comprehensive, tried and tested DevOps framework with tools that could help different technologies and engineers who can handle them well could be the next winning point when a client choosing a vendor for outsource development.

Everyone talks about DevOps today. But do you have a clear idea on how to set-up such DevOps framework for your projects?

This session will take you through simple guidelines to give you an idea of how to setup your DevOps framework in short steps based on a case study.