In a way, pair programming is like riding a bicycle. You could read a book about it, you could watch videos of other people doing it, but you can only really learn it by doing it.

This workshop not only gives people a chance to experience pair programming, but to examine that experience in depth and see how their practice can be improved.

The “promiscuous pairing” technique is used, followed by an extended feedback session where participants analyse the strengths of pairing, and look at how they can improve their interactions with their colleagues.

We like to say that agile teams own their own process by choosing their way of working, their “WoW.” This of course is easier said than done because there are several aspects to WoW. First, our team needs to know how to choose the appropriate lifecycle for the situation that we face. Should we take a Scrum-based approach, a lean/Kanban-based approach, a continuous delivery approach, or an exploratory/lean startup approach? Second, what practices should the team adopt? How do they fit together? When should we apply them? Third, what artifacts should the team create? When should they be created? To what level of detail? Finally, how do we evolve our WoW as we experiment and learn?

There are several strategies that we could choose to follow when we tailor and evolve our WoW. One approach is to bootstrap our WoW, to figure it out on our own. This works, but it is a very slow and expensive strategy in practice. Another approach is to hire an agile coach, but sadly in practice the majority of coaches seem to be like professors who are only a chapter or two ahead of their students. Or we could take a more disciplined, streamlined approach and leverage the experiences of the thousands of teams who have already struggled through the very issues that our team currently faces. In this talk you’ll discover how to develop your WoW without starting from scratch and without having to rely on the limited experience and knowledge of “agile coaches.”

More asking, less telling. As an agile leader, adopt the approach of humble enquiry to build relationships, increase trust and collaboration, and deal with the challenges of organizational transformations.

"Humble enquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person." - Edgar H. Schein

Working in an agile way asks us to rethink how we relate to each other as we tackle complex problems and challenge the traditional structures of our organizations. Humble enquiry - the art of asking instead of telling - is a critical skill for agilists who seek to improve collaboration and address difficult problems head on. Inspired by Edgar H. Schein's book 'Humble Enquiry, this workshop will teach you the fundamentals of how to do more asking and less telling. Through mini-lectures and interactive exercises, we'll discuss the different types of questioning, consider the forces around and within us that inhibit our ability to ask instead of tell, and examine how this powerful technique can improve collaboration within agile teams as well as help to address some of the challenges of agile transformations.

Five people at one computer? How can that possibly be productive?

While this seems like a reasonable question, it's not easily answered - until we begin to understand the power of flow.

Mob Programming grew from the quest of one team to learn how to work well together. Once we started We almost immediately noticed that working this way provided better results in a variety of ways:

• We were getting more done, and they were the more important thing
• The quality of our work was increasing dramatically
• Our Knowledge, skills, and capabilities were improving rapidly
• And all while we were having a lot of fun as well!

While we noticed these benefits and more, and it was clear this was in a large part due to working well together throughout the day - we didn't have an understanding of why this was working so wonderfully for us.

A hint came early on when we recognized we were achieving a one-piece flow - but we didn't realize the importance of this until we started exploring the meaning and power of "flow".

In this presentation, we'll share the results of that exploration, and see if we can get a better understanding of Mob Programming and the power of flow.

After 20 years since the manifesto, the latest state of agile reports more than 80% of organizations as "still maturing" in their agile practice. As agile methods expand beyond small teams and software itself, we are still struggling to answer these questions:

• Why is it that some teams are more 'agile' than others even though they all claim to be practicing agile methods?
• What all dimensions need to change as teams, managers, and entire organizations attempt to become agile?
• How do these dimensions interact with each other?
• Overall, what does it take to become agile and how does that differ from doing agile?

This talk is based on my original theory of becoming agile developed from 10+ years of industrial research of agile practice in New Zealand and India, which received the distinguished paper award at the IEEE/ACM international conference on software engineering (ICSE), in 2017.

In this session, I will explain the key dimensions that need to transition during agile transformations, using industrial examples, and highlight what you can do to progress beyond simply doing agile, to harness the most from your agile transformations.

This keynote will add a unique research perspective to the conference program, sharing agile research in an industry-friendly format and delivery style.

Ever wondered why some people prefer to work alone? Or why some people cringe when pair programming is mentioned? It might be that that person, like me, is an introvert. But is is really that simple? Can we really put every person in a box labeled "introvert" or "extrovert" or are we all just ambiverts?

During this session I will talk about introverts, extroverts and everything in between.
Drawing from almost 15 years of personal experience being an introvert on agile teams I will talk about the differences of being an extrovert
or an introvert, how to foster an inclusive team environment, and the importance of psychological safety.
You will hopefully leave this session better fit to help EVERYONE on your team to reach their full potential!

Agile Management, many books, and blog post are written about it, but how do you really do it? What are the tools that you can
use?

In this workshop, we are gonna experience some of those tools by actually using them.

We will start the meeting with what is Agile Management all about. However, we will quickly switch to the games and tools.

The games, practices, and tools we discuss are:

• Delegation Board, delegation is not easy. Delegation boards enables management to clarify delegation and to foster empowerment for both management and workers.
• Moving Motivators, Moving Motivators can be used to identify the impact of motivation and how motivation it is affected by an organizational change.
• Personal Maps, A great exercise for a better understanding of people is to capture what you know about them in personal maps.
• Team Competence Matrix, the Team Competence Matrix is a tool to identify gaps between the current competencies of the team and the required competencies

Attendees will experience the real tools, and when they leave the workshop are ready to apply the tools the next day at work!

There are many suggestions dealing with Agile-friendly performance appraisals, which promise to rely on trust, honesty, respect, safety, and servant leadership. The Agile Manifesto does not address performance appraisal although it does generally mention regular and frequent feedback, which can also be applied to performance evaluation. Two related methods, Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy, offer interesting approaches to agile performance review. In this session we want to present these two different performance appraisal approaches, how they're are supported by the values of BOSSA nova (short for Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agile) and want to invite the participants of this workshop to discuss the synthesis of the two approaches.

This session looks at several real-world examples from actual companies including Accenture, Equinor, and Google.

The first principle of Beyond Budgeting asks to “engage and inspire people around bold and noble causes; not around short-term financial targets,” the eleventh principle advocates: “Evaluate performance holistically and with peer feedback for learning and development; not based on measurement only and not for rewards only.” Thus, the main strategy of Beyond Budgeting is to separate (financial) bonuses from performance evaluation and to use relative and not fixed targets as a foundation for the evaluation.

Sociocracy suggests holding 360 degree in-person meetings. The person being reviewed should request it when needed, not just on a rigid annual basis, and perhaps not just once in the year. In the 360 degree meeting, the organization itself can be critiqued in the review - “the way we organize is causing performance problems.” Similar to Beyond Budgeting there is a focus on the vision and mission of the specific department as well as the overall company as a source of inspiration and motivation. The output of the performance review meeting should be a development plan that the immediate group of supervision, peers, and subordinates consent to.

Based on BOSSA nova, we invite participants to dive into what Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy combined offer for performance appraisals. Participants will take away insights that they can use in their organizations.

Agile beyond IT and beyond just doing it, but rather being it requires experimenting continuously in order to learn continuously. Thus more important than failing fast is learning fast.

In this workshop we will learn what learning fast means for every individual and the organization as a whole and we will define experiments for you to use in your company for becoming agile truly. This will allow you to create an environment for continuous innovations.

In this workshop we will also make use of examples that make:

• the organizational structure (hierarchy?) more agile
• the organizational processes faster so that they enable innovation
• the organizational strategy better aligned with current needs so that your organization is able to drive the market instead of being driven by the market

How can an Agile Coach figure out when an Agile “Transformation” is going wrong? Are there signs that they might see, heed, and take action upon? Of course, there are!

Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, these warning signs can be hard to see. Let’s explore some of the more common, and frightening, warning signs that your Agile “Transformation” might be exhibiting. We will discuss transformation provider types, frameworks, keywords, and other anti-patterns that might be signs that THE END IS NIGH.

This session will review common themes and help familiarize you with the warning signs. Armed with this new knowledge, you will be able to plan as appropriate, to help navigate your organization through potential impending doom.

The communication tools of Liberating Structures will teach you how to facilitate the discussions your org needs. I am going to demonstrate how to use these techniques in the workshop. And all the attendees are going to be fully immersed and ready to wield their new knowledge the very next day at work.

Come learn how to help your team(s), org(s), and company(ies)!!!

For more information, watch my video at http://youtu.be/UNOjqMUv8h0

A version of this workshop that was presented at Agile Tour Sydney 2016 is at http://bit.ly/2f4Bie8

With the move to microservices architecture, a lot of teams end up managing dozens of code repositories (vs just a couple before), and some tasks that were done quickly manually are now becoming very time consuming : consistency of the repositories, and eventually of your platform, gets impacted, making it more and more difficult to manage.

Surely, there must be some tools existing to take care of boring tasks like finding where a given dependency is used, and upgrade it automatically (this is just an example)... Well actually, we didn't find anything, so we implemented them ourselves and made them available for everyone !

A resilient organizational can not only adapt and respond to incremental change but more importantly, can respond to sudden disruptions and also, be the source of disruption in order to prosper and flourish.

The traditional risk management approach focuses too much on defensive (stopping bad things happen) thinking versus a more progressive (making good things happen) thinking. Being defensive requires consistency across the organization and this is where methodologies like Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) come in. However, PDCA approach does not bake in the required progressive thinking and flexibility required for a fast company organization which operates in a volatile environment.

Professor David Denyer of Cranfield University has recently published a very interesting research report on Organizational Resilience. He has identified the following four quadrants across to help us think about organizational resilience:

• preventative control (defensive consistency)
• mindful action (defensive flexibility)
• performance optimization (progressive consistency)
• adaptive innovation (progressive flexibility)

In this talk, I'll share my personal experience of using this thinking to help an organization to scale their product to Millions of users. I've dive deep into how we structured our organization for Structural Agility and how we set-up a very lightweight governance model using OKRs to drive the necessary flexible and progressive thinking.

We live in a world of "getting to yes" or "a positive no"
Yet the world is no black & white.
I live in a world of options. I like to say yes to all the options and only decide about an option at the last responsible moment. In this talk we will teach you to do the same.

Real options is one of these agile tidbits that is applicable to all aspects of life.
- a real option has a value
- a real option expires
- a real option has a cost

In this talk we will give you examples that will teach you how to apply real options to your life and projects.

At the core to any agile approach is the ability to manage for uncertainty. This is only possible through a process of continuous learning which requires active feedback loops. Linear approaches are doomed to fail in a world of uncertainty. Feedback incorporates new knowledge which enables learning. The key is maintaining healthy feedback loops which will enable success. An iterative approach with broken feedback loops is similarly doomed.

Not only is this the foundation of business agility, empiricism is the foundation of the scientific method, Shewart-Deming process improvement cycles, and the Lean Startup model. Healthy agile approaches incorporate multivariate closed loop process control.

In the original book on Scrum, Ken Schwaber talks about his discovery of empiricism by trying to sell waterfall solutions to Chemical Engineers at DuPont Chemical. Todd’s background is as a Chemical and Petroleum engineer, so his journey was different. Empiricism was natural for him, so when people started talking about agility it fit nicely with the model he was already using. It was even better when the conversation became about “Business Agility.”

As a child, we loved to play. These years of unbound creativity, fun and flow may seem lost for some of us. Playing can be a powerful tool to unleash that creative source of fun and flow. Lego Serious Play is a well-known and tested way of tapping into that source. In this introductory workshop, we show you the power of playing, Lego and how this enhances happiness at work in your team.

About the workshop

This highly entertaining and interactive workshop focuses on playing with Lego Serious Play as a tool for a group, to discuss values, happiness, and effectiveness. In one and a half hour, we explain about the background, but we focus on you working with the bricks.

Collaborative organisational culture doesn't just happen, it needs conscious and deliberate design and careful nurturing. In this workshop participants will explore what a collaborative organisation culture is, why it matters and how to deliberately design culture.

Culture is "the way we do things here" rather than anything written or prescribed, so understanding how leadership attitudes and behaviors influence and create organisation culture is vitally important to successfully establishing an environment where people are able to bring their whole selves to work, are engaged and positively contribute to the organisation's success.

This session is presented as series of facilitated conversations drawing out the key aspects of organisation culture and showing how it is influenced by a wide variety of factors including structure, geography, promotion policies and practices, the conversations leaders have, what gets rewarded, ignored or punished, relationships and friendships and a wide variety of other factors.

In this interactive session Shane discuss his experience working in a distributed, virtual organization which is founded on an Agile Mindset. The challenges of maintaining agility when remote, the ways the ICAgile team have consciously designed their team and organization culture and provide actionable advice based on real experience on how to maintain collaboration, teamwork and live the agile values in a remote only organization.

ICAgile is a global, virtual organisation working with partners across over 100 countries spanning almost every timezone. There is no single corporate office and the ICAgile team is spread across seven locations in three countries. We have managed to build a strong collaborative culture and a truly safe working environment focused on outcomes rather than activities, holding each other to account and being really effective and productive while having a joyful workplace.

[email protected] is about a lot of things. For example purpose, culture, autonomy, personal grow, attention, fun, flow, results, being yourself and friendship. How are you doing when it comes to your happiness at work? This workshop is a 90-minutes fun experience by playing the ‘serious’ game ‘Choose [email protected]’.

About the game

Choose [email protected] is a game developed by Happy Brain Science to foster productivity, creativity and happiness through the application of cutting-edge brain science. We want to get the participants talking, laughing and solving real world workplace problems. The game Choose [email protected] is a fun way to learn more about the science of happiness and each other.

The agile manifesto was created in 2001. That is (when I write this) 17 years ago, (when the conference takes place 18 years ago.

At age 18, adult life begins. At 18 we think we know it all. Life is easy. Yet we quickly find out that easy, isn't always simple. Yves has gathered tips from many agile friends that are working in the trenches. Tips that will help your agile life.