Agile scaling models tend to be based on scenarios where 5 - 10 agile teams are working on the same project/program/product/value stream.   The scaling models provide some good ways of organizing the work that needs to be done to plan, synchronize and demonstrate the outputs of the teams.  This case study describes the path of a development group that has 10-12 teams working on about 50 different software "products and services" within a reasonably narrow-focused energy company.  The case study describes how they went about paring down the SAFe model to meet their needs and then prioritizing the scaled-back scaling transformation using group inputs to a weighted shortest job first exercise.

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

Ever solve a jigsaw puzzle?  Do you typically design and document all your pieces before assembling the puzzle or know anything about the kind of picture formed by the puzzle?  Hardly.  Usually, the specifics of the puzzle, as they emerge through the process of solving that puzzle, affect our tactics for solving it.  

This analogy is at the heart of Exploratory Testing (ET) - a fun, focused and powerful approach to testing that has been gaining in popularity in recent years.  While not a new idea, it is often misconstrued as being a random, flailing at the keyboard approach to uncovering problems.  Not quite.  ET is a disciplined practice that involves simultaneously learning about the software under test while designing and executing tests, using feedback from the last test to design the next.  It leverages traditional test design analysis techniques and heuristics, but design and execution become a single inseparable activity.  Within the agile context, there is a need for agile teams to augment their scripted automated tests with a manual testing practice that is adaptable, and ET provides the right fit.

In this session oriented towards beginning explorers, we will gain a deeper understanding of what ET is, what it isn't, and discuss the essential elements of the practice with practical tips and techniques for: learning the system under test and capturing our understanding to design tests; designing tests on the fly using heuristics; executing tests and observing results; and finally, integrating ET into the cadence of an agile process.

Are you struggling to implement Agile at your company?  What could be better than to learn from someone who has done it wrong over and over! We want to share our experiences pioneering Agile at a FinTech company.  After multiple attempts and through sheer stubbornness, we were we able to get it right and improve our release pace by 650% annually.  We will walk through where we went wrong, what we did right, and why we now understand that Agile cannot be successful without profound collaboration, Continuous Delivery, a DevOps culture and a desire to continuously improve.

Your Agile Stand-up Meeting Sucks!

Most Agile and Scrum stand-up meetings I see are boring, lifeless, status meetings that don't provide any real value.

In this session you'll learn:

The REAL purpose of the daily stand-up

The most common bad habits and how to correct them

The habits good stand-up meetings have

How you can use Improv to invigorate your daily stand-up

A whole bunch of Improv exercises you can start using with your team right now!

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.

The Zombie Retrospective - presented by Tommie Adams 

So they say the retrospective is one of the strongest and most powerful tools in the agile scrum methodology tool kit, and is often overlooked or skipped. So how does a scrum master find ways to creatively explain and express the importance of this agile scrum ceremony, or even the basics of agile scrum in general. How does the scrum master explain the importance of banding together as a team in this brave new agile scrum world.  In many organizations, nowadays, the teams are even made up of outside vendors as well as in house associates. So how do you even start to pique the interest and the importance of team collaboration to a bunch of folks who are strangers to one another on a agile scrum team?  Even more specifically, how do you explain how the retrospective ceremony will help improve the way they work with one another over time?

My answer: ZOMBIES!!!  Everyone loves zombies, right?  So come, take a bite!

Tommie works for Marriott International in Bethesda MD. His background is in theater and communication which he studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. He has worked for Marriott International for 26 years with jobs ranging from reservation sales associate, to group sales manager, to functional IT tester to his current position as scrum master for the Marriott Rewards Agile Scrum Team. A native of Omaha, Nebraska, his hobbies include photography, cello and learning the ukulele, (you know, in case you were curious.) 

“Running a football team is no different than running any other kind of organization…” -- Vince Lombardi

Large enterprise scale software development is a team sport. In order to win in this game your software needs to be of the highest quality, which is almost impossible to achieve with testers on the sidelines. To build a winning a team you need the right players, but great teams don't always need the best players. Great teams win because they find ways to let the individuals on their team be great. 

The wave of DevOps in the industry is in a broader sense an effort to let developers and system engineers do what they do best by eliminating or simplifying tasks that forced individuals into activities beyond their expertise. Pre-DevOps roles were like trying to ask Payton Manning to play both quarterback and running back at the same time. DevOps is the manifestation of empathy between two distinct sets of skills allowing the other to focus on what their best at. What about testers? How can the team expand their empathy to their role? What can the developers, program managers, and others do to let testers be great? Please join me if your curious to hear about the practices, tools, and culture that can make your software a winner with quality.

Delivery teams know from experience the importance of maintenance such as applying patches, upgrading, and conforming to the latest security and accessibility regulations. Product Owners, other value team members, and system stakeholders are focused on functionality and end user satisfaction. Maintenance isn’t sexy and can sink in priority until it fails to be included in releases.

The Security community has been using Dark/Abuser/Evil Stories using the persona of a Black Hat Hacker to uncover vulnerabilities. In this workshop participants will assume the role of Delivery Team members and use the power of personas to write “Dark Stories” that bring to life the full impact of failing to perform necessary maintenance.  The intent is to give Product Owners a complete understanding of the importance of maintenance so they can appropriately prioritize maintenance and keep their systems strong.

Doing Agile is more than just the summation of all the roles, ceremonies and artifacts of a method like Scrum. Agile only works when one has the courage to really realize the concepts, values and principles at its core. The secret is in "being" Agile in thinking so that it manifests in the "doing."

The session will present common patterns observed in organizations and teams thinking they are "doing" Agile, whereas their practices are very "Fr-agile". These patterns are signs of Agile being practiced in an unhealthy way leading to complete failure or a less-than-expected outcome with unfulfilled expectations.

The presentation is for executives and senior managers responsible for supporting and leading agile transformation in their organizations. In addition, both experienced Agile practitioners and those who have just started or are planning to start their agile adoption journey will find this session helpful in learning about common anti-Agile patterns.

When we have our most successful coaching moments, they often come from a deep groove: where we seem to anticipate the team's needs; know when the breakthroughs are coming; know how to dance between mentoring the team and letting them innovate (or struggle) on their own. But, it rarely starts that way. Coaching new teams can be awkward -- and especially so if you're new to coaching. I will show you some ways of approaching these coaching engagements that can break down the awkwardness, reveal things about the team, and get on a track of improvement and discovery.

I will share some attitudes I think can benefit coaches who find these situations awkward, as well as practical tools and tips you can exercise tomorrow to get teams talking and making progress. We will also engage as small groups, for further practice on these tools and to create space for coaching one-another.

Sprint Planning is a frequent, important part of the rhythm of many agile teams. And yet, we find that many coaches and Scrum Masters struggle to make the meeting relevant, valuable, and creative. We will work through a simple, relatable simulation that we use to teach effective planning to teams and facilitators that brings energy, creativity, and problem-solving to the Sprint Planning experience. 

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 software development methods are now well established in many commercial organizations, and are starting to make inroads into government contexts. There are reports of software development projects using Agile methods that achieve significantly higher levels of productivity and quality compared with projects that used traditional methods. When it comes to brand new “start from scratch” software projects, a wealth of information, advice, training, and literature exists to help guide practitioners and speed them along the path to agility. Unfortunately, most such publicly available resources have relatively little to say when it comes to legacy systems. However, there is a small but growing amount of evidence that agile practices can yield compelling benefits for legacy projects—even those that have been previously successful using traditional methods. Our experience suggests that agile practices need to be customized and introduced in a different order into a legacy project. This presentation provides an analysis of the differences between legacy projects and new software development and the implications for the adoption of agile methods.

Are you ready to take control of your career in Agile space? Then this session is for you! Learn to build your personal brand, establish your career goals and reach them using an Agile mindset. The session is equally relevant for beginning and experienced Agilists, for people in the midst of an active job hunt and these who have already secured their dream position but are not sure how to take their career to the next level.

Learn how to job hunt like a pro and how to attract recruiters and hiring managers instead of relying on job applications; how to seek and secure a promotion; how to insure your Agile career; and how to network in a powerful and focused way.

Find out how to leverage the power of social media in your brand building efforts, including the ultimate brand building and career management tool, LinkedIn: develop and maintain a strong LinkedIn profile that includes an Agile work portfolio, a powerful Summary, and a results oriented Experience section; develop an ongoing engagement with Agile LinkedIn community using status updates, LinkedIn publishing platform and Agile groups and grow and nurture your network. Bonus: you will learn about making the first steps towards thought leadership.

According to the VersionOne State of Agile survey, the most widely practiced agile technique is still the daily standup (80%).  Everyone knows its a critical part of agile and we all can recite the three questions by heart.  But why do many agile teams say their standup just isn't working?  Even though the stand up can be done very easily on an agile project (setup a 15 minute meeting every day and your done!), it takes some work to get the true value out of it. Everyone has probably been in that stand up where the energy level is very low and there just seems to be a group of people going through the motions.  Or maybe there is dissention among the team and nobody wants to go anymore.  In this workshop, we’ll discuss why stand ups are a critical practice for agile teams and how you, as an agile coach or Scrum Master, can support your teams in pursuing a useful, valuable stand-up and get out of the standup blues.

Retrospectives are often one of the first team ceremonies to get dumped for time, or to fall flat as we repeat the same boring patterns. Yet, many voices tell us they are the single most important practice our teams could be doing!

We agree, and we will show you how to put some zip back into your retrospectives. Learn how to use a retrospective as the first-engagement with a new team; how to use the form to begin building trust and understanding in the team; and get your colleagues on the path to continuous self-improvement!

This session will take you beyond the Plus-Minus-Delta, By-The-Book format for a retrospective, explore the Derby-Larsen framework through activity demonstrations, and provide an opportunity for attendees to put this new knowledge into practice as they design a deeper, groovier retrospective to take back to their teams.

You’ve read all the books, you’ve gotten your certifications and now you have a team staring at you waiting for you to take the lead. There is no hesitation about how to perform the basics -- determining roles and scheduling meetings -- but how do you kick off an effective, high performing team?

Whether you have a brand new team or you’re the new guy on an existing team, the tools and techniques you will learn in this session have proven to be effective from state government to private sector insurance.

As an accredited Leadership Gift Coach Jessica focuses on vocabulary, shared responsibility, and team agreements. You will leave the session able to facilitate more than one Innovation Games and utilize them during your kick offs to set the stage for a powerful and effective team no matter what methodology they use.