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.

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.

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

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.

When you transitioned to Agile you solicited the best advice, updated your development tools, hired coaches, installed furniture, and embraced painful cultural changes. Now, a few years later, you wonder whether Agile is working. Are you realizing the productivity you are paying for, or did Agile flop? With so many people developing software every day you expect more to get done. Your advisors tell you not to worry about productivity, this is how it’s supposed to be. Questioning themselves, many executives are awakening to these gut feelings of disillusionment in their post-transition organizations. How much productivity should they expect from Agile teams? How do you know if Agile is working? Can Agile organizations be slow and unwieldy despite their Agileness? This session offers a strategic business management perspective about the honest reality of Agile in a post-transition organization. Attendees will learn to recognize the signals of poor Agile productivity and how to fix development so it stays fixed.

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.

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!

This unique journey will transport you deep inside the world of the General Services Administration (GSA) Integrated Award Environment (IAE).  You will see how user-centered Agile is transforming the way software applications are engineered, how users' voices have been integrated with large-scale Agile development, and what issues we encountered along the way.

When Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, predicted, "Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game," perhaps he was envisioning a user community such as ours.  The IAE family of software applications have more than a million users representing federal, state, local, and tribal government organizations; congressional staff; large and small businesses; universities, schools, and hospitals; non-profit organizations; foreign entities; private citizens and others.  Our greatest challenge is the diversity of our user base, resembling a massive multiplayer game in many ways. 

This case study looks inside a major reengineering effort to migrate 10 legacy applications into an integrated environment while at the same time transitioning from Waterfall to Agile development.  It tells the story of how IAE users have shaped our transformation thus far.  

Like in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, being close in Agile has great value.  We need not abandon our brethren in the trenches just because some of the most recognizable practices are out of play.  The great principles of Agile help in even the most difficult environments.  Shipping great software while under some traditional constraints is a true test of the movement – and we have a track record of doing just that.  We have employed Stealth Agile, Green Box Agile, Cafeteria Agile, Agile Pathfinding, and even Agile Treason in order to deliver in less than ideal circumstances.

A series of actual scenarios will reveal the adaptations to Agile practices that kept us close to principles.  A small set of practices are present in so many of our projects that we consider them to be part of our Agile core.  Sometimes we rename them, sometimes we feather them, sometimes we disguise them, but they are always present and are pivotal to success.  Chief among these are the various practices that enable and encourage rapid feedback at multiple levels including Customer, Product, System, and Development.

In the simplest terms, software development decisions for commercial organizations can be reduced to a calculation of whether the cost of developing the software will be outweighed by the revenue generated or costs saved by the software.

However, what does this mean for government and other non-commercial organizations for whom the impact of software isn’t primarily measured in terms of revenue?  How should organizations prioritize work in the face of conflicting goals and metrics?  Help more people?  Minimize delays?  Prosecute more crimes? Lower costs? In this session participants will experience a dice-based simulation that has been created to explore these questions by examining the impact of these decisions on the performance of organizations in changing environments.

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.

A build pipeline is such an important aspect of a software project.  It saves a ton of manual, error-prone depoyment work, as well as results in higher quality software that can be released more frequently.    

However, I have been on multiple projects where one of the steps in the continuous integration process was failing (red), often for multiple days or even perpetually.  So much of the benefit a build pipeline provides is lost when this is allowed to happen.  Bugs are not caught by automated tests; additional tests break without being fixed because no one notices; the culture of keeping a green pipeline diminishes and faith in everything from the pipeline itself to automated tests reduces.  Developers learn bad habits.   

Building the pipeline and getting all steps working (keeping it green!) is no small feat in the first place, and keeping it that way can also be a large undertaking. One way I have tried to combat this is to institute some specific process for the Scrum team, pertaining to monitoring and maintaining the build pipeline.  There is also an aspect of convincing the team and management that it is worth spending the time, and dropping everything to maintain a fully functional pipeline.  

Join me for a common sense, tactile approach to keep a build pipeline green that has worked on small and larger projects with multiple teams.  

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a fire that will help you, your team and your organization to become more productive and improve product quality. We will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.

Knowing this will help anyone to understand the consequences of not prioritizing and increase their desire to. This will lead to producing faster, higher quality products that should lead to delighted customers.

“Agile doesn’t have a brain.” This quote from Bill Scott, ‎VP, Business Engineering and Product Development at PayPal, is provocative for sure, but it highlights the perception that in most organizations Agile is primarily applied as a downstream engineering approach. As such, it isn’t inherently concerned with optimizing product design and user experience, the biggest drivers of customer satisfaction. The feedback cycles that form the basis of Scrum provide verification and validation of stakeholder needs only as they are expressed in the backlog’s user stories. Even if a sufficiently empowered and accessible Product Owner is available, agile methods offer little guidance on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog’s content and relative priorities in the first place. As a result, the danger persists that agile teams end up very efficiently building products that implement an incomplete and subjective perception of the wants and needs of both the organization and its customers.

In this session, we will explore how Lean thinking expands the “inspect and adapt” loops of agile development and helps systematically determine which features and design choices really provide the greatest organizational value. After a brief introduction to Lean concepts, we will discuss how Lean approaches product development as a series of hypotheses about customers’ behavior and value perception and builds on Agile’s rapid iterative delivery of working software to test these assumptions. Finally, we will examine ways to derive testable assumptions from organizational goals, such as the Lean UX Hypothesis Statement template and Gojko Adzic’s Impact Mapping.

We've all heard how we need to collaborate better, but what does this really mean?  What results can I expect to see with better collaboration?  

This workshop will demonstrate how productivity increases with greater collaboration and how to create better a more collaborative environment.  In the session you will not only have an opportunity to experience this relationship with a relatively simple learning game, but we'll look behind the curtain at the science and how some various behavioral models explain why this relationship exists.  We'll then explore some tactics you can use to help teams collaborate better and close with an exploration of what either helps or hinders collaboration and how you can use this information as well as the game with your teams.

If you have an interest in improving productivity of your team or the teams you serve, then this is the session for you.

Can a federal agency’s PMO support Agile teams that are focused on delivering working software frequently? What about all the needed documentation, reviews, and sign-offs from a myriad of groups including systems engineering, privacy, PRA and cyber security? In this session we’ll look at a federal agency’s PMO processes and the concept of minimum viable bureaucracy. We’ll explore the roles and relationship between the PMO, PM, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and team. We’ll see how projects get initiated and the decision criteria needed to start or defer a project. We’ll walk through a lightweight gate review process and the activities and deliverables of each phase. We’ll also see how gate reviews can co-exists with a continuous delivery pipeline. We’ll share lessons learned and take a look at the challenges ahead. Come to this session to see how a lean PMO is operating in a Federal Agency.

Many Agile adoptions stall because they fail to align with what the business needs. It's not about just delivering work more quickly, but also ensuring that it is what the business needs; for the Government, this is mission needs alignment. Getting a fully automated DevOps pipeline does nothing if you don't have any idea what type of impact you plan to make on the business.  

However, once you have that delivery aligned with your business or mission, you can begin to perform experiments safely and more importantly measure the impact they make.  This session will discuss the types of measurements one can make and explore a few techniques you can use at both the macro and micro level to understand impact. We'll cite real-world examples set to help you understand how to apply each of the following techniques:

• Business Canvas
• Value Streams
• Personas and Customer Experience Journeys
• Impact Maps
• Experiments & Hypotheses via Validation Boards

This tour of techniques will give you ways to better craft your agility to your business needs.

Large codebases have structural problems that do not occur in smaller codebases. These problems are emergent in nature and typically not noticed until some indirect symptoms rear their ugly heads. (“What do you mean it will take six weeks to change that!?”) Even then, the root causes are often not identified and, regardless, are costly to correct. Left untreated, these structural problems eventually make changes to code so costly that the software becomes brittle and unchangeable within the cost and time constraints of the business. This is the software equivalent of hardened arteries, and, like the medical condition, it is a silent killer.

The traditional metrics of architecture complexity are insensitive to, or worse, favor structural changes that increase codebase complexity. Our recent research has identified and characterized this phenomenon and we offer a new metric, the Layer Respect Metric, which sheds light on this problem and helps us balance our uses of the traditional measures of architectural complexity to ensure our codebases are as agile as our teams.

So you want to transform your organization? How should you get started? Am I throwing everything away?

Understanding how to co-create your organization's aspirational characteristics creates a great start to your Agile journey.  This allows the people to internalize what agile means to them in their context; doing this will allow greater alignment and commitment during the transformation. We'll explore a technique that allows you to do this invented by some coaching colleagues (Michael Sahota and Olaf Lewitz) and that I've utilized in Federal and commercial clients.  

After performing this short exercise, we'll discuss next steps of selecting strategies using Appreciative Inquiry to help find and build upon your organization's strengths. Along the way, we'll learn a bit about what Appreciative Inquiry is and how it complements other change management approaches one can take. Don't throw out everything, build on your strengths!