Genuine agility is enormously effective in helping us achieve our dreams. The trouble is, Agile has grown into a complex tangle of roles and rituals, frameworks and tools, processes and certifications. We need a return to simplicity. Modern Agile is here to help.

Designed for people in many domains (not just IT), Modern Agile is defined by four guiding principles:

• Make People Awesome,
• Make Safety a Prerequisite,
• Experiment & Learn Rapidly and
• Deliver Value Continuously.

Understanding and deeply practicing these four principles will help you get better results faster.

In this talk I’ll share how these four principles power world-famous companies and how they can help you work with greater speed, simplicity, safety and success.

Code that is difficult to understand, hard to modify and challenging to extend is hazardous to developers, users and organizations. Refactoring, or improving the design of existing code, is one of our greatest defenses against such code. Yet many programmers lack formal training in refactoring. Furthermore, management tends to lack knowledge about the value of refactoring. This one-day workshop is designed to address these needs. You’ll learn the art of refactoring safely, when, why and how to refactor hazardous code, strategies and tactics for refactoring, as well as refactoring to patterns. You’ll also learn how refactoring impacts business concerns and vice-versa. Come to this class prepared to code with a pair and a mob as we refactor example code and help you learn the art of refactoring.

Mob Programming is a development practice where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer. It is a whole-team approach to doing all the work the team does including designing, coding, testing, and working with the customers, users and other stakeholders. This is an evolutionary step beyond pair programming and accentuates face-to-face communication, team alignment, collaboration, and self-organizing team concepts of the Agile approach to software development.

Mob Programming can be a highly effective approach to software development. There are numerous teams doing Mob Programming all over the world, including distributed teams, and there has been a great deal of positive reports of success. Please join me as I share how the concept got started, the benefits, techniques we use, and some of the problems we've faced.

Many people agree that one important outcome of Behavior Driven Development is a set of regression tests to demonstrate the desired behavior and ensure that it is maintained over time. Then they often struggle to do so in a manner that remains maintainable as the system and the test code grows larger. Sometimes they even abandon their tests and start over, repeatedly.

In this session we'll examine the evolutionary history of an application and its test suite. We'll stop at various stages in its life to consider the choices we might make to address growing complexity.

We'll work using Cucumber-JVM and Java in order to be accessible to a large audience. You can apply these concepts in other languages and test frameworks. Rather than depending on having enough laptops set up, we'll use mob programming to enable everyone's participation.

If you'd prefer exploring on your own machine, bring your laptop loaded and ready to go.  Clone the code repository from https://github.com/gdinwiddie/EquineHoroscope to get the code and its history.  Unzip http://idiacomputing.com/pub/EquineHoroscopeJars.zip in the same directory for the dependencies.  (Download sample at https://leanpub.com/EvolutionaryAnatomy/ for even more detailed instructions.) I'll be using Eclipse, and the instructions are tuned for that, but you can use any Java IDE.

Bonus: Participants will receive a coupon for a free e-book on the material.

Pyramids? Quadrants? Cupcakes?! There are a wide array of models that describe approaches to test automation strategy and their possible positive (or negative) outcomes.

In this talk, we’ll survey the landscape of testing models: models that range from technical to product to cultural mindsets, including best practices and anti-patterns. I’ll add detail and nuance to each of these models in the form of professional experience, real world example, and case study. 

With a new lens, focusing on testing strategy as an act of curation, I'll share a new approach to evolving a testing strategy appropriate for your product development team's specific context.

In the early 2000s, eXtreme Programming (XP) introduced agility to software engineers. Contemporary cultural and technical innovations - container technology, distributed version control systems, the proliferation of free and open source software, and the DevOps movement - have significantly expanded our possibilities.

In this one day, hands-on workshop, we’ll build a modern continuous deployment pipeline based on Git, Jenkins, and Docker. Starting with continuous integration, we’ll practice Git workflows enabling parallel development with pull requests and explicit dependency management through the use of forked repositories. We’ll then extend the ecosystem to support ad-hoc testing environments, multi-versioned deployments, and build promotion. We’ll survey tools and techniques for production deployments touching on Docker Swarm, Google Kubernetes, ChatOps, and emerging tools used in serverless architectures such as Amazon Lambda.

While technologies change, values and principles continue to guide our choices. We’ll end with reflection and a guided discussion on how core XP values - simplicity, feedback, communication, courage - can serve as a compass for environmental and workflow decisions that impact our customers and teammates.

This workshop readies developers for success with Test-Driven Development. Together we’ll take small steps toward working a full, double loop TDD workflow. Over the course of two days attendees gain comfort with the TDD workflow, integrating it with other important practices such as pair programming, source control, emergent design, domain-driven design and lightweight modeling.

It’s two solid days of intense work — over 60% hands-on, iterative exercises. The rest of the time is a mix of fast, dense lightning talks, case study reviews, chalk-talks and facilitated group discussions.

As an independent agile coach, I encounter a lot of developers frustrated by their home team culture. The same questions come up time and again: "how do I get my team to adopt XYZ?" This question assumes a solution instead of framing a problem and involving a group in conceiving and developing an answer. With a little conscious work, we can hone our skills as influencers and stop operating from unconscious, unexamined motivations. When we reframe effecting change in this way, our efficacy improves dramatically.

In this talk, I'll share a mindset for improving effecting change through ethical influence and group involvement. I'll end by sharing a toolbox of simple change tools you can apply to your teams the very next day.

This workshop will introduces lean/agile leaders, coaches, and facilitators to Visual Thinking Strategies, or VTS.

VTS is a cross-disciplinary technique applicable to anyone working in a collaborative setting where observation is key. VTS develops critical thinking skills by viewing and discussing works of art in a group. It is backed by over 30 years of field research showing its effectiveness and accessibility. By allowing individuals to talk about art - without needing a background in the field - VTS advances skills you can use to create more relevant products and stronger teams: Observing, Brainstorming, Speculating, Reasoning with Evidence, Cultivating a Point of View, and Revision & Elaboration.

We'll begin with an introduction to the concepts, background, and learning outcomes of VTS. Teaching through demonstration, I'll facilitate a VTS session with the entire group so attendees can experience the process first-hand. During this interactive exercise, we’ll discuss selected works of art and then have the opportunity to review initial impressions of the method. There are no right answers or group consensus being sought - we’re creating an environment and process for looking, thinking, reasoning and revision - skills that are mission-critical to anyone working in a software design or development role.

Participants will learn the basics of image selection and facilitating VTS sessions within their own organizations. We'll break down the various components of the technique and dig into why & how the process works. In addition to the above skills, we'll cover how VTS can help you and your team with the following: Comfort with Ambiguity, Openness to the Unfamiliar, Civil Debate, and Willingness to Participate in Group Thinking.

I'll share some case studies with the group before we break into our first set of practice sessions where workshop participants can try their hand at leading VTS discussions. We'll then take a more detailed look the process of image selection for VTS sessions, and more advanced facilitation tools such as paraphrasing. We'll then break into smaller groups for more hands-on practice of the entire process: from choosing images to facilitating sessions.

Finally, we'll review the entire day, getting feedback and having a group discussion of how this tool can be applied  in your specific environments. We'll save some time at the end for Q&A and I'll leave everyone with a toolkit of online resources to take back to their team. Attendees will leave with the ability to take VTS back home and introduce a whole new way to build better teams and products.