You’re a new coach. Now what? This session will help you get started on an agile transformation assignment with a coaching backlog. This session will inform new coaches on “where to start” as an Agile Coach. The session will begin agile transformation challenges followed by common agile impediments, conditions for success, an agile readiness checklist and a coaching backlog including Epics, Features and Stories.

Enterprises want to deliver more value with higher quality at a faster pace. Many development teams have adopted agile frameworks to improve their ability to deliver software. This has led to a local optimization for the development teams and they have become good at delivering potentially shippable increments of their products, but from there, they typically see organizational constraints in moving it to the customer. The development organization is quickly adding features to the queue waiting to be released, but the operations teams are struggling to support fires in production, maintain stability, and provide the environments and infrastructure needed so development teams can move their new functionality forward. The operation team’s focus on stability usually minimizes the number of changes in production thus creating infrequent, large batches being deployed at a planned date. Can Agile and DevOps bring the development and operations teams together to remove the organizational constraints in moving the software to the customer?

In this session, we’ll talk about the relationship of Agile and DevOps, not as an intersection, but as a progression of capability with development and operation teams working together to remove those constraints. We’ll discuss how using Agile and DevOps practices together, teams can release value faster, with higher quality, and in more stable environments making it safer to deploy.

Are you or your Agile business partners struggling to vanquish their Agile nemeses?

In this beginner-level session, we'll examine how different super heroes have dealt with difficult business challenges. We'll take cues from these heroes to discuss some basic techniques that can be applied to overcome these difficulties.

We have all been there, a shiny new and improved framework is released and we must implement it, but is this always the answer to improve your Agile organization? Frameworks are needed and provide guidelines for teams but if the teams/companies do not follow the principles and fundamentals of the Agile Manifesto it makes it very difficult for the framework to be successful. The belief is that switching up the specific framework is the answer but they soon realize that the framework is not the main issue that is the driving force. This can leave the teams/companies in a tough situation after committing to a framework that they are not ready for.

I will be sharing my experiences across multiple different companies on how this assumption has let them down and how we had to return the teams back to the fundamentals to solve the issues they are experiencing.

Have you ever worked in an environment where Agile turned into a four-letter word? Many companies get lost on their Agile journey and end up turning it into something that leaves a sour taste in everyone's mouths. There are many ways companies get lost on their journey from the C-Suite down to the team level.

Teams that are too big or too small, micro-managing, no Work in Progress (WIP) limits, and lack of leadership backing are just a few of the many indicators we will touch on that result in transformation hiccups and failures. Join me as I share my experiences as an Agile Coach and dive into the reasons why transformations fail and how you can avoid turning Agile into a four-letter word at your organization.

Today many organizations are going through Agile and DevOps transformations and are adopting frameworks like Scrum, SAFe, or Kanban to try to keep pace with the rapid delivery that is needed today. But these organizations aren’t getting the benefits that they expected, especially as it’s related to quality and sustaining their pace of delivery. As organizations begin to adopt one of the agile frameworks, they usually begin with making sure the teams are doing Scrum or Kanban well and forget about the engineering practices that are needed to sustain or accelerate their technical agility. The lack of engineering practices constrains the organizations and eventually can cause it to take longer for each feature to be delivered. This talk is about why software development organizations should embrace the technical practices and provides some examples of practices they can use and the benefits they will receive.

Overview

“Three Amigos” sessions are a common occurrence on many agile teams – with three or more team members exploring all aspects of a user story from the Business Value, Development, and Testing perspectives. While this helps identify gaps in user story acceptance criteria, it may not address how the respective criteria will be tested. How do we measure if we’ve “done the thing right” during development, while adding business value and considering the effectiveness and speed of testing the system?

This session provides 1) an exploration of using a Three Testing Amigos approach in agile; and 2) an interactive activity for the participants to explore potential biases and gaps in determining how a user story should be tested.

Target Audience

Agile team participants at any level of transformation.

Prerequisite

Basic understanding of Agile team ceremonies and user story generation.

Many companies are struggling with Agile. They have lost sight of how the teams at the center of an Agile transformation are only the first drop in the lake. That first drop will create a ripple effect that must be allowed to progress throughout the entire organization in order to unleash the power that Agile promises and to achieve top performance. Holistic Agility provides a perspective on how to create a healthy and whole organization that is unified and adaptive to change. It aligns the inner workings of the organization in a way that enables them to create harmonious and symbiotic relationships with each other and their customers - relationships that work to the benefit of everyone involved.

What is the Urgency Index? Organizations that adopt scrum, kanban, SAFe, or other agile methodologies get access to a bevy of new metrics: velocity, predictability, cycle time, variability, and many more. These metrics can help an organization incrementally improve, focus their transformation, and produce better outcomes – or they can just drive the teams to misery and organizational results to pot. So how do you get it right? First, track the urgency index.

Those who join this session will walk away with a new way to use the many new metrics that agile methodologies enables – one that drives the right conversations and results. This session is fun and interactive (with white board interaction, not slides), and always includes lots of engagement and participation. It’s not a lecture, it’s a discovery session – and I always learn as much as the attendees!

As companies continue to adopt agile and lean, they also need to use design thinking to help them build the right problem and connection to their users, not just the sponsors or customers. Developing the product to meet enterprise needs is the only way to sustain the business to gain marketing comparative. In this workshop, we will engage the audience to learn design thinking, lean’s test and learn, and review agile iterative and incremental development. Audiences will learn why we must marry lean, lean, and agile. They will take away all benefits statements. During the workshop, we present some case studies. We also encourage the audience to explore what problems they want to tackle by using the concepts.

Why does testing always get the shaft?
Any DevOps initiative that expects outcomes of speed and quality requires an investment mindset. Tests (unit, acceptance, non-functional, and regression) of all types are investments that can return incredible value when integrated with a software delivery pipeline.

We will explore the following questions:

How do I build an organization that mines and releases the value in automated testing?

How do I, as Quality Leader in an organization, help shift the culture in my company to value consistency and predictability associated with a strong testing practice?

You may ask why this a business perspective and not a code and test perspective? This is about taking and investment mindset to testing.