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.

A well-facilitated large-scale Planning event (such as a SAFe PI Planning) can leave you feeling energized and more confident in your team and your direction. Poorly facilitated events have the adverse effect and can leave you feeling like you’ve just been run over by a Mack Truck.

There is not a lot of guidance from SAFe on how to facilitate this critical event from their website, other than an example agenda and program board. This session will focus on how information radiators and other visual tools can make a tremendous difference in increasing engagement and collaboration amongst teams in order to orchestrate a thoughtful plan with high confidence.

We will show battle-tested ways on how visuals are critical to...

• increase collaboration across teams
• reinforce development practices & standards
• track team progress through the day
• highlight dependencies
• increase the confidence vote
• motivate teams to strive for success

Participants will leave this session with some visual tools and tips they can immediately put to use in their designing their next PI Planning or ANY large-scale planning event.
“There is no magic in SAFe… except for maybe PI Planning” - SAFe authors

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.

 Training is often the first step in implementing an Agile transformation within an organization.  Often an agile coach will corral resistant staff members in a room and sell the virtues of Agile with disappointing results.  But at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, students are clamoring to voluntarily attend full day sessions and recommending classes to their colleagues.  The organization has successfully grown the Agile Training Program to include 10 courses taken by 2200+ attendees from 25+ federal agencies.  The training is not required on anyone’s mandatory curriculum, but instead is taken because students feel it provides real value enhancing their ability to work well in the organization.  Effective training doesn’t just educate, but instead changes behavior.  

The masterminds behind the USCIS Agile Training Program will unpack the secrets to their success.  Mash Eslami, USCIS Section Chief of Agile Training, and Melinda Solomon, USCIS Agile Training Lead explore 10 factors that make students receptive to learn.  Part Experience Report, part Case-Study, this session will explore:

• How to choose your initial audience
• What to do with resistant students
• How to structure a course that changes behavior
• Ways to grow the program
• And much more…

Scrum is hard to understand, or so they say. But when we describe new topics in easy to understand language, suddenly it can all make sense.

We'll look at Scrum through the lens of Waterfall, to discuss how similar they really are if you think about the core concepts that make Scrum work so well and apply them to Waterfall in the right way.

We'll talk about how the first big hurdle isn't in changing the process, but rather in how you think about the process. This is particularly important because often we cannot change the process. However, we do have flexibility to operate *within* and *in addition to* the process, where we can inject tangible benefits, so we can create trust around the approaches, so we can get the support to move closer to pure Scrum.

This presentation will open your eyes to understanding how close you really are to Scrum if you just use this conceptual stepping stone.

In the mid-late 20th century, industry giants asked themselves; “How do we continuously improve?”, “How do we build a quality product?” and “How do we design for end users?” These are the same challenges that we face as software developers and designers today. Issues with technical innovation, resource constraints, and organizational support, are experienced not only in zeros and ones but were experienced on the road. In the early 20th century, the U.S. was considered a global leader in economic and scientific achievement. After those major innovations in transportation, space exploration, and computer science, American industries focused on manufacturing advantages, such as mass production and repeatable use. Progress was now measured by process improvements, adapting to market changes and ability to pivot. Why has the tech industry continued to boom, while other industries struggle? Using examples from General Motors, this talk examines their failures in reliability, collaboration, and product design. Take a step back in history to relive the experiences of these pioneers, learn from their past failures, and how they apply to crafting software products today.