More and more organizations and teams are adopting Agile, however most stay focused on just the development part. They maintain a Big Upfront Requirements/Design (BRUF) phase and still have a long test and deployment phase. This approach results in more of a mini-waterfall approach rather than an Agile approach where we actually place valuable products in our customers’ hands. The old risks and pain points are still there: are we building the right thing? Is it valuable and usable? Does it work? So the true benefits of an Agile approach in terms of quality valuable products and higher ROI is never achieved due to our long cycles and slow feedback loops. Come to this session to see how Lean Discovery and Agile Delivery combined with a DevOps mindset, can make actual delivery of customer value sustainable. We will look at how Lean Discovery replaces BRUF and ensures the team is constantly building the right thing. We will also see how applying Agile Engineering practices ensure that the team is building the thing right and how a DevOps mindset ensures that the product the team builds actually gets delivered to the customer early and often.

As a business analyst on an agile team, do you spend your time gathering decisions from product owners and passing them on to development teams? Are you tired of simply being a “proxy without power?” As a product manager, do you feel like you are just collecting stakeholder opinions and filtering them for the team? What can you do to boost your impact to your team?

Be more than a proxy.

By definition, a proxy means doing a thing “by the authority to represent someone else.” That job can be important, especially when stakeholders and customers have limited available. But teams need more.

In this workshop, Diane Zajac-Woodie demonstrates how you can be more than a proxy. Through some experiential exercises, you will learn what impact collaboration has on results and why requirements are just as important as ever. Diane also teaches you how to document requirements so people will actually read them. Using acceptance tests, you will practice writing requirements that describe the exact behaviors that you expect in a format that everyone understands.

Be inspired to embrace your role in an agile environment and leave with new techniques that ensure that you will be more than a proxy when you head back to work.

FeatureBan is a simple and quick simulation that introduces several of the key concepts of Kanban, including visualization, feedback loops and limiting work in process and that lets participants learn by doing.  The simulation is also useful because it lets organizations who are curious about Kanban quickly learn about it before investing further.  Mike Burrows invented the simulation, but in this session we will present a modified version that we have used with both technical and non-technical audiences.

Situation A: Your team is great. You’ve met all your sprint goals and your Product Owner is pleased with the results to date. Yeah!

Situation B: Your team sucked. Zero story points completed last sprint. Team members are complaining and blaming each other for the failures.

These two situations demand two very different retrospectives. The right retrospective can make a good team great and turn a bad situation into a learning opportunity. A bad retrospective can set a team back and create a non-safe working environment.

In this session, attendees will explorer retrospectives techniques and examine the pros and cons of the techniques. The workshop will then explore scenarios and examine how to effectively run retrospectives across a variety of scenarios.

Coming out of this sessions, attendees will have an understanding of applying the right retrospectives based on the state and needs of the team and projects.

In the agile community, we celebrate failure as well as success. On our journey to plan @ scale, the Agile Program Management team at Opower had a lot of early failures, but then we started succeeding. How? By not only listening to our stakeholders, but co-creating solutions with them. In this talk, I focus on how process co-creation is helping Opower scale. I’ll describe a specific case study, then we’ll try co-creation together. By the end of this talk, you’ll have specific tips and techniques on how to successfully co-create solutions with your teams that you can take back and use with them tomorrow.

You probably started your Agile journey with Scrum, which helped. But regression testing still takes forever. New feature tests aren't what they could be and are hard to complete within the Sprint.

If you have active product owners, the POs helped to improve your product, but there is still a disconnect, between the user story and the tests.  And how do you test "as a, I want, so that"?

Now you hear you need Agile technical practices to keep improving and you find you need to automate. What are you going to do with your testers?  They really, really know your business, but they don't code.

If you are a manager, a tester or a product owner, come hear Camille as she shares her experience successfully teaching manual testers Automated Test Driven Development and showing product owners how to write great Acceptance Criteria that are easy to automate.

In this session you will learn:

• How to get your product owners, testers and developers to understand each other
• How to make your business scenarios unambiguous and testable
• How to avoid brittle tests that need frequent rewriting
• Which tools and languages are better for testers to learn and why
• Strategies and techniques for testers to learn test automation
• Where to find inexpensive and free resources to get started

Are you overwhelmed and/or confused as to which metrics can reveal insights to make fact-based decisions to properly manage your agile software development portfolio.  Join us for a the story of a journey, where we will use the metaphor of “going on a road trip” to explain and demonstrate simple yet effective metrics for agile portfolio management.  As we go on our road trip, we’ll highlight the importance of defining and then using quantitative “roll-up” metrics to enable leadership to make informed strategic decisions without slowing delivery team activities while at the same time providing a foundation for team self-management and autonomy.  We’ll use the road-trip metaphor to depict the challenges that teams and organizations encounter attempting to manage their portfolio without effective portfolio metrics defined.  Think about what driving on a road trip would be like if your car didn’t have a check-engine light or a gas gauge, sound risky???  The good news is: it doesn’t have to be that way, and believe it or not, if you have measurements at the team level creating actionable portfolio-metrics is easier than you think.  As we recommend simple portfolio-level metrics to guide our road trip, we’ll define them, share how to interpret them, discuss the insights they provide, and offer guidance on how to gather or aggregate them from team execution data.  We will also touch on why and how the use of an easy to understand metaphor has aided significantly in creating and sustaining engagement amongst stakeholders for portfolio inception and governance activities.  Participants will leave having learned how to successfully navigate their next enterprise-wide initiative using quantitative data to promote alignment, maximize return on investment, foster engagement and reduce risk - everyone attending will receive a printed guide (worksheet) summarizing recommended metrics for agile portfolio management discussed.

Gerry Weinberg once said of consulting “There is always a problem, and it’s always a people problem.” The world of DevOps is emerging rapidly, and just like the early days of Agile, is still working on refining exactly what DevOps means.  So often, the focus is either on the technical aspects of the various tool, or on the people problem of “bringing Ops into the room”.  But what is the problem that DevOps addresses, and is that problem more of a technical problem, or a people problem?  We will explore this, and look at the possible intersection between the two “problems” and how a DevOps approach can help overcome them.

The many trivial testing and refactoring examples available on the web are difficult for developers to apply to real-world code bases. As a result, many "new to agile" developers don't attempt to apply tests or refactorings to legacy code, reserving these techniques for the ever elusive greenfield project.
To help developers with this dilemma, this session will walk through a real legacy Java code base, and go through the steps required to bring the code under test & begin to perform useful refactorings. All of this will be done under the guidance of the principles of Simple Design.

Do you want to be able to “trust the wisdom of the group” but find it difficult? Do you ever feel like you’re having the same conversation over and over again with no real progress? Do you ever feel like you are stuck in a disagreement and not sure how to move forward?

If any of these issues are standing in the way of your work with groups and teams ‐ ‘how’ you are having (or not having) the conversation is likely contributing to your challenges. Research consistently demonstrates that team effectiveness is highly dependent upon the quality of the communication between team members. Yet it’s easy to get into the flow of daily work and be really focused on the ‘what’ in our conversations without much attention to the quality of ‘how’ we’re communicating.

As an agile coach one of the most important ways you can serve your team is to help them unlock the wisdom that exists within the team itself and have the conversations they need to have. We’ll explore a framework for learning to ‘read the room’ using four elements for all face-to-face communication. We’ll do some live practice to apply the framework to a conversation and then identify some typical patterns of “stuck” communications that can lead to “breakdowns” in teams.

This will be an interactive session with people actively engaged in both large group and small group discussions.

When design is based on random choices, the end product is an assembly of random elements that have little or nothing in common. But when design forces all elements to work together then it makes a single, powerful, and meaningful impression to the user. While agile can get the job done faster, it doesn’t help guide design choices for a software product.    

This session presents a design driven approach called Strong Center Design that incorporates design into an agile workflow.

If you have an interest in improving design of your software products, then this is the session for you.

The government is seeing the merit of using agile practices to develop software.  However, the fallacy that you can’t estimate projects using agile in the government still exist.  The result is that many projects that want to use Agile begin in a very waterfall way developing the initial plan and are forced to stick to that plan throughout the project despite using sprints throughout the ‘development phase’.  Many falsely believe they are stuck in the tradition of estimating everything in the beginning.  During this presentation, through lecture and based upon real experiences, we will demonstrate techniques for developing a project plan and estimating techniques to satisfy the typical government compliance requirements using Agile practices and principles.  In essence, we will together learn how to build the bridge from the traditional government practices to a brave new world where we can plan, estimate and still inject agility.

DevOps as a buzzword is gaining traction, but what does it really mean? Managers, non-techies, and developers-new-to-devops will get a guided demo of development automation. See all the cool tools in action - continuous integration, automated testing, cloud deployment, etc. More importantly, we'll walk through what they do, and why that adds value to a project. 

This talk will...

• Break down the buzzwords and define some key technical practices in plain english.
• Uncover the pain that leads teams to seek greater automation.
• Demonstrate a continuous integration pipeline working in practice via live demo.
• Diminish the knowledge gap between technical practitioners and managers/analysts/coaches.
• Level-up the vocabulary of non-technical attendees.
• Introduce practices to developers who don't yet work in an automated environment.
• Spark "ah-ha" moments to convert skeptics into DevOps believers!

By the way, all of the tools in the demo are some combination of free and/or open source. DevOps doesn't have to cost a lot.

Most scrum teams create effort estimates, often using story points. As a product owner, you also want to have an estimate of the business value of each user story. Business value estimates help you create a more rational backlog and maximize the value the team delivers.

This workshop explores the art and science of estimating the business value of user stories. Participants will gain an understanding of the essence of business value,
and why it is more complex than just revenue or profit. Then we will then learn a surprisingly simple technique to estimate and quantify business value.

Why does the Agile community encourage cross-functional teams?  So many large organizations have naturally organized into system-specific teams.  This is a very common and logical approach.  At scale, though, it creates serious impediments to organizational agility and getting things done.  We'll discuss the roots of that phenomenon, one of our key interests in cross-functional teams, patterns for enabling such a team structure, some failure modes, and how to prevent them.  Please join us!

Most agile teams focus on following a delivery process and overlook finding ways to improve the process. The essence of agile is focused around the idea of continuous improvement via inspect and adapt. In this session, we will be providing insights around evolving your measurements using data in order to embrace a different mindset. A mindset that encourages more facts and less judgment. A mindset that encourages organizations to move from “performance” to decisions, behaviors, outcomes, external evaluation to “Let’s figure this out together”, proof to evidence, answers to questions, precision to speed and from objective to subjective (but with lots of facts!)

While many companies are adopting Agile development practices, it is fascinating how most of the management team in these companies are still starting trying to budget and plan in one year increments. Budget and planning starts in the fall and managers are literally guessing what they will need and what they are going to be working on 12 months down the road. It is inevitable that within the first few months of the plan there is going to a major event that is going make the plan completely irrelevant. It could be a new project that came out of nowhere, an issue with a major application that needs all hands to address, or the simple fact that as the team has completed work throughout the year, what was important at the beginning of the year is no longer important. 

In this talk we will share the experiences of the IT management team of a small financial services firm that took a conference room and Scrum and found a way to improve throughput, increase visibility, and improve coordination across IT, all while delivering projects, responding to auditors and growing the company's product portfolio. 

Have you been adopting Agile methods across several teams but wondering if there is a consistent way to measure their health and progress? What does it even mean to be a "healthy" Agile team? Take a deeper dive with our dynamic Agile Expert, Sally Elatta, as she walks you through the top 5 metrics you need to be looking at to measure the health and performance of your Agile teams and how you can create a continuous growth process where teams, programs and portfolios are getting better quarter after quarter.

Learning Objectives: 

• How do you really measure TeamHealth and what metrics should you look for?
• Why it's important to look at both Qualitative and Quantitative measures and not just focus on 'hard metrics'. 
• How to create a continuous quarterly growth process that is predictable and measurable.
• Go through a TeamHealth retrospective simulation!

This will be an engaging and hands on session where attendees get to color a blank TeamHealth radar using crayons and have a tangible output they can share with their teams. 

More and more organizations have already reached some level of Agility. Some of them reached what we call Stable/Recharge which means they stabilized some structure/process that works for them. They had a couple of months or even years to “digest”/”recharge” and are now waking up hungry for the next level. Others got stuck along the way with some process that frustrates them but they didn’t really know what to do with it and just continued to suffer. These ones typically have a grudge towards agile when we meet them. People in these two groups have some common ground - they have a lot to benefit if they get exposed to some practical tips and tricks from the trenches that can help connect “by the book” agile to the day to day reality in the typical organization.

In this "Agile Boost Camp" session we will give participants ideas/tips for working through typical boost/reset challenges. These tips/ideas are inspired by working in the trenches with real world organizations.

Each time this session/workshop runs is different because the workshop runs in an agile form where the participants act as the “Product Owners” choosing and customizing the agenda. The trainer brings in the experience and best practices as well as orchestrates the workshop experience.

Ready for your Boost?

We've all see Project Charters.  Project Charters usually state the vision, mission, roadmaps, and is hand top down to the teams.  However, how many of us have Team Charters in place.  Team Charters are one of the most powerful tools a team has when it comes to being able to work effectively together.

This workshop explores the dynamics of creating a team charter, the definition of ready, and the definition of done and how all this works together to create software that is ready for review, to potentially shippable, to released into production.