It’s surprising how little of the research around incentives has made it into practice. There’s widespread belief that the debate is about carrots vs. sticks or if it’s carrots or sticks, what kind of carrots or sticks. It’s also surprising how the understanding of this fundamental topic eludes many well-respected, experienced practitioners and coaches. There’s considerable research that suggests what incentives work (and don't work) for individuals and teams. Linda will bring in the latest from cognitive neuroscience and help those of us who care about development teams to learn what works best.

“What do you do?”

It’s a frequent first question asked at parties, networking events, and bad dates. And sadly, the answer often includes the word “just”.

Perhaps a more interesting question is, “Who are you?”. But, how do you answer? Often, our identity is dominated by our professional image. However, even those that “live to work” have other facets which may contain hidden value.

In this session, Damian uses humor, improv, personal stories, and more to examine our identities, explore our interests, and find inspiration from unexpected sources. Join him to laugh, learn, and “unjust yourself” as you rediscover Who You Are!

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.

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.

Want to find the perfect Product Owner? It's easy, all you have to do is find one with the time to do the job, the power to make decisions, the knowledge to make smart decisions, the interest in doing the job, and the Vision to build the right product. Easy, right?

Via a story, the session will start by exploring 5 key attributes of being a Product Owner:

1. Bandwidth
2. Power
3. Knowledge
4. Interest
5. Vision

After that discussion, we do an exercise to identify what a Product Owner does day to day. The debrief will identify the balance a Product Owner must have in working with stakeholders, end users, customers AND working with the Scrum team AND product backlog refinement. We will also touch on client/vendor relationships and identify if the PO should come from the client or the vendor (and how technical should the PO be).

The session concludes the attendees being given a Product Owner persona scoring template. The attendees can use this template to score their Product Owners and we will discuss how to identify their Product Owners areas of strength and gaps areas.

I often suggest to teams that they should be using all sorts of tools in their pipelines- from simple static analysis checks and automated builds to security scans and performance testing. I've done presentations and talks at conferences. I've lobbied to clients. I've commiserated with my colleagues. But I've never put together my dream pipeline in one of my own projects.

There are always reasons that some tests and tools get left out- our policies won't allow them, they will take too long to get approved, we don't have time, we have bigger problems to deal with, it just isn't what the client is looking for right now. And I usually think, if only I were in charge, I'd make sure we were using those...

In late 2017 I took over maintenance on an open-source project. Now I have no restrictions. The sky's the limit. No one is around to tell me what I can't do. So why don't I have my dream pipeline in place yet?

I'll talk about the trade-offs and compromises I made when building out the pipeline. Why I decided to focus on some tools and tests but skipped others, and what I need to do or change to make this delivery process the pipeline I've always dreamed about, now that I have no one else to blame.

Despite thinking that organizations are slow to innovate, innovation actually abounds at many companies. Kodak, DEC, and Xerox did not fail due to lack of new, cutting-edge innovation; they failed because their organizations were tuned to their traditional markets, and a failure to change their business models and organizations led to their eventual disruption.

The key to achieving business agility lies in leadership that transforms organizations. Transformational leaders succeed by changing the system, leading with purpose, and steering from the edges. They own their responsibility and boldly lead their organizations into the future. As leaders, we can accelerate this evolution by enabling true self-management and team-based governance.

Join Bob and Sanjiv to learn how leaders can transform organizations with a flatter organization structure, work anywhere flexibility, participatory profit sharing, and delegated hiring and firing. Explore the agile leadership journey needed for true business agility.

When organizations move to agile for software delivery, there is often tension with traditional portfolio management. This talk will illustrate how an organization can move from traditional portfolio management approaches to one that embraces agile software delivery. Doing so enables organizations to become predictable, improve the flow of value delivered, and pivot more quickly if necessary.

We will demonstrate the use of governance that allows a more adaptive portfolio management approach. We will cover topics that enable agile portfolio management including:

• Lean techniques for managing flow
• Effective prioritization techniques
• Long range road-mapping
• Demand management and planning
• Progressively elaborated business cases
• Validation of outcomes
• Support for audit and compliance needs

These topics will be illustrated by real-world examples of portfolio management that have been proven over the last five years with a wide range of clients.

Think of a time when multiple contributors were all working in the same area of code at once. Ever wish there was an easy way to resolve those inevitable merge conflicts? This certainly happened for us while contributing to the pgAdmin 4 open source project. As evangelists from Pivotal, Matt Kleiman and team contributed all of their patches to pgAdmin 4 using test-driven development. Attend his talk to learn the virtues of testing and the story of trying to bring test-driven development to an existing open source community. He will walk through an example of how Pivotal extracted existing, untested code and wrapped them in tests in order to benefit the entire community.

Are you daunted by the prospect of introducing automated testing to a code base without it? Does your code base have automated unit tests, but no one has confidence about what the tests say about code? Consider approval tests to confront these challenges. Approval tests simplify assessing the behavior of a system by taking a snapshot of the results, and confirming that they have not changed. They are useful for both bootstrapping testing automation and for creating more expressive tests. In this session participants will join in hands on exercises using LEGO bricks that illustrate the concept of approval tests, and will share the results of a case study where the approach was used to improve software testing.

This game lets players experience the burden of being a Product Owner, backlog management and having to choose between stakeholders. Players will form a team responsible for everything related to coffee and will try to create as much business value as possible for their organization while keeping stakeholders happy.

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.

Is it possible to deliver software improvements faster and with better quality in a highly regulated environment? What if the organization only uses off-the-shelf commercial packages like SAP rather than custom software? Oh, and much of the team is still learning the ropes? And by the way, our business users are unavailable during monthly and quarterly close, and to top it all off whole divisions go off-line for weeks or months at a time during refinery “turnaround” events? How can we improve cycle times, if it sometimes takes us months just to figure out how to design a solution for a single request?

In this session, we will examine a case study at an energy company that needed to increase their speed of delivery and their level of quality, while at the same time controlling costs. They started to adopt Kanban a year ago, by visualizing their waterfall process on a board and holding a daily stand-up. However, cycle times were still unacceptably long, and the board did not change much day-by-day. Worse, the business was getting more impatient and the backlog of urgent requests was growing longer. The team was ready to take the next step and deepen their kanban implementation.

We will examine a number of improvements that were made and the impact of each one of them. Larger work items were broken down into user stories, enabling progress to be tracked at a more granular level and helping the team to break down difficult problems into smaller, bite-sized chunks. Defects were captured individually on the board so large items did not appear to “stall” for no reason. Time-boxed “Spikes” could be created to capture efforts required to identify alternatives and reduce risk in design or implementation. The kanban boards went through multiple iterations as we updated them to better reflect our new process.

Hand-in-hand with these improvements came training and practice. How do we create properly formed user stories? When is it appropriate to create a Spike? How can we make process policies explicit—especially the Definition of Ready and Definition of Done?

Perhaps the biggest change for any team moving away from waterfall is the difference in the way team members interact with each other. Analysts and developers used to formal, defined handoffs gradually learned to work together more closely during all phases of a work item—from cradle to grave. Introducing this new way of working together exposed many concerns and biases, most of which have roots in the very different ways that analysts and developers think and see the world. We will review this phenomenon and talk about different techniques and approaches to help mitigate concerns and move forward.

Come join us for a stimulating, thoughtful conversation about one Fortune 200 company’s journey towards a deeper and more complete implementation of Kanban. Perhaps the “alternative path to agility” is right for your organization?

Elevator Pitch:

Agile Transformation is harder than it needs to be because we often find ways to consciously or subconsciously sabotage our efforts if we can recognize this behavior it is possible to intervene and make a change for the positive.

Abstract:

Have you ever been on a project where it seems like team members are preventing the team from getting better? Why do they do that? I don’t know either- a psychologist might have to answer that. What I can tell you about is my experiences in seeing teams become their own worst enemies and unwittingly sabotaging the projects they are trying to make successful. My goal is to help you realize when you or those around you are behaving in a way that is going to lead the team plateauing or even failing. I have often found that many teams can get stuck, or plateau, at a certain point along the continuum of agile maturity. These teams can meander around without getting better or even changing anything for long stretches of time. I have also worked with teams that put so many hurdles in their own way that they had no option but to fail. They often fell back into old patterns and gave up hope that things can get better. As an Agile Coach, I have often felt that one of the most valuable things I can share with the people I coach are my failures. I have worked on Agile projects for a long time, and I have failed in many different ways. Having been through failure, I have learned that to keep getting better you have to recognize the things that you do that lead to plateaus and failures to overcome them. This talk is for coaches and team leads who want to make sure their team isn't getting stuck in a rut, or who are trying to get out of a rut with their health and sanity intact.

Failure signs and examples

No process is defined and followed

• ex. Projects that claim to be agile without any experience or training, or doesn’t have basic agile practices such as retrospectives, I.e. we are agile because we have hour long daily standup meetings.

Process practices are ignored or removed with no compensating practices

• ex. Agile practices hold each other together, supporting each other by the value they bring to the project, some teams decide to not do some practices without doing something else to get that value, for instance pair programming provides code review and knowledge transfer, many teams don’t pair program and don’t do code reviews and or knowledge transfer.

Automation is not valued or planned into work

• ex. We will automate tests later. Often that later never comes and the team is left with a code base that is hard to maintain and change because you don’t know what your changes break.

No stakeholder expectations management

• ex. The only way a project can negotiate scope and or schedule is to actively manage stakeholder expectations. An example of unmanaged expectations is the PO that never says no to a feature request or the executive that decides what must to delivered and when it must be delivered.

Quality and testing practices are an after thought or short changed on schedule

• ex. Teams that don’t complete sprint commitments because the testers get coded stories too late in a sprint to do all the required testing and the rest of the team isn’t held responsible to help test.

No negotiation allowed in deliverables and or schedule

• ex. Executives that dictate all of the terms of a project before a team is even selected.

The team doing the work didn’t estimate the work but are held to an estimate

• Many government projects have such a long procurement cycle that no one from the proposal team is put on the project.

Part time team members are in the critical path

• ex. Sometimes people with special skills are needed for a part of a project. If the person is part time but their work is in the critical path the project is in trouble.

Heavy team turn over

• ex. Heavy turn over is a sign of a project that isn’t on track, even if it hits its deadlines the quality and output will suffer.

Political motivations more important than team’s ability to do work

• ex. If the team is setup to fail for reasons outside the team, they will most likely fail.

Distraction from issues outside the work that needs to be done

• ex. Scrum Masters that don’t shield the team from issues outside the work that needs to be done during a sprint will end up with a team that doesn’t hit the mark.

Examples of what can be done to avoid failed projects:

Focus on shielding the team from outside influence

• Have the team focus on the things they can control and prevent outside issues from distracting the team.

Negotiate delivery with the team

• The team can develop an understanding of what it can deliver. Trying to make the team do more is going to lower quality and potentially make the project take longer.

Management of stakeholder expectations

• Stakeholders always want more, that is their job. Let them ask for anything but set their expectations on what is really going to happen.

Focus on technical excellence, quality, and automation

• If you want your teams to get better, have them focus internally on things they can control like technical aspects of the project including quality and automation.

Hire motivated team members and make it possible for them to work

• People who care about what they are doing will always be better than the cheapest people that don’t care. Hire people who care.

Maintain a progressive planning pace for getting requirements ready

• Agile requires planning at different levels, skipping a level for any reason means there are going to be disconnects between your stakeholders and the people doing the work. Disconnects means the project will not product the results you want.

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!

Agile methods not only promise us a better way of working, but also a better way of life. Through owning our personal objectives and iterating constantly towards our better selves, we can reap the rewards of agile philosophy in our personal lives.

Enter "Thing Three", an informal peer coaching framework to make personal agile a reality. In this framework, three people, with commitment to the process, hold each other accountable and offer coaching through brief weekly standups. The process includes personal adherence to agile techniques like limiting WIP, and iterating with purpose to ensure focus and progress. Ultimately, Thing Three leads to faster personal achievement, no matter the individual's goal. Plus the journey is so much more enjoyable with others to help you.

We look forward to sharing not only the process of our Thing Three agile peer coaching model, but also tips, tricks, and lessons we have learned over the last year using it. You will leave with the will and skills to use agile peer coaching to achieve your most ambitious goals yet.

Have you sat through a retrospective that feels like Deja vu? Didn’t we already come up with a plan to fix this thing we are talking about, AGAIN! Are you in yet another blame/complain session with no apparent way to fix the complaint? Time and again this happens in retrospectives and before you know it, the team thinks they should cancel them altogether because they aren’t effective. Fortunately, there are clear steps you can take to fix this and make your retrospectives highly effective.

In this session we will cover the common patterns that typically lead to ineffective retrospectives. The downsides to the team when retrospectives are ineffective. Then I will give you a very effective format to follow along with some different techniques to help get your retrospectives to be very effective.

You have a golden gem of an activity. There's a brand new project and your project sponsor says "I want to do some DevOps on our new Agile project!" Sigh. You respond with "Well, how about this? Let's BE Agile and adopt a DevOps approach to structuring our teams, designing our architecture, and leveraging automation to rapidly deliver value to our customers." There. At least we've set the mood.

Regardless, greenfield projects provide a unique opportunity for us as DevOps professionals. You don't have the established baggage of a legacy project. The project is probably open to modern tools and architectures. The project is trying to set up team structure that will have the right skill sets.

The problem is: where you do you actually start with greenfield projects? When we introduce DevOps to an existing project (brownfield) we have a unique set of challenges and we can prioritize where to start based on our biggest problems. What do you do when you have a blank page? "Do everything!" Well, what actually makes up "everything" and where do we start?

Putting a solid DevOps solution in place involves some key things. You can follow the religion of the "Three Ways of DevOps" (fast delivery, fast feedback, constant learning) made popular by Gene Kim, but you still have to start somewhere. In this talk, I'll provide a pragmatic formula to setting up well-integrated teams, establishing a DevOps platform, organically growing an initial DevOps pipeline with continuous integration and continuous delivery, establishing some (useful) standards, and guiding the system architecture to support rapid build, deployment, and testing.