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.

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.

The presentation is a case study of how Agile (Scrum/Kanban) can be applied to business development (BD).

Business Development is about managing increasing amounts of investment or determining where to invest. Agile business development is about learning, failing and succeeding quickly in this process. This talk presents a case study from the presenter's personal experience in coaching, training and mentoring 6 BD teams how to apply Agile to their work. 

The case study will cover how the following challenges of applying Agile to BD activities were addressed:

• How do you define a Release?
• How to do release planning?
• How to define Sprint goals?
• Do we write User Stories? 
• Do we size the stories?
• Do we calculate velocity?
• How do you do Sprint planning?
• Do we need a Scrum Master? Who should play this role?
• What is the right duration of a Sprint?

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.

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.

There are many levels of estimation, including budgeting, high-level estimation and task planning (detailed estimation).  We can link a more classic view of estimation to  the Agile planning onion popularized by Mike Cohn.   In the Agile planning onion, strategic planning is on the outside of the onion and the planning that occurs in the daily sprint meetings is at the core of the onion. Each layer closer to the core relates more to the day-to-day activity of a team. The #NoEstimates movement eschew developing story- or task-level estimates and sometimes higher levels of estimation. As you get closer to the core of the planning onion the case for the#NoEstimates becomes more compelling and dare I say useful. 

This presentation focuses on challenging the attendee to consider estimation as a form of planning. Planning is a considered an important competency in most business environments. Planning activities abound whether planning the corporate picnic to planning the acquisition and implementation of a new customer relationship management system. Most planning activities center on answering a few very basic questions. When will “it” be done? How much will “it” cost? What is “it” that I will actually get? As an organization or team progresses through the planning onion, the need for effort and cost estimation lessens in most cases. #NoEstimation does not remove the need for all types of estimates. Most organizations will always need to estimate in order to budget. Organizations that have stable teams, adopt the Agile mindset and have a well-groomed backlog will be able to use predictable flow to forecast rather than effort and cost estimation. At a sprint or day-to-day level Agile teams that predictably deliver value can embrace the idea of #NoEstimate while answering the basic questions based what, when and how much based on performance.

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.

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.

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.

We all know that a Minimum Viable Product is a lean startup technique designed to test and validate if a solution actually solves a customer problem. It is an endeavor to go forth and learn  to then, iterate or pivot as you better understand the problem and solution.  To be successful, it is not only  about learning what the people want but also being able understand the most painful aspects of that problem to then define what is the minimum amount of work you can do to generate early value to them.  But how do we figure that out?  In this 45-minute workshop, you will learn what is an MVP;  why it matters; what makes a good MVP experiment; and how to get started on designing your own. By the end of this 45-minute workshop, you will have:

1. Created a problem statement, or hypothesis for an MVP
2. Turned your hypothesis into a list of possible experiments
3. Collaborated with agilists who will help you formulate your MVP concept and experimentation ideas

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.

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.

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.

How many times have you heard someone say that scope is fixed and then throw a tantrum when they hear how long it will take to build?  How many times have you seen the spirited creativity of development teams evaporate when a stakeholder tells them the deliverable cannot be changed at all?  And how many times have you discussed agility with naysayers who say, "That's all fine in an ideal world when you are building some hip little application, but we're in the real world with real projects with fixed scope."

This presentation explores the myth of fixed scope, how damaging the notion is, and the tool we all have at our disposal for escaping the trap.  Come explore how natural it is to use it, and yet how vigilant we need to be to keep ourselves from casting it aside.

Studies over the last two decades have shown change initiatives have a high rate of failure to meet expected outcomes, yet traditional change management approaches continue to apply a sequential, step-by-step process in constantly changing environments.   An underlying assumption for these approaches seems to be that the desired end-state is assured, as long as the steps are followed.

Successful change initiatives in today’s environment will view the “wicked problem” of complex change through an empirical framework based on proven concepts from Organization Development (OD), augmented with tools and techniques from additional disciplines such as Lean, Agile, and Human Systems Dynamics (HSD) to influence changes in thinking and behaving.

This interactive session includes:

• Overview of the OD approach to organization change
• Introduction of a Change Spectrum for visualizing organization change
• Introduction of an Empirical Framework for designing and implementing change initiatives
• Introduction and Overview of a few specific diagnostic models from OD, Human Systems Dynamics, and Integral Agile
• Overview and discussion of a few specific tools and techniques that help shift thinking and behavior

If you are looking for a recipe (pun intended) for success, then this session will disappoint you.  For, a tool by itself will not change anything, but how a tool is used can help foster changes in behavior, which is key to organizational transformation.  

 So, what is DevOps? Is it just hype? How does it help organizations deliver value to their customers? If these questions are on your mind then this session is for you. While simply a constriction of two terms, "devops" is in essence a stub for broader organizational collaboration and feedback beyond just that of development and operations working together.  It emerged as a grass-roots movement at the confluence of two rising trends - agile development and large-scale cloud infrastructure.  And, like any horizontal revolution, devops is a path of discovery - people and processes do not change overnight.  Agility in coding and agility in systems takes time and effort, but the results can be astonishing.  The feedback and feed-forward loops that devops advocates makes the whole difference in quality and results, while the sharing and close collaboration pierces the veil among organizational silos, blurring their delineating lines. 

 In this session targeted towards beginners, we will explore these ideas and principles, framing our conversation within the context of the nascent and evolving CALMS framework and look at what it means to extend  "traditional agile" principles beyond the boundaries of the code to the entire delivered service.  After-all, isn't the principal Agile credo about satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software?

Our project was suffering from a series of unfortunate events; it was behind schedule, over budget, re-baselined twice and nearly cancelled. The PM and one third of the staff was gone. Needless to say **we did not have a trusting relationship with our client or their other contractors.** We knew for sure we could no longer conduct business as usual.

We had to convince our government partners that they did not make a mistake in trusting us. Agile had to rebuild relationships, knock down barriers, and produce quick results.

In our case we are government contractors to the United States DoD, working with other contractors (competitors), in an environment that was heavyweight and plan driven. We used agile to drive trust and transparency, which led to collaboration and real results.

If we made agile work you can too!

This exciting workshop includes case study interspersed with frequent exercises and discussion so that you can take what we learned and apply it in your context.

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.