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 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.

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.

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.

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!

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. 

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.

There has been a lot of talk lately about Software Craftsmanship. Most of this talk has been centered around how to take existing, skilled programmers and turn them into Craftsmen. What about those who are just entering the field? In this talk, we will explore a new approach to fulfilling the entire journey from Apprentice to Master, both from a personal and organizational level. We will also look at how to get such a program started, and how to bring the existing team along.

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.

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!

I will share how I led a team from believing that end-to-end functional (browser) tests were "other" or "someone else's problem", to engaging the whole team in writing these kinds of tests.  By the end of the transition these tests were on almost equal footing as unit tests.

Along the way, I had to challenge conventional wisdom and dogma about unit tests - that unit tests are easier than functional tests, that unit tests are less brittle, or that unit tests are unconditionally useful.  

This talk is more about changing people's mindset than about specific tools, although I found that having the right tools made the mindset shift possible.

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.

Do you want to help your local community connect, learn and share from each other as they journey towards agility (or any endeavor)? Do you have a local user group that is struggling and needs a resuscitation? This talk will help you pump life back into your local user group. I have taken the local DC Scrum User Group that was starting to fade and brought it back to life with a fast growing membership base that regularly connects, learns and shares with each other multiple times per month. How did I do this? Come find out as I walk you through the various steps I took to reestablish the user group and engage thought leaders and luminaries to come speak at the user group.

When I took over, last year, our local DC Scrum User Group was just over 500 members and growing at a pace of about 20 members per month. Since then, we have grown to almost 1300 members and growing at 50-60 new members per month. We typically have multiple meetings a month that are a mix of presentations, workshops and webinars.

Standing up a Kanban system seems simple enough. If you’re already a Kanban fan you know that simply visualizing a team’s work and limiting work in progress (WIP) can produce a consistent flow of completed work. Add measurements and explicit process policies to your Kanban system and teams see dramatic increases in throughput, lower operating costs, and capacity perfectly tuned to demand of their customers.

Yet, despite this promise, a team's use of their Kanban system can languish. Why? The challenges are simultaneously more basic yet more difficult to overcome than one might think.

This session will first identify common sources of resistance you are likely to encounter, drawing on the presenters’ real world experiences with a federal organization in which all software projects deliver using agile methods and a majority of projects have adopted Kanban.

Challenges include:

• Establishing sufficient personal safety to make work visible
• Facilities e.g. “Where could we put a board? Are we allowed to put things on the wall?”
• Learning the mechanics of a pull system
• Sticking to WIP limits
• Evolving a team culture that values finishing work over starting work and throughput over utilization

Next, we will share what we’ve learned about making Kanban relatable through the hands-on Kanban Holiday Card Simulation, which has been run in 17 training classes with 330 federal staff from a variety of professional disciplines. In the simulation, students define a workflow for sending out holiday cards, create a Kanban board to represent that workflow, and carry out the work of a family producing cards while visualizing their work on the board and limiting WIP. We impose just one teensy rule that ensures the process has a constraint. Then, let the learning begin!

Profoundly, we have time and again observed students’ emergent discovery of the Theory of Constraints and subsequent uncovering of 4 actions that may be taken to speed the flow of work through any constraint.

We will describe how this simple, non-technology simulation provides a safe space to create and run a Kanban system and can give your teams the courage, practical experience, and permission to create Kanban systems when they return to their real jobs – whether their sphere of influence extends to creating a board to track just their own work, their team’s work, or the work of a whole organization.