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.

Experience Report: Applying Lean UX to New Hardware Development

We often hear how Agile and Lean UX techniques are applied to software development, but there is much less information available on how to use these same ideas to develop new hardware solutions.

In this experience report, Matthew Maddox, VP of Digital Strategy at Mirion Technologies and Roland Cuellar of Lithespeed will show how Lean UX techniques were successfully applied to the design of new and highly complex integrated hardware and software products.

Mirion makes complex, highly regulated equipment that is focused on radiological safety for national security, first responders, and nuclear power. Mirion’s radiation detection equipment is used to protect people from radiation exposure, secure major events, and track down illicit radiological sources. Over the past year, Mirion has been experimenting with agile and lean UX techniques to design it's next generation radiation detection hardware and software.

In this experience report, we will hear how Matthew utilized rapid, lightweight, lean UX techniques to quickly develop hardware prototypes, gather feedback from past and potential new customers, and quickly pivot initial designs based upon feedback from customers.

As a result of this important process innovation, Mirion is now embracing more modern digital and agile techniques to more quickly bring innovations to market that are more closely aligned with customer desires.

Matthew Madox is the VP of Marketing & Digital Strategy, and lead the field research, primary design and customer validation phases of the next generation Personal Radiation Detector (PRD).

Topics Include: Agile Hardware Design, Lean UX, Hardware and Software Design Integration, New Product Development, Engineering Culture Change

You've heard all about how TDD will solve all your problems on a software project. Your defects go away, your time to market decreases, customer satisfaction goest through the roof. Everything is supposed to be awesome if your team just did TDD. However every time you try to adopt it, the adoption fails. Why? Let's explore why TDD is so hard for teams to adopt and find an alternative approach to either adopting it, or getting its benefits.

Agility is about adaptation, challenging the status quo, experimentation and learning. HR has historically hewed closer to compliance, but that has been changing rapidly.

Today's nimble teams and workers will no longer tolerate stifling, staid environments and management practices. The newly popular label "people operations" implies an emphasis on human engagement over bureaucracy and regulation, and indeed many organizations have been moving this way.

Be inspired by some of the most daring advances in human resources while also learning some practical approaches and techniques that can be applied to start leading your business down this path. We'll discuss new approaches in hiring, performance management, learning and development, and even the structure of HR groups and roles. Participants will also enjoy a few exercises that will illustrate some interesting techniques.

Prepare yourself for HR in the next generation.

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

Leading a large-scale agile transformation isn’t about adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level… it’s about helping your company deliver faster to market and developing the ability to respond to a rapidly-changing competitive landscape. First and foremost, it’s about achieving business agility. Business agility comes from people having clarity of purpose, a willingness to be held accountable, and the ability to achieve measurable outcomes. Unfortunately, almost everything in modern organizations gets in the way of teams acting with any sort of autonomy. In most companies, achieving business agility requires significant organizational change.

Agile transformation necessitates a fundamental rethinking of how your company organizes for delivery, how it delivers value to its customers, and how it plans and measures outcomes. Agile transformation is about building enabling structures, aligning the flow of work, and measuring for outcomes based progress. It's about breaking dependencies. The reality is that this kind of change can only be led from the top. This talk will explore how executives can define an idealized end-state for the transformation, build a fiscally responsible iterative and incremental plan to realize that end-state, as well as techniques for tracking progress and managing change.

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.

The best way to learn Scrum is by doing, but it can be difficult to simulate Scrum and see how well Scrum helps team overcome technical hurdles without actually building something technically challenging. Lego's have always been a fun option for introducing Scrum, but it's difficult to recreate technical impediments, the need for spikes and managing technical debt with our tried and true friend, the box of Lego's.

Arguably, a better alternative might be Snap Circuits, a toy designed to introduce children to electronics in a fun and easy-to-understand format. Like Lego's, adults gravitate toward Snap Circuits because they are colorful, quickly understood and snap together with ease.

But, Snap Circuits have the added advantage of requiring a small amount of technical learning during the simulation that make it a closer match to the technical obstacles faced by a typical Scrum team.

In this workshop, you'll learn one "Scrum in a Snap" simulation exercise. In addition, we'll provide you with a few other "Scrum in a Snap" ideas and encourage you to experiment on your own. Four lucky attendees will also win their own Snap Circuits kit so they can develop their own Scrum games.

Past participants in "Scrum in a Snap" have said "The best Scrum exercise I've ever done", "I can't believe how much it's like coding - without actually coding", "What a blast - I'll never forget this activity!" and "Where can I buy one?"

Attend this workshop to see why.

At the beginning of a project, teams will usually spend a lot of time on infrastructure, making it hard to demo anything to the business. There is a constant battle between engineers and product owners on what needs to be built first.

But you do not need to compromise. Infrastructure can be generated, using an application generator called JHipster that allows scrum teams to focus primarily on delivering business value right at the start of a project.

In a live demo, we will show you how to first generate a new Angular/Spring Boot application with just a few keystrokes. Then we can quickly deploy that application to the cloud. Lastly, we will create a Jenkins pipeline for automated CI/CD and deploy some changes quickly. The audience members will be also able to interact with the application using their mobile device.

How do you promote mastery of practice areas? Danial H. Pink tells us people are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. Small Agile teams promote autonomy while value streams and corporate missions promote purpose. Communities of Practice can be a great way to promote mastery, if formed correctly.

Communities of Practice are more important today then they’ve ever been before. We’ve learned cross-functional teams are the best way to produce customer focused products but as we put people into value streams and product teams, are we creating silos where practice domains don’t communicate as often and knowledge gaps are widening? There’s a reason why most Agile Frameworks recommend forming Communities of Practice.

In this workshop we’ll talk about forming masterful communities and you’ll create a handy pocket guide to take with you.

Come learn how to form Masterful Communities of Practice and lead your organization going forward.

Agile transformations typically fail to deliver true business agility because organizational power structures, norms, and culture remain locked into legacy models that oppose Agile. Similarly, companies fail because their organizations remain tuned to their traditional markets, even as disruption creates new dangers and innovation new opportunities. The failure to change hidebound bureaucracy and rigid organization structures leads to eventual disruption, and often dissolution.

Agile methods can serve as a foundation for organizational “sparks” that are adaptable and resilient in the face of disruption and relentless change. Those looking to leverage investment in Agile as a business differentiator must heed Conway’s Rule, and adapt organizational elements to support and enable true business agility. Join Sanjiv and Audrey to explore essential organizational sparks for business agility, including Lean Discovery, Agile PMO, Agile Budgeting, Dynamic Strategy, and Portfolio Kanban.

Scaling frameworks can still be a polarizing topic. This session compares three of those frameworks on a factual basis:

• Where are they similar
• Where are they different

In terms of their own stated

• Principles and sources
• Structure, and
• Practices

As Lyssa Adkins noted, "...When we argue about this framework, that framework, the other framework; when we snipe at each other on social media; when we allow our Agile values to be compromised... those are from a bygone era and they are not worthy of us, not anymore. That’s not who we are... We're headed toward something else." (We are the Leaders We Have Been Waiting For https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6pPQ3W7npY&feature=youtu.be) (she also makes some other direct observations in this vein).

Following in that spirit, the purpose of this presentation is to present a fact-based comparison of the key elements of SAFe, LeSS, and [email protected]. It's not to feed you any pronouncements on the relative strengths or weaknesses of these three popular frameworks, or to assert which, if any is appropriate in what situations. Rather, the idea is to put you in a position to make your own informed judgments these points. And in doing so, perhaps deepen your understanding of the key issues and options associated with agile scaling.

As agile practitioners, we are well aware that we need to delegate decision-making and responsibility to members of the team, but it's often easier in principle than it is in practice. Frequently, delegating triggers some angst in most of us, usually revolving around our biggest fear: "What if they fail miserably?"

Fortunately, there are better questions to ask before we delegate, including:

• How can I determine whether the person is capable of handling the responsibility delegated?
• If they're not ready, how do I help them to acquire that ability?

In this combination tutorial and workshop, we'll answer both these questions so you can be more successful when you delegate. We'll also give you an opportunity to apply your newly acquired knowledge via in-class simulation and provide information to help you coach others in effective delegation.

In a diverse company full of schedule-packed consultants and engineers, how do you continually find ways to engage employees and create a more inclusive environment? Khadijah and Lizzie knew they had the support of leadership – and the interest of the employees – so all they had to do was come up with a way to learn quickly, fail fast, and prototype.

Come hear how Lizzie and Khadijah, along with their fellow Blackstonians, applied Agile Principles to solve a decidedly non-IT challenge.

Specific organizational patterns are the villains of agile adoption, setting unreasonable expectations and sabotaging progress. We’ll explore these villains, and give real examples how federal organizations overcame them.

Participants will see the power of metaphor first embraced by Extreme Programming: a system metaphor or (for transformations) a cultural metaphor to name and avoid common anti-patterns in Agile adoptions.

Leaders in government programs or large organizations will recognize common challenges patterns: setting schedules by fiat, limiting the availability of product owners, balancing responding to emergencies with focusing on consistent prioritizes, just to name a few. Coaches and champions supporting Agile adoptions will be equipped with counter-examples to avoid these challenges.

Often times, us Agilists can often be in our own world, stuck doing one set of exercises or approaching situations in one specific way. What if we actually listened and responded to our audience in real time, driven by the needs of who is directly in front of us?

As a seasoned life-practice artist and improviser, I will model a few techniques rooted in the improvisational performance world that can help you better listen and respond accordingly.

Retrospectives are a key component in assisting you teams to improve. Most Jedi, er, Scrum Masters know how to facilitate a retrospective. However, many do not consider how to SELECT a retrospective based on the needs of their teams. Different types of retrospectives will be considered, such as the 6 Thinking Hats, Appreciation, Sailboat, and in addition, two Custom retrospectives. Have you considered which retrospectives you would facilitate for your team based upon their needs? For example, if you are with a new team, what would retrospective would you select? If your team seems to have trouble working together or communicating, which retro? How could you customize a retrospective to address the needs of your team?

Scrum relies heavily on Velocity for planning and performance improvements. Let's talk about what it really means, some anti-patterns and good practices.

One of the more abstract concepts in Agile is how to use Story Points and Velocity. It seems pretty straightforward in concept--assign each work unit (story) relative points; at the end of the sprint count up how many points you completed and plan that number for next sprint. But in practice...

Do points represent days? Complexity? What if something is easy to develop but hard to test? Maybe a task is UI heavy or back-end heavy? Should all teams in an organization use the same scale? What happens when the team composition changes?

One of the most common challenges is how velocity is viewed outside the Scrum team. Why is Team A's velocity 70 while Team B's is 90? How can we increase velocity to 90? Of course the team can and will fix that just by changes the SPs assigned to each task--that three-point story is now magically worth five; how did that happen?

Points and Velocity are just tools. Learn some ways to not let them take over.