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.

"Companies know that they derive greater creativity and innovation from teamwork - but what, they wonder, makes a great team?"  -Margaret Heffernan

The research is clear: High performing teams are extremely rare, but their ability to impact an organization is limitless. If we know this is what we're aiming for, why is high performance so elusive and how can organizations and leaders create environments where it can flourish?

In this unique session, participants will have the opportunity to observe and interact with a high performing team (live and in the flesh!), discuss what makes them a great team, and learn about the various roles that make them who they are. Through performance and a facilitated conversation, the Ars Nova Chamber Orchestra (ancoselfconducted.org), Washington DC's premier self-conducted orchestra, will offer insights into their organizational dynamics. You will observe and discuss what makes them tick and take away practical examples of how you can supercharge the teams you work with or coach.

"Companies know that they derive greater creativity and innovation from teamwork - but what, they wonder, makes a great team?"  -Margaret Heffernan

The research is clear: High performing teams are extremely rare, but their ability to impact an organization is limitless. If we know this is what we're aiming for, why is high performance so elusive and how can organizations and leaders create environments where it can flourish?

In this unique session, participants will have the opportunity to observe and interact with a high performing team (live and in the flesh!), discuss what makes them a great team, and learn about the various roles that make them who they are. Through performance and a facilitated conversation, the Ars Nova Chamber Orchestra (ancoselfconducted.org), Washington DC's premier self-conducted orchestra, will offer insights into their organizational dynamics. You will observe and discuss what makes them tick and take away practical examples of how you can supercharge the teams you work with or coach.

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.

We think we understand that awkward teenager.

Many experienced testers will claim exploratory testing expertise, but too few have ever written an exploratory testing charter, and even fewer have applied a heuristic in that charter. We think we understand exploratory testing just as we think we understand teenagers, because “we have been there”. However the reality is that many of the words currently used in exploratory testing are foreign to us and we feel awkward about our lack of knowledge. The goal of this talk is to give people experience writing and executing exploratory testing charters, creating mind maps, and applying exploratory testing heuristics.

The talk is intended to introduce people to the exploratory testing techniques described by Elisabeth Hendrickson in her book Explore It! with some added material from the work of Cem Kaner and James Bach.

Typical mistake many startups do is engineering idea before validating to learn whether it'd solve the problem. Obvious approach, also another mistake, is to run in a shorter sprints, demo, & get feedback till team realizes that features doesn’t seems delightful or satisfactory. Consequently, the app isn't often used by many as predicted once shipped. Speaking of learning, experimenting with a fake app to validate the idea is a cheaper, faster, a smarter strategy that's worth investing therefore.

What's there to validate about your ideas? What are the cheaper, smarter, and faster ways to engage with users to decide what a good idea is and what a stupid idea is? Let's meet to learn some of the pragmatic ways to validate your ideas before putting everything to leap-of-faith.

I had been introducing some of these tactics to many product teams, forums such as IIBA, Google Business Group events during last few years and now that entrepreneurship and startups has become one of the buzzwords, I am pleased to learn new methods that audience has to share.

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!

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. 

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.)

“Every line is the perfect length if you don't measure it.”  - Marty Rubin

So your organization has embarked upon a transformation to be more nimble and responsive by employing the latest tools and thinking in the Agile and DevOps arena.  In this transformational context, how do you know that your initiatives are effective?  Empirical measurements should provide insights on business value flow and delivery efficiency, allowing teams and organizations to see how they are progressing toward achieving their goals, but all too often we find ourselves mired in measurement traps that don't quite provide the right guidance in steering our efforts. 

Rooted in contemporary thinking and tested in practice, this talk explores the principles of good measurement, what to measure, what not to measure, and enumerates some key metrics to help guide and inform our Agile and DevOps efforts.  If done right, metrics can present a true picture of performance, and any progression, digression of these metrics can drive learning and improvement.  

It is our hope that this session inspires organizations and teams to start or take a fresh look at implementing a valuable measurement program.

Agile reminds us that the focus of any set of requirements needs to be on an outcome rather than a collection of whats and whos.  Storytelling is a powerful tool to elevate even the most diehard requirements analyst from a discussion of individual requirements to a discussion of outcomes. Outcomes are the big picture that acts as an anchor for whole efforts and which is continuously broken down into more and more detailed backlogs. The onion metaphor that is popularly used in agile planning (Cohn’s Planning Onion) can be used to describe the evolution of backlogs. Building an initial backlog is much like peeling through the layers of an onion to get to the core. There are many mechanisms for developing and maintaining the detailed backlogs, including asking, observing, showing and all sorts of hybrids. Using the onion metaphor, techniques for developing and splitting user stories are the second layer of the onion. However, before getting to the center of the backlog evolution onion, composed of features, epics, and user stories, we need to understand the big picture. 

 Presentation:

Provide an overview of storytelling in a business context and a lean change canvas framework.

Exercise

The room will be broken into teams (aisles will be used if auditorium seating).  Each team will be seeded with a common product change scenario. Based on the scenario the teams will be asked to tell the story of the change and capture the story on a small change canvas.  The exercise and session will culminate in by sharing ideas and lessons learned.

(Note the longer workshop would break the changing canvas into epics and stories)

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 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.

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.

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.

Business is tough. If your market is any good, other companies want your revenue and market share. A lot comes your way that's beyond your control, so how do you stay competitive in a dog eat dog world? You strive for Business Agility.

Business Agility is about being able to sense, create and respond to change, quickly and confidently. Every organization has the bravado to think they do, but few actually can. Think about these local companies who are:

• At the top end of the market being threatened by a newer, faster rival.
• Experiencing a market shift threatening half their revenue.
• Subject to whims of powerful regulation. 
• New in an emerging market and need to stay ahead of the major players. 

Major change can come from all angles, whether from competitors, regulators or market shifts. Companies need to be able to execute not just at the execution level, not just as the portfolio level, but at the business level, so they can handle the change or better yet, BE the change.

Business Agility isn't about how big you are, it's about survival of the fittest. Whether you are a small business or a publicly traded company, be the bigger dog.

Does any of this sound like you?

• You’re a changemaker working on a complex problem either as an entrepreneur or intrapreneur. You have some resources for making change but will need to work with partners, policymakers, or others to scale your impact.
• You’re a product manager, business analyst, designer, architect, or systems engineer in a large organization.
• You’re working on a difficult problem which will need to be solved in phases over months or years.
• You’re managing a portfolio of work that spans multiple time phases or teams.

Are you running into any of these problems?

• The product design cycle is taking too long.
• You’re delivering value but getting a lackluster response from customers and stakeholders.
• You have great ideas and the customer likes them, but there's no roadmap to get them into production.
• You have multiple stakeholders, none of whom are on the same page.
• You don’t have one single, completely informed decision maker who can make the final call.
• You’re having difficulties reconciling modern experiences with legacy systems and business processes.
• You have “wicked problems” to tackle but your organization is ignoring them in favor of low-hanging fruit. And you’re starting to run out of low-hanging fruit.
• You’re having difficulty helping other people focus on anything beyond the latest fire.

If any of that resonated with you, an Enterprise Design Sprint might be exactly what you’re looking for. Combining elements from agile, design thinking, enterprise architecture, and systems engineering, Enterprise Design Sprints will help you make sure that you're delivering value over the long term. This talk will cover the theory and mechanics behind planning and running your own sprint, with examples from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. 

Behavior Driven Development / Acceptance Test Driven Development (BDD/ATDD) is a new, exciting approach to developing software that has been shown to reduce rework and increase customer satisfaction. While other testing tools focus primarily on “are we building the thing right?”, BDD tools such as Cucumber and SpecFlow attack the problem of software directly at its source: “are we building the right thing?” By retaining all the benefits of automated unit testing, while extending them upstream to cover requirements, we cut the Gordian knot of risk and complexity to unleash hyper-productivity. 

Why is BDD so effective?

• As a form of Test driven design, BDD helps produce frugal, effective and testable software.
• As a development tool, BDD frameworks like SpecFlow provide many convenience functions and are pre-integrated with powerful libraries like Nunit and selenium to make writing tests a snap.
• As a collaboration tool, BDD helps ensure the “three amigos” (tester, analyst and developer) sync up – ahead of time.
• As a facilitation technique, BDD enables product owners to efficiently provide the team with concrete examples that clarify the true intent of a user story and define the boundaries.
• As a reporting tool, BDD captures functional coverage, mapping features to their acceptance criteria to their test results, in an attractive hierarchical presentation.

Want functional documentation? How about documentation that is guaranteed to be correct, because every feature maps to its test results? Witness the holy grail of traceability – executable specifications.

We will spend a few minutes talking about the context and pre-requisites, so attendees have an idea of where BDD fits in, and what type of investment they are signing their teams up for. We will see that in return for a modest amount of investment in tools and training, very significant benefits can be realized, and the benefits compound over time.

This workshop then dives right in to Gherkin, the structured English language technique used to capture BDD specifications. We will spend the better part of the session learning the tricks and techniques that make for robust and maintainable gherkin specifications. We will review and critique lots of examples, both good and bad.

We will review several examples of reports generated from BDD tools, to provide context and to immediately highlight the bottom line business value that makes an investment in BDD so worthwhile.

Come and learn why Behavior driven design is taking the software world by storm!