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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

Each year VersionOne conducts a survey to assess the state of the agile community, highlight emerging trends, and provide insights on practices and techniques that are proving successful.  I observed an interesting and alarming trend within the 2015 survey data.  Many in the agile community have commented that they frequently are asked to evaluate the effectiveness of agile methods, which leads to questions about how do we measure success.  According to VersionOne’s 2015 survey data, the most frequently tracked agile metric to determine success on a daily basis is “Velocity” - Jim Benson (author of “Personal Kanban”) has referred to velocity as “an imaginary number divided by an arbitrary amount of work” - it is a very imprecise metric due to the high variability and non-scientific origin of the data used to compute it.  I hypothesize that many of the questions surrounding the effectiveness of agile methods result from focusing too much on the use of imprecise metrics, such as velocity, to measure progress and determine success.  Additionally, VersionOne’s survey data from 2015 reveals that metrics based upon precise quantitative process or business data (such as: cycle time, customer retention, revenue/sales impact and product utilization) are used less frequently on agile projects, despite the fact that they all can be measured.  Join us for a discussion to explore the hypothesis that many are questioning the effectiveness of agile methods because too frequently imprecise metrics are used to determine success.  Using VersionOne’s survey data, we’ll talk about the importance and potential benefit of shifting to use the metrics that offer greater precision near the bottom of VersionOne’s list to determine success, offer guidance on how to track them, and how to interpret trends observed to make informed decisions.  All participants attending will receive a worksheet that highlights the discussed metrics with insights for how to interpret trends observed.  The following clip from a July 2015 episode of ThisAgileLife establishes the hypothesis and context for this presentation: https://youtu.be/TmiJQkQMlas

The retrospective is one of the most powerful Agile ceremonies. They require you to learn from your experiences and challenge you to continuously improve.

In this interactive session, you’ll explore retrospectives in depth, including activities to bring out different personality types and patterns for different levels of team maturity.

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Context:

Scrum has gifted a few Scrum Ceremonies to the world: Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Backlog Grooming and the Sprint Retrospective. The Retrospective is one of the most important and the most powerful Ceremony.

Retrospectives are required to learn from the experience and improve upon. To he ever-growing competition, the Organizations need to learn a lot from their experience and change accordingly (Charles Darwin: Survival of the fittest).

If it is performed well, it can yield wonderful outcomes to improve anything/everything.

Over a period of time, the teams start feeling bored about the same Old Retrospective (Glad, Sad or Mad, etc) so a lot of Fun/engagement part needs to be added to the same.

In the current times, Retrospectives need a rebirth otherwise Retrospectives will die and the Learning curve will die as well!

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.

One of the most retweeted Tweets from Agile2015 held during August 2015 in Washington, DC was “If you adopt only one #agile practice, let it be retrospectives. Everything else will follow. http://bit.ly/retrospection  #Agile2015” posted by Woody Zuill.  If you are interested in putting this into practice (or looking for new ideas and activities for the retrospectives you are already having with your teams), join us for a session to learn two new collaborative retrospective games.

We will begin with “Temperature Check” which uses the backdrop of a thermometer to allow teams to have a round-robin discussion regarding team activities that have team members “boiling” vs. other activities that are “freezing” people out.  During the game, participants will experience a “round-robin discussion” to discover challenges impacting the team, engage in “paired discussion” so as to collaboratively brainstorm improvement ideas, and conclude with “weighted voting” amongst all team members to identify what to do.  These activities are all driven from a single game canvas using Post-It notes allowing temperature check to be played in-person, or it can be played online using a collaboration platform for distributed teams.

Next we will visit the “House of Pain” which is a new game intended to promote higher levels of team happiness - during game play, team members use a canvas and Post-It notes to build a metaphorical house that represents “pain” they are experiencing as a team.  The house begins by capturing “types of pain” as participants work in trios - each type shared is validated and prioritized by group discussion and roman voting.  Once the highest priority pains are identified, team members brainstorm the source (root cause) of the pain.  The team then brainstorms actions that they hypothesize will reduce / eliminate a source of pain.  The game concludes by team members targeting the actions they wish to implement and for each prioritized source of pain - the team completes the “House of Pain” by defining an indicator to measure the impact of each prioritized action to reduce pain.  “House of Pain” can be played in-person using paper and Post-Its, or it can be played online via a collaboration platform for distributed teams.

In a conference setting, each game takes just under 20 minutes to allow participants to experience the game play and flow, so this session will entail playing both games with a brief period for Q&A.  All attendees will receive facilitation guides for each game and having experienced them in the session will be well prepared to use these new games in retrospectives following AgileDC.

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.

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!

There is much talk about diversity in the software development field and in the tech industry in general, and yet most teams and organizations comprise mostly a single cultural group. The dominant group may be 20- and 30-something white males, as is common in Silicon Valley, or some other culturally homogenous group, such as H1B holders from the same country, as is common in large corporations. 

When nearly everyone in an organization has the same general worldview, problem-solving approach, educational background, life experience, and so forth, the organization tends to suffer from groupthink - they can only conceive of a single approach to achieving a goal or solving a problem. When faced with a unique challenge or an unexpected change in circumstances, such an organization often has great difficulty.

In contrast, a diverse organization can bring to bear a variety of perspectives, experiences, collaboration styles, and problem-solving approaches. The rich blend of differences enables the organization to adapt to change and to overcome unexpected challenges creatively and flexibly. How can we build a more diverse workforce in the software development field?

In the Agile community, we often talk of Servant Leadership, but this notion often doesn't resonate with leaders that have a history for more command and control based approaches. While Servant Leaders exhibit behaviors preferred for leading and supporting teams, the transition can be difficult to grasp. In order to help leaders understand and take action, I have merged the concepts of Servant Leader with a participatory style to become Facilitative Leadership.  This provides a means for better helping people understand more of what they can take action on.

This talk will help people understand how anyone can become a facilitative leader with a specific focus on people who need help in transitioning their thinking from typical command and control approaches to those that are more facilitative. So if you have been struggling how to serve your teams better, let's reframe how we think of approaching the actions we can take.

This workshop shows how Test-Driven Development (TDD) is used to enable emergent design. Using a simple but representative example in Java, the presenter will demonstrate how a low-level design naturally emerges when using the TDD cycle of test/code/refactor. The audience will be involved by suggesting the next steps and also by pairing with the presenter.

Note that the goal of the session isn't necessarily to have a complete working example at the end, but to illustrate the process of low-level design through TDD.

Whether it's a minor typo on a page, a major failure causing a severe outage of a system or anything in between, the software industry is fertile ground for examining problems and their causes. From the problems that plagued HealthCare.gov to defects that allowed some lucky people to purchase airline tickets for almost nothing from United airlines, we hear a constant stream of issues with software systems.

With our society becoming increasingly dependent on software, we need to "up our game" with respect to tracking down problems with they happen, ensuring that defects are caught before entering the wild, and are prevented from occurring in the first place.

Root Cause Analysis is a process that enables this form of continuous improvement and uses techniques borrowed from other engineering disciplines. The aviation industry, for example, constantly seeks to improve due to the dire consequences of any failures in that domain.

This interactive workshop will explain when and how to use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to investigate problems and determine actions that will ensure that those problems can never happen again. Using real world examples the attendees will explore simple, lightweight RCA practices as well as a more involved example using fault tree analysis.

Mainframe systems continue to play an important role in large IT operations. Contemporary software solutions often comprise components that run on multiple platforms, from smart phones and tablets to Windows, OSX, and *nix systems, and mainframes. 

Is it feasible to extend modern software engineering practices like continuous integration; automated deployment; automated unit, component, and functional testing; and test-driven development to this venerable platform? It turns out to be quite feasible. There are several practical approaches to the problem, including commercial products from IBM and third parties; off-platform test drivers such as Cucumber, Concordion, and FitNesse; service virtualization products; on-platform approaches such as Java on zOS Unix System Services; hand-rolled mocking of CICS, DB2, and MQSeries resources; using IBM utilities to isolate and test individual steps from batch jobstreams; and isolated off-platform solutions based on hand-rolled test frameworks running under S390 emulation or mainframe-compatible compilers.

This session provides a summary of several of these approaches. Unfortunately, it isn't feasible to run working examples on an actual mainframe in the context of the conference. We can show code that works and walk through it to illustrate approaches to test automation that are in use in real mainframe environments, and we can demonstrate the emulation-based solutions that don't require a connection to a real mainframe.

To wrap up, we can have a group discussion about the specific testing and automation issues you have in your organization and how you might introduce test automation on your mainframe systems. Better yet, you can share your own stories of how you have solved this problem.

As you might have surmised, this is not a real session proposal.

As Program Chair for Agile DC 2015, I'd like to welcome you to our session submission system. If you have any questions about the submission process, please direct them to me at [email protected] and I'll respond as quickly as I can.

Please note that most sessions will be 45 minutes. We have LIMITED space for dual-length workshops.