Agile is about the ability to inspect and adapt to change. Can we become adaptable agile leaders? You don’t need to change your title. You might not need to change where you sit in the organization. You will need to change your mindset to have the courage to lead.

Johanna will discuss how you can develop an agile mindset, seeing and living the “art of the possible.” We’ll discuss how your mindset influences your change artistry tools, and maybe even what you call yourself. We’ll see how to learn from small successes and continue to make progress, as you change yourself and your organization. You can start your change by changing your mindset to be one of change artistry and leadership.

One of the 12 principles of the Agile manifesto states that “The best architecture, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Why is that? and what exactly are self-organizing teams? How does a team become self-organizing? Teams that have always been used to command and control cannot suddenly become self-organizing overnight. Come to this session to learn what self-organizing really means. Understand the attributes of a self-organizing team and some of the challenges you face in getting your team there. Understand how to find the right balance between team learning and team empowerment vs. control? Leave with techniques to help you build and foster high performing self-organizing teams.

It can be difficult for developers to find the motivation to write automated unit tests.  This workshop introduces a simulation that can demonstrate the value of automated unit tests to identify and localize defects.  In the simulation, participants will play the roles of programs and tests.  We will discuss barriers to creating and maintaining unit tests, and how this simulation addresses those barriers.

Theme: Games for Learning, Code and Test

  (We have not published slides for this workshop.  "Slides" link below is to representative slides from other presentations.)

Many team challenges can be tracked back to cognitive biases: our judgement gets anchored, we think we're better than we are, and we are our own favorite reference point. And even though we're encouraged to "think outside the box," there are conditions where we have a bias against creativity. If that's not a recipe for a tough team environment, I don't know what is.

Improve your game by learning about bias! You'll leave this session with strategies for identifying and mitigating bias on your team. 

Retrospectives are the core of agility. And yet they are the scrum ceremony that is most frequently skipped. Many teams like the idea of the retrospective but find them boring, or worse ineffective.

This talk aims to re-energize retrospective facilitators and participants. Starting with the basics: "what's a retrospective and how do you run one?", this talk reveals 7 secrets that lead to more engaging, more effective retrospectives.

You'll learn:

* The best way to ensure your retrospectives lead to real change

* The "pledge" everyone on your team should take before participating

* How to know who to include in each retrospective

* The single most important thing you can do to keep your team engaged during the retro

* And much, much more!

In October, 2015, my company was sold by their parent and taken on by a new investor.  We lost somewhere around half of our staff, but we still had 15 years of legacy tech to maintain while simultaneously finding a new path to profitability.  Morale was extremely low across the engineering organization.  Leaders from engineering gathered in a board room with executive management to figure out next steps.

What started in that board room evolved into our current use of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to provide a middle tier of guidance between company vision and sprint planning.  We have also adopted a new tool to clarify the mission of particular teams within the organization.  In this talk, I'll go over what we did and what we've learned.  Most importantly, I'll go over the critical approaches necessary to ensure that you continue to follow Agile values and principles while looking at longer-term horizons like quarters and years.

While much of this was accelerated by our company's sale, it is not just about turning around a company.  The thinking, which continues from what I shared in my Agile DC 2015 talk, "The Myth of Fixed Scope: Why Goals Matter", is for anyone who is looking to deepen their adoption of Agile and Scrum.

In the simplest of 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 estimated revenue generated or costs saved by the software.  However, as Mark Schwartz points out in his book, “The Art of Business Value Paperback” this simple explanation is insufficient for commercial organizations, and not applicable for government and other non-commercial organizations for whom the impact of software isn’t primarily measured in terms of revenue.  

In this session participants will experience a simulation that has been created to explore these question of how to make decisions about investments to deliver mission and business value by examining the impact of these decisions on the performance of organizations in changing environments.

Do you want to write great User Stories that provide the vehicle for conversation and confirmation that we build the right thing? Do you struggle with splitting stories so that they still provide business value but can be accomplished within a fraction of your iteration and be potentially shippable to production? We will do a quick refresher on User Story formatting to include Acceptance Criteria. Then we will dive into learning techniques for splitting stories in this interactive workshop. 

Are you a Scrum Master that has a strong affinity to sticky notes, dry erase markers, and other tools of Agile facilitation? Are you tired of seeing the same old blue painters tape on every kanban board? Want to learn some new facilitation techniques that you can use in retrospectives or to build awesome information radiators with your team?

If so, join me for my session on the Super Agile Satchel.

During the session, I’ll briefly talk about how the satchel came to be and its awesome contents.  Then we’ll jump right in to actual examples of information radiators that I created with the tools the satchel contains.  I'll discuss why choosing the right materials, colors, and sizes are critical to facilitation and creating information radiators that draw attention, are maintainable, and focus the team on what's truly important.

Impact mapping is a powerful practice that ensures we are delivering work that directly impacts our business goals and mission objectives.  Our roadmaps and backlogs are usually littered with pet projects, squeaky wheels, and recent ad hoc items that gain priority just because they are the latest shot across our bow.  With a tool such as impact mapping, we can stand firm knowing our real priorities, and fend off these common challengers.

Impact maps visualize quantifiable benefit that deliverables should produce towards our business objectives.  They allow us to focus our work on those deliverables that move the needle the most, not just deliver features.  The practice is a great way to communicate assumptions, create plans, and align stakeholders as well as aid in strategic planning, roadmap management, and defining quality.  Happily, it is also significantly less bureaucratic and much easier to apply than many alternatives.

This workshop will provide an appreciation for the power of Impact Mapping and walk you through building your own Impact Maps.  You will learn techniques for creating Impact Maps as well as facilitating an Impact Mapping session.  You will leave the workshop with a usable Impact Map of your current project, or other of your liking, that can bring immediate value to your road-mapping, backlog grooming, and software delivery.

Does your organization find it hard to determine “the right thing” to build? You are not alone – studies show that even in very high performing organizations only 10-35% of initial ideas actually generate business value. Agile development should make it easier to obtain early customer feedback, but in most organizations Agile approaches are limited to software development teams with little connection to the rest of the business. In addition, Agile methods by themselves offer few guidelines on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog’s content and relative priorities in the first place. As a result, there is a significant, but often underappreciated risk that Agile teams end up very efficiently building “the wrong thing right.”

In this session, we explore how Lean Discovery and experimentation can expand the scope of Agile’s “inspect and adapt” feedback loops to systematically identify and validate critical assumptions about our product’s value proposition. Based on the Lean Startup and Lean UX approach to product development as a series of hypotheses about customers’ behaviors and value perceptions, we discuss ways to derive testable assumptions from organizational goals to enable validated learning. Finally, we explore the implications of this approach on project planning and budgeting to support increased business agility.

So why does pair programming (or any form of pairing really) work? Well rather than tell you why, let's experience it! 

This is a simple 3 round exercise that you can do with your teams and managers to demonstrate the benefits of pairing. It will show the linkage between having a shared mental model through collaboration and ease of integrating the resulting work.

Does prioritizing your development portfolio seem unclear or mired in politics? Ever feel like the decisions for what gets worked on when are somewhere between arbitrary and emotional? Ever get tired of providing cost estimates for work of uncertain value?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this session is for you! Matt Barcomb will open with introductory concepts about shifting from a cost focus to a value focus for development work. Next, providing business value for user stories will be debunked. Then, a collaborative framework for prioritization, Benefit Mapping, will be discussed. Finally, Matt will end with ways to simplify the cost evaluation of work and risk.

Static designs and monolithic structures are brittle and prone to failure. How can we progress beyond them? By understanding the nature of our challenges and applying the right tools at the right time. This talk will describe how to use evolutionary principles to foster changes in your architecture and infrastructure so that you can create antifragile systems.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spoke to these ideas in “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” Join us as we describe how we can:

• Move beyond planning for known failure modes and instead develop antifragile systems that are safe-to-fail in unanticipated ways.
• Leverage the Cynefin framework and its 5 sense-making domains to better frame problems and drive action.
• Employ microservice architectures to make the variability of our environments work for us, not against us.
• Gain knowledge more rapidly through multiple parallel experiments.

Software development culture has been dominated by the hero. Rock stars, ninjas, and 10Xers have been the center of attention, giving the skewed perception that great software is the result of a single amazing developer. But this couldn't be further from the truth.

In this talk, Andrea Goulet, the CEO of Corgibytes, will share her experiences using vulnerability and empathy as drivers for Agile adoption and culture building. 

The agile manifesto challenges us to favor customer collaboration more than contract negotiation, but what does that really mean and how do you actually do that?  Join us to experience a “fun” ideation framework that teams can use to engage in dialogue with their customers to determine what needs of the team / customer relationship are most important at the present time and then as a group decide on practices to support the highest priority needs.  As the ideation framework is completed, teams and their customers will be challenged to work together and achieve consensus on a limited number of priorities since we all know what happens when we try to make EVERYTHING a priority.  “Let’s Be Awesome” concludes with teams establishing and agreeing upon working agreements to build an “awesome” relationship between customer and team.  In this hands-on and highly interactive workshop, participants will have a chance to learn how to use the “Let’s Be Awesome” framework and cards to facilitate a team / customer ideation session focused on establishing the foundation for a strong relationship; an opportunity to learn, review and discuss many agile practices supportive of effective team / customer collaboration; and a chance to experience a “MarketPlace of Ideas” where they can exchange recommended patterns and practices for customer collaboration from others also attending the workshop.

Does your team treat test code differently than production code? Do you let your test code accumulate duplication and complexity that you'd normally attempt to squash in your production code? Have your tests become brittle? Are you worried that they aren't providing you the same value they used to? Have you strongly considered dumping your test suite and starting over? Are you afraid that if you refactor your test code, you'll introduce false positives?

If you said yes to any of those questions, then this talk is for you.

We'll explore the technique of "refactoring against the red bar" (http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.MichaelFeathers.RefactoringAgainstTheRedBar), and how you can employ this technique to confidently refactor your test code. No longer do you need to let your test code have a lower standard of quality than your production code.

When dealing with metrics, most Agile or Lean teams begin with a Burndown Chart.  Unfortunately, that is also where most of them stop.  While a Burndown Chart is a great first step, it only provides a small sliver of the information the team has access to.

In this talk, we’ll be starting at the beginning with what a Cumulative Flow Diagram is, how it relates to a Burndown Chart, its advantages, and where it too ultimately stops.  We’ll then look at additional information radiators that the team can easily use based on existing data to provide transparency to stakeholders and the raw material for continuous improvement.

In his book Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux describes the “Teal Organization” model. Teal organizations have an evolutionary purpose, self-managing teams with little or no organizational hierarchy, and individuals who bring their whole person to work rather than putting on a work face when leaving the house. Zappos is the most talked about organization attempting a transition to Teal.

Bob describes how his organization is becoming a Teal Organization. Since the concept of Teal is not a specific recipe, they are basing their transition on practices gleaned from other organizations and their history of helping truly agile organizations. LitheSpeed is starting the path of delegating most authority to team members including profit sharing and hiring decisions, using a Spotify Tribe model and extreme transparency, implementing a simple set of peer-based operating procedures, and deemphasizing titles.

Bob shares lessons on building the organization, culture, and systems to support the transition. Although it’s early in the journey and the road is sometimes rough, Bob is excited about the prospect of a Teal future.

Come hear the good, the bad and the ugly side of this long days journey into teal.