Elevator Pitch

Sometimes teams need more than just questions. They need scrum masters and coaches who are courageous enough to have the hard conversations, challenge their decisions, push them to the next level. During this session we will introduce participants to some anti-patterns that have arisen in the scrum master and agile coaching communities and discuss ways to break free!

Description:

Coaching Agile Teams is all about asking questions and allowing them to self organize, right? Well, that's just part of the mission. During this session we will introduce participants to some anti-patterns that have arisen in the scrum master and agile coaching communities and discuss ways to break free!

Sometimes teams need more than just questions. They need scrum masters and coaches who are courageous enough to have the hard conversations, challenge their decisions, push them to the next level. However, sometimes we push our teams a bit too hard and create negative conflict. It's times like this when we need to demonstrate how to reach out and make the first move to repair the relationship. We will introduce the concept of repair bids to help in this area.

Lastly, we learn a model to put into practice to create a coaching alliance with teams so you can be in agreement on how you will work together for their best interest and improvement over a period of time.

The reason we chose to create this session is that over the past few years we have noticed that as people are learning more about coaching they are getting out of balance and believing that the only thing that coaches are allowed to do is ask questions. We've noticed that scrum masters lean so far in the direction of self organization that they no longer believe they can challenge teams to grow or to move beyond where the team decides to be. We believe that the root of the problem rests in the fact that people are learning a bit about coaching but not actually learning how to be a coach. We would like to introduce to the attendees the more direct coaching methods that are available for use such as 1) direct communication, 2) challenging, 3) courageous questions that push the edge of the comfort zone, etc.

Session is collaborative and includes interaction with the participants throughout. Also has collaborative exercises.

“Test-driven development (TDD) is a programming technique in which the tests are written prior to the source code. It is proposed that TDD is one of the most fundamental practices enabling the development of software in an agile and iterative manner. Both the literature and practice suggest that TDD practice yields several benefits. Essentially, it is claimed that TDD leads to an improved software design, which has a dramatic impact on the maintainability and further development of the system.” (Reference: ieee.org)

Fannie Mae, a government sponsored entity (GSE), is in the fourth year of it’s agile transformation. Teams use an Agile Maturity Matrix as a roadmap for optimizing their agile capabilities as well as technical engineering practices.

As long-standing teams, we have a long track record of trying to incorporate persistent TDD practices with varying degrees of success. But it was only after the LDNG teams collectively matured their agile mindset and focused on optimization, implementation of TDD took flight.

Past year, 4 teams comprising the Loan Delivery Next Gen were recognized for being the first teams in organization to complete highest agile maturity model’s category, hallmarks for which include: Feature level BDD, Test first mindset & All layers of testing are automated and executed on every check-in.

• Do you want a real world example of implementing TDD in a large program?
• Are you unable to grapple with the challenges of TDD? Is TDD frustrating you?
• What are some misconceptions about implementing TDD?
• How do you get a good ROI (Return On Investment) by developing TDD capability?
• By the way what’s the big deal about TDD? Is it really helping or just another hype??

This talk is intended for the technical members on a cross-functional team (responsible for the “how” who are faced with implementing TDD) as well as well as Scrum Masters and Product Owners who are interested in understanding the benefits of TDD and why they should be advocating for / insuring there is capacity to develop and mature these practices as part of the team’s work. Unlike most TDD training sessions, this focuses on the subtleties and challenges of implementing TDD in a pragmatic manner that address everyday concerns of a large organization.

Join us to get answers to all these questions based on our real world experience as well as see a live intuitive demo.

While we are not experts in this field (at least not yet), we will share our journey and practical learnings. How does that sound?

Our presentation shares experience of Loan Delivery teams. We will share our journey in adopting TDD along with moving away from testers in team, to training developers with test-first mindset. We will also cover misconceptions and touch a little on testing techniques for developers. We would like to cover the non-technical blind spots that most TDD trainings might miss, based on our real world experience.

Also in the spirit of Agile, we will present practical real-time example of TDD in action that addresses a number of concerns, but mainly how to re-factor code using TDD. We will use personal laptop to demonstrate a loan calculator example.

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.