Do your teams struggle with silos, multitasking, under performing, and not truly swarming to work with an understanding of shared responsibility

Based on the Swedish public domain game "Yatzy", we turn a familiar roll of the dice into a team building, learning exercise. This game is designed to not just talk, not just show, but to deliver a firsthand experience of what works and what doesn't in terms of incremental delivery.

This game is designed to teach:

• How multitasking costs time & reduces quality
• How silos disrupt the collaborative power of Agile
• When one member of our team under performs, we all underperform
• When we swarm to work, we all individual look better than we ever could on our own
• How working as an Agile team in earnest is addictive & once you go there, you'll never go back

A well-defined Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a requirement for many government institutions. However, the typical SDLC process is very "Waterfallish" by nature of it's phase gates and documentation requirements. This talk will explain how the SDLC at Fannie Mae has evolved as the company has transformed from a Waterfall to a lean Agile organization in alignment with Agile best practices.

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.

Not all programmers are comfortable with coding alone for 10 hours a day. Matt Kleiman spent years programming inefficiently in a cubicle. His Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and other learning disabilities deterred his success on traditional development teams. Seeking out an environment that would nourish his strengths, he found Pivotal Labs. Pivotal's Extreme Programming practices empowered Matt. Attend his talk to learn how pair programming and test-driven development transforms ADD into an asset in the workplace.

Colors Personalities: Lead with Your Strengths | Communication, Interaction and Collaboration

In the workplace there are so many different personalities. By understanding your color personality signature you will get to know your strengths, pre-conceived “weaknesses,” and how understanding your personality may impact you as a team member and as a leader. By knowing these personality types you can identify other personalities within your organization and then more effectively communicate or interact with others as a team member or as a leader.

This session will be interactive. It will begin with a Color Personality assessment to learn your Color Personality Signature. It will go through each colors’ strengths, how others view your personality as potential weaknesses (and how they are not), how your personality makes you a good team member or a good leader. Finally, by learning about these four personalities and their traits, can you identify how to interact and communicate differently with team members? Your boss? Your direct reports?

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.

To all technical members involved with building DevSecOps pipeline this talk is for you.

In today's competitive world, fixing problems in the pipeline is still a human task and how many times have we seen that when pipeline stops, notifications are sent out and then we wait........ for someone to identify, diagnose and resolve the issue. I am sure we have all been there and done that.

Is this good enough?

In my talk I will share some smart ways of infusing self healing into your existing pipeline. We all know it’s good to set thresholds and quality gates in the pipeline, so you can stop the pipeline when the threshold or the gate fails and notify appropriate stakeholders. But in this approach the problem is brought to the attention of the humans to take corrective action what if this issue gets self diagnosed and self healed by the pipeline itself!

Imagine that....

I will shows ways on how self-healing can be built into the pipeline by leveraging the data that gets generated from within the pipeline by converting it into information, and the information into knowledge, and the knowledge into insight to make intelligent data driven decisions and remediation.

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.

The concept of servant leadership is nothing new in the agile community. Servant leadership shifts the focus of leaders from managing teams to empowering and supporting teams. But as the world continues to evolve, are we really forming the connections we need to have truly high performing teams? Empathy forms the foundation of connections between individuals, teams, and organizations, and is the key to successful in supporting the needs of our customers and society. To have truly high performing teams, we need to move beyond servant leadership to a more empathetic leadership mindset. So how do we recognize, nurture, and grow empathy and grow from Servant Leadership to Empathetic Leadership?

This workshop will guide participants through several topics. We'll explore how empathy changes our thinking, how empathy and agile success relate, and how to build empathy within ourselves, our teams, and our organizations.

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!

In the February of 2001, seventeen independent- minded software practitioners got together and developed what we know as the Agile Manifesto. The purpose of the manifesto was to provide guidelines for agile adaptation in organizations seeking better and faster ways to develop software and to serve as the north star for teams, coaches, trainers and change agents seeking to implement the best agile had to offer.

It has since been 18 years and the manifesto remains unchanged. Mainstream agilists and troupers are passionate about the comprehensiveness of the manifesto and believe that it is self-adapting to the needs of today’s software and solution development.

So have things truly ‘changed’? Does the manifesto need a revisiting? Is it time to amend the agile principles and modernize them to today's growing software demands or is the manifesto truly adjusting and inclusive of all change?

Let’s get together and refresh our understanding of the manifesto and the 12 original principles.

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.

When organizations are ready to adopt Agile at the enterprise level, people are resistant to organizational changes and have a fear of change due to loss. Use NLP and Logic Level to deal with the fear.