In this lightning talk, we explore the 5 attributes to look for in a ScrumMaster:

• Knowledge - Deep knowledge in Agile and Scrum
• Experience - Deep experience with Scrum teams and in Agile environments
• Coaching - Deep understanding of Coaching concepts and techniques
• Facilitation - Deep understanding of Facilitation concepts and techniques
• Servant Leadership - Deep understanding and desire to enable success for the teams and the organization

From there we look at the ScrumMaster's progression for removing impediments and addressing issues:

• Did we talk about it in the Retrospective?
• Did we discuss the impact?
• Did we identify root causes?
• Did we come up with solutions?
• Have we tried the solutions?
• What were the initial results?
• What are next steps from here?

We use the steps above to ensure:

• Our teams are not making the same mistakes time time after time
• Our teams are not having the same issues arise time and time again
• Our teams are not stagnating but rather are getting better over time

This session will arm session attendees with what to look for in a ScrumMaster and discuss how the SM uses the impediment progression to ensure we have a continuously improving team.

In our follow-up session to last year’s Kanban in Action: Thoughtfully Observing Flow, we are excited to bring our newest installment of the series: Kanban in Action: Thoughtfully Creating and Discussing Flow.

This session puts the attendee in the driver’s seat to create their own Kanban board configurations. We provide seven business scenario exercises and ask the attendees how they would go about configuring their Kanban board given the unique constraints of each scenario. Each team/table in the room will spend a few minutes discussing how they would configure their board using the provided flip charts, markers, and stickies. A debrief with the entire room follows as each team shares its concepts. The instructors will also share their own board configurations and ideas.

These exercises will increase your understanding of Kanban systems, give you practice interpreting and creating board configurations, present multiple implementable ideas for any given scenario, and provide you with approaches for meaningful engagement. They are great for aspiring coaches, managers, and leaders who want to have more valuable conversations with their teams and improve Kanban implementations.

We all know the story of how the Agile ‘Software Development’ Manifesto emerged out of Snowbird in February of 2001. And we all know that Agile is still the current best practice for software development. What remains to be fully realized is that Agile has evolved to a best practice for business in general; a way of life for that matter.

I had the privilege of bringing Agile into business over the last couple years. In that time, I introduced my executive leadership team to Business Agility. After getting executive participation in the inaugural Business Agility conference in Feb 2017, we partnered together to seek the benefits of a comprehensive Business Agility adoption.

Using our corporation’s strategic planning and execution effort to exemplify, I will share with you how the Agile mindset and practices apply to business and drive the highest impact possible towards the most valuable goals and initiatives. Modern leadership and business practices such as those under the Business Agility umbrella bring a value-driven, data-driven, efficient focus on impactful delivery.

• Revenue and growth accelerate as we focus the company’s resources on delivering in the most valuable way
• Corporate processes lean out as we remove wasteful bottlenecks, saving money, time, and providing competitive advantage
• Employees are more capable as corporate practices are more meaningful and less taxing
• Back-office tools and data are integrated into a unified experience allowing real-time awareness and predictive analytics, increasing effective decision-making and enabling empowerment at lower levels
• Employees are happier. Customers are happier. The corporate bottom-line reflects this happiness.

I am enthusiastic about the spread of Agile beyond IT. And as such, I am excited to illustrate the brilliance of Business Agility to session participants, adding examples from my most recent corporate transformation effort to exemplify the mindset and practices presented. It is my interest that participants come away with an understanding of how Agile mindset and practices benefit the corporate back office as much as they do software delivery, and how their companies can begin to benefit too by applying what they learn from this presentation.

I spent January in Antarctica hanging out with penguins, whales, and seals. It was about as different from my day-to-day work as can be. And yet, on my long flight home, I couldn’t help but reflect on how well my trip aligned with one specific value of the Agile Manifesto: “Responding to change over following a plan.”

Antarctica is a place that truly drives home why we need both planning AND, even more importantly, the ability to respond to change. This trip helped me fully appreciate how true this value is - and not just in software development. And after being stuck in Antarctica six days longer than planned, it also built up my empathy for team members struggling with dynamic situations!

Does your team have a "me first" mentality? Are people so focused on getting their own work done, their tickets closed and moved to the right, that they seldom look up to see what is happening with others? What about your division--do teams appear to be siloed, concerned about only themselves, not looking around to see how their work affects others? Let's change this!

Collaboration is not just working together. We can achieve real collaboration, the type where we inspire one another, challenge the way we work through problems and tackle work, do the things that scare us by making selflessness a daily practice. By making questions of "What did you do to help another person or team?" or "What did someone do to that really made a difference in how you worked?" into our retrospectives and mindset, we can build selflessness into the very fabric of the team. By bringing selflessness to the forefront and making it a talked-about, key ingredient to how our teams function, we can go from wishing for more opportunities to work together to achieving true collaboration.

Retrospectives are not just about making you feel bad for missing your commitments, pointing fingers at your colleagues, and hearing your talkative team members go on and on. They are supposed to help your team become great. This workshop is for anyone that participates in retrospectives, doesn’t always feel they are useful and wants to learn a better way to accomplish the intended goal.

We will explore several different topics to help revive retros such as:

• Understanding people's perspectives to retros
• The psychology of blame
• Looking for what is working in the team
• Problem solving strategies
• Getting the team's feelings out on the table
• Understand team perceptions
• Using data to determine the way forward
• Improving team interactions in a remote environment

Agile Quality Management (AQM) at Sevatec was born out of a need for the quality department to add value to our organization. Sevatec is a contractor to the Federal Government with specialties in Agile, DevSecOps, Cloud Solutions, Data Storage and Cyber Security. The hypothesis was that we could meet and exceed all of our industry standard quality objectives through adopting an agile mindset tied to modern leadership practices.

Prior to the creation of the AQM office, Quality was driven by a single person behind a desk. There was no collaboration and the focus was on checking the box for the sake of maintaining quality designations. Data showed that there was little to no improvement as a result.

Our new approach to quality derived from implementing business agility practices, with the belief that our ISO and CMMI requirements will be met and exceeded through the holistic application of agile principles. This provided an added value to the company, in that quality is baked in to every aspect rather than being led by someone sitting behind a desk churning out excessive documentation. Typically, discussions of quality in the agile environment are tied to code, but in our experiment, quality was embedded into all aspects of the organization, not just service delivery.

Ultimately, our auditors spent more time asking us about our AQM approach than actually auditing us and were very impressed with the people, processes and tools we adopted. We believe that our holistic view of business agility will set us apart in the marketplace and drive our organization to its next level of excellent quality, in which all aspects of the business are operating in a lean, agile manner. Our focus on experimentation and continuous improvement lends itself to a fun, collaborative environment in which learning is expected, play is encouraged and quality is an outflow of our working culture.

Product Owners have the challenging task of choosing which items their teams should focus on next. By combining their experience, conversations, and intuition, they often have to make decisions based on a set of imperfect data, which is hard to do. Adding to this, that they may have to justify their reasoning, making the task of prioritizing even more difficult.

In this workshop, participants will explore the Kano Model, an approach that takes into account satisfaction, functionality, and categorization to best identify the most important things based on customer response. This model gives Product Owners real data and insights to aid their decision making process, vastly improving on "this is important because I said so!"

In 2001, a group of software developers got together in Snowbird, UT, and created the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto was a statement of core value and principles. The core values are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

These four values are supplemented by 12 principles of agile software. The original 17 signatories were joined by thousands of additional people with the ability to sign cut off in 2016.

These principles are the foundation of much of the work in agile that has occurred in agile development, but have been mostly frozen as practices and agile has evolved.

Modern Agile has been created recently to update the underlying foundational values and to provide a focus beyond software delivery. Those four values are:

• Make People Awesome
• Deliver Value Continuously
• Make Safety a Prerequisite
• Experience and Learn Rapidly

This talk will walk through this reimagining of the agile values and what they mean for delivery within a government context. We will take each value and look at government cultural and technical challenges and opportunities to advance modern development practices.

Want to help your data and analytics teams embrace Agile but don’t know where to start? Wondering why your data team seems to struggle with creating manageable yet valuable stories? Curious why we think Agile for data teams is a distinct challenge?

Data work is often structured more like a pyramid than the familiar “layer cake” metaphor due to the state of data infrastructure technology, common industry practices, and the heavy lift to integrate data before it can be analyzed and visualized. Prevailing Agile wisdom of cutting work into “vertical slices” thus presents significant challenges for Agilists working on data teams! Typical full-stack vertical stories in this environment can easily become too complex, interdependent, and unwieldy to fit into fixed-length sprints. Technical stories can encapsulate smaller work increments but risk becoming too abstracted from the customer’s core problems and trap the team in infrastructure work for too long. An additional impediment to traditional user stories is the highly exploratory nature of advanced analytics and data science projects where in many cases end users lack awareness of what kind of problems can even be solved and technical experts can’t initially predict which solutions will actually be possible.

This session presents successes and lessons learned from applying alternative story decomposition and writing techniques on several data products across multiple teams. Returning to one of the fundamentals of what makes Agile valuable, namely to obtain feedback on feasibility and end user value as quickly and systematically as possible, our approaches strive to ensure teams have small, independent stories while still maintaining a value focus. We discuss ways to decouple the technical stack through stubbing and gradual tightening of the Definition of Done. This technique accommodates the necessary foundational work in the background while also obtaining early feedback about the value of the eventual product delivery options. A second approach incorporates Lean Startup concepts and centers on replacing traditional user stories with testable hypothesis statements that allow for explicit experimentation and risk trade-offs towards relevant milestones such as model quality, performance, predictive reliability, etc. in the context of extreme uncertainty.

Join us as we discuss some of the friction Agilists can encounter on data teams, as well as some validated ideas for meaningful solutions.

Agile at the team level fosters self-organization by leveraging constraints. Timeboxes, Work in Progress (WIP) Limits, and clear operational definitions are excellent examples of the kinds of constraints teams regularly employ to deliver reliably. Are you familiar and comfortable with these ideas, but uncertain how to apply them at larger scales? Are you looking for techniques that will allow you to harness the creativity of your teams to enable self-organization at scale? If so, this session is for you.

I’m passionate about applying concepts from Complex Systems Theory (as developed by Dave Snowden, Alicia Juarrero, Bob Artigiani, etc.) to the work of software teams. My colleagues and I at Excella have been exploiting these ideas by using a variety of patterns borrowed from different theories and frameworks to allow our teams to grow like healthy plants in a garden. From Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) we leverage the concepts of a single product backlog and a shared cadence. Kanban principles of visualizing the work and limiting WIP help align the teams and foster greater collaboration. Dave Snowden’s emphasis on Homo Narrans—the human as storyteller—has provided a framework for clarifying and promulgating common values, which are essential for decentralized decision-making. Collectively, these mental models created an environment that helped us scale one of our engagements from three teams to eight over the course of a single year.

DevOps needs to consider many different aspects of software quality, including security. The term DevSecOps was developed to highlight that security is a focus of the pipeline, not a second-class citizen.

Fortunately, we can define done for our pipeline so that it includes security. Continuous integration can invoke static analysis tools to test for security errors and check if we are using components with known vulnerabilities. Automated deployments and virtualization make dynamic environments available for testing in a production-like setting. Regression tests can drive traffic through proxies for security analysis. From the code to the systems where we deploy the software, the process can be designed to make sure that we follow security best practices, and not produce insecure software.

Participants will learn how to construct a definition of done that focuses on security in a DevOps pipeline. They will see how to define security practices that build confidence that they are doing DevSecOps, and how those practices and criteria might mature over time.

Shipping code is hard and it is rough! It doesn't have to be. Using Docker, Heroku and CircleCI you can set up a world-class Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipeline in an hour with advanced functionality like Heroku preview apps, provisioning servers on-demand for to scale and containers that leverage layering to enforce Enterprise requirements, while giving developers access, flexibility and speed to get their work done. With duluca/minimal-node-web-server docker image and how you can tailor it to build your micro-services or web servers in a matter of minutes using Docker and deploy your web app on the cloud.

Does your Scrum team start all its stories on Day 1 of the Sprint? Do stories sometime carry over into the next Sprint? Or perhaps testing always gets crammed in on the last day of the Sprint? If any of these sound familiar, your team may benefit from improving its flow.

Flow metrics are common with Kanban, but can provide tremendous value to any team, including those using Scrum. In this session, we’ll start by exploring the value of achieving a smooth flow of work (versus simply achieving maximum utilization) and give simple ways for your team to measure its flow. We’ll look at examples of metrics including lead and cycle time, throughput, and the cumulative flow diagram (CFD), reviewing what each represents, easy ways to collect them, and how they can be used in both a Kanban and Scrum context. You’ll leave the session knowing how to interpret and capture all these valuable metrics, so your agile team can measure and improve its flow.

Story point is an arbitrary relative measure used by Scrum/agile teams to define the effort required to implement a story or feature. This is a metric to measure the cost related to the implementation of story points. This metric is called Story Point Cost. It should allow to track development costs and also make the Scrum team aware about the budget issues of their project and for product owners to easier compare cost to gained value.

Agile is an incremental and iterative approach to delivering value to our customers. But too often we assume it’s really all about ways to slice work into smaller batch sizes and that both approaches are fundamentally equivalent. However, there is a crucial difference and this lack of awareness is a major contributor to projects and teams that are AINO (Agile In Name Only)!

In this session, we will discuss how to differentiate between incremental and iterative approaches, their strengths and weaknesses, and why you really need both. We will explore the many ways in which iteration shapes the core of Agile practices, how it supports and enables the benefits of agility, and how understanding its awesome power is a key step in moving from “doing” Agile to truly being agile. In addition, we will take a close look at the practical implications of when to use each approach by discussing real world scenarios, highlighting common Agile anti-patterns and (re)examining familiar story slicing patterns.

You will walk away with both a better understanding of one of the most important underlying principles of agility and immediately applicable insights for your daily work!

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and probably continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a little (or big) fire in your belly that will help you become more productive and improve the quality of your work. From this, we will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.

Losing good people during your transformation? Getting more resistance than you expected? You may be producing unwanted reactions in the way you are leading your people through change.

If you want your Agile transformation firing on all cylinders without the harmful side-effects, managers at all levels should focus on becoming Catalysts. Much like a chemical catalyst, your job is to help boost organizational performance by creating a healthy environment and providing the needed support.

In this interactive presentation-tutorial, we’ll explore how you can do that through some simple techniques that anyone can do; extracted from Fearless Change and Liberating Structures. We'll relate these techniques to how trust works and give you some powerful ways to improve your organizational trust.

As an agilist I strive to build great teams and then keep them together as they set on their Agile journeys. However, when you are in an environment where teams change all the time, it makes me wonder if the idea of dynamic teaming can be used to inspire teams to grow in a different way. A couple of years ago, Heidi Helfand, did an experience report about dynamic re-teaming (https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/experience-reports/dynamic-reteaming-how-we-thrive-by-rebuilding-teams/). I have used a lot of material from her research to implement dynamic re-teaming on my program.

The idea of dynamic re-teaming has been working for us for over 18 months now. We have seen several interesting outcomes from this implementation. For one, the developers, testers and Scrum Masters are constantly on their toes - no one gets too comfortable with their team. But since we are all part of a large 16 team program, we still have managed to build camaraderie, owing in part to team members being reassigned across teams. In supporting a large IT organizations, most of our teams work on small applications for a period of 3-6 sprints. At the end of each such application, the team starts work with a new product owner. This forces the team to do a "reset" and allows them to examine the good, the bad and the ugly from their previous experience. It almost gives the team a chance to wipe the slate clean and start over. This alone has been a great source of inspiration for the teams to continue to grow. Another example of re-teaming is when someone from the development team rotates into a production support team. This idea was initially put in place to ensure that every developer has the experience of fielding user calls for the application that they put out. Being on the receiving end of these calls allows the developers to grow understanding the problems, first hand, from a users perspective. After their rotation, the developer goes back into a team with a renewed motivation to write better code.

Dynamic re-teaming is core to what we do and I would love to share some experiences in this talk.