In this interactive workshop we will examine multiple examples of Antipatterns observed in real-world Kanban boards. In each case we will identify the issues and discuss ways to improve the situation. We will review a number of better alternatives and see how the improvements map to the core principles of Kanban such as visualization, managing flow, and making policies explicit. Brand new to Kanban? Learning by example is a great way to get started! A long-time Kanban veteran? Come to see how many antipatterns you recognize and help firm up our Kanban Antipattern taxonomy and nomenclature!

Kanban is an extremely versatile and effective Agile method that has seen significant growth in popularity over recent years. Kanban’s flexibility has led to widespread adoption to manage business processes in disparate contexts such as HR, loan processing, drug discovery, and insurance underwriting, in addition to Information Technology. Like snowflakes, no two Kanban boards are alike. The downside to this flexibility is there is no well-known and easily accessible library of patterns for designing effective Kanban boards. Like Apollo engineers, teams are expected to design their board starting from first principles. Unfortunately, sometimes teams get stuck with board designs that may not provide the visibility and insight into their workflow they hope to see. Worse, some designs actually may serve only to obscure the situation. Working within the limitations of an electronic board can exacerbate the problem even further. Is all hope lost? Certainly not!

Let’s learn more about effective Kanban system design by examining what to avoid and why. Learning by example is effective and fun!

DevSecOps uses application security practices that have been around for a while. The innovation of DevSecOps is incorporating security into the daily workflow of the team rather than leaving them to the end of a release like many legacy processes do. Shifting security left is made possible by the ability to automate many aspects of security testing and verification. DevSecOps leverages DevOps practices to make application security a first-class citizen in the practices of modern software product development. DevSecOps starts with a culture change mindset of cross-functional teams creating software through collaboration and fast feedback cycles.

The security in DevSecOps starts before the code is written by using techniques like threat modeling and risk analysis to help figure out who might want to attack you and how they might do that. This often ignored security practice can be enabled by following the DevSecOps practices of having a cross-functional team involved in the process from the beginning, including security professionals.

Next, DevSecOps maps application security practices into the build pipeline for a project in order to provide quick feedback about the security posture for any change made to the software. By using automation to allow the team to move quickly while maintaining confidence in the health of the code base, DevSecOps extends that health check to include application security checks. While automation can be used to make security data collection easier it is important to understand what security practices still require a human being.

This talk focuses on how, when, and where practices should be incorporated into a build pipeline to get the most value out of your security practices through automation. It explores what manual security work still needs to be done by a person and how to maximize value while minimizing the effort of human beings.

Have you ever worked with a Business Analyst (BA)? Is what a BA does on an agile project much different from what is done on a waterfall project? All analysts bring excellent communication, collaboration, and trust to their work on project teams. During this session we’ll review the roles a BA can play, a BA's responsibility on the development team, and the skills a good BA possesses. For fun, lets also talk about why an Analyst is part of the 3 Amigos and the complexity of communication channels. Generally speaking, let’s discuss how BAs participate in an agile project’s success and I’ll share some stories about my experience going from waterfall to agile, how I’ve interacted with the PO, and important things I think an Analyst should be involved in.

This session is not intended to offer an exhaustible list of metrics or instructions on how to improve all systems. Rather, the intent is to provide a framework on how to ensure the quantitative and qualitative metrics you use are measuring the right things and how to apply them to a system of continuous improvement. Attendees will have a repeatable framework they can apply after leaving the session.

The session is broken into two main parts.

• Part 1: Identify the right (quantitative and qualitative) metrics that will help people and teams meet outcomes or goals.
• Part 2: Create a cycle of learning and improvement that aligns people and teams to the outcomes or goals.

The Dojo movement is growing in popularity as an approach that helps enterprises transform into world-class product development organizations. Dojos represent a departure from the classic agile focus on delivery, bringing learning and a product mindset to the forefront.

We'll share the emerging Dojo model by way of specific examples and mini-case studies. You will see how Dojos have taken shape at Fannie Mae and other large companies in the last several years. Think of this as a tour of the Dojo for two, main audiences: teams and leaders. Attendees will leave understanding how Dojos can benefit their group, portfolio, and/or organization.

Summary

In this session, you’ll learn about one team’s struggle to improve collaboration and how they sought to shorten cycle time by carefully crafting an experiment with an Andon Cord. The Andon Cord is a Toyota innovation designed to empower front-line employees to recognize issues, initiate a stoppage of work, and work together as a team to quickly identify a path forward. The emergency cable strung above assembly lines became a symbol of the Toyota Way, and has widely been copied throughout the auto industry and beyond.

You’ll be introduced to metrics that show a surprising correlation between collaboration through Andon Cord pulls and Cycle Time!

We all do it. In fact, I've done it already in this talk description. I've amended to title of the "Manifesto for Agile Software Development" to just "Agile Manifesto," and I suspect most of the you attending AgileDC 2019 have done this as well. In this talk I will argue that this truncation of the title of the Manifesto is more than an abbreviation of convenience, it is a sign that how we use the Manifesto in practice has moved beyond what was stated in the foundational document. For many folks Agile has significant importance and impact beyond software development. Just as our nation's Constitution has been amended over the years, I will propose amendments to the Manifesto in this talk.

Metrics are the bane of many organizations, getting fascinated on measurements that don’t matter or can drive improper behaviours. In this session, we walk through a simple grouping for metrics where the groupings not only call out the metrics, but their limits, and help guide to better metrics.

Are customers beating down your door before the product is even ready? Do you have an inexhaustible number of new ideas on the horizon? And are your teams cranking them out month after month? If you answered no to some or all of those questions, then... your employees are probably afraid of emotions, and it's standing in your way.

Yes, I did just say that emotions are the thing in your way.

And you're not alone. The Age of Reason brought us Scientific Discovery, which is vital to continued survival, for people and companies. It inspired the Industrial Revolution. We reached for the stars, and touched other planets. So we raised up idols like Mr. Spock from Star Trek, and phrases like, "It's not Rocket Science". The Toyota Lean Movement inspired additional data-driven revolutions like Agile and DevOps. We automated our factories, and our stock market transactions. We created machines that can learn, and cars that can drive themselves.

And... we tricked ourselves into thinking that WE also became logical in the process.

But we're still human beings. In 2002 the Nobel Prize was awarded to two economists for research that proved that the decision making part of our brain is not connected to the logical part of our brain. Decision making is still done with our emotional brain. The emotions of your customers prevent them from buying. The emotions of your managers prevent them from making the right decisions. The emotions of your employees prevent them from delivering great ideas. And you can't just remove emotions from the equation. You must understand them, embrace them, and journey through them, to get to the other side. And on that other side you will coincidentally find our old friend, Reason.

If you don't start embracing emotions, talking about them, and designing for them, then you will be left behind. It's what makes Apple and Amazon successful. (It's why Donald Trump got elected.) And it's why your products are failing.

How do you grow a continuously learning organization? If certifications and wikis were enough, organizations would be crushing it. In this session we look at how we learn in complex domains - focusing on tacit vs explicit knowledge; context learning; and growing coaches and teachers.

Have you ever seen the term “process authority” used to describe the role of a Scrum Master? You don’t have to look too hard to find this description. In my experience, it has caused a lot of confusion and misunderstanding on project teams. So why is it even used? And should it?

I worked on a new Scrum project where management informed the project teams that the Scrum Master role was given process authority over the team. There was a lot of confusion and unease about this. Questions started popping up such as “I already have a manager – is the Scrum Master now my boss,” “What does process authority mean,” and “Do we really have to do what she says?” As a result, the teams were becoming hostile to the Scrum Master role, untrusting of the Scrum Master’s responsibility, and concerned Scrum Masters had authority to tell the teams what to do. I was the project’s agile coach and needed to diffuse the confusion and better the working environment as quickly as possible. This did not happen overnight, but our journey started with this interactive discussion which we used as a foundation for the project moving forward.

In this interactive presentation, we explore the concept of “process authority” and consider the various directions it takes us. To do that, this discussion goes far beyond a typical “the role of a Scrum Master” presentation; It explores…

• What it should (and should not) mean when/if “process authority” is used to describe the Scrum Master role
• How the responsibility and expectations of a Scrum Master are different than that of team members
• How different leadership styles play into understanding the role of the Scrum Master
• The importance of trust in a Scrum Master/team relationship

The presentation uses real-time audience feedback to further explore these topics. Audience members will provide answers to questions given throughout the presentation, so we can explore members’ thoughts, opinions, and experiences they have had with the Scrum Master role.

Behind the creation of every Agile Framework was the intention to improve the Return on Investment for creative work, primarily through faster and richer feedback. But as team-level frameworks like Scrum are internalized by large organizations, that message gets mistranslated. Instead of, “Get better outcomes, sooner,” the drive instead becomes, “Just do more, faster.”

A common expression of this problem is the confusion of Velocity for Value, where teams are directly managed based on their Output, but the connection between Output and Outcome is lost or ignored. This plays out in all kinds of ways that distract from achieving tangible results, and often incentivizes internal competition over collaboration. This problem can be especially tenacious in organizations with significant institutional ‘status-ing’ behaviors, where leadership struggles to translate common Agile methods like Relative Estimating into existing artifacts like Executive Dashboards or Earned-Value Management.

In this tutorial, participants will explore the 'Velocity Trap', and will be shown how to setup a results-driven framework that prioritizes 'Maximizing Outcomes while Minimizing Output.'

Unlike agile at the team level, enterprise agility requires cultural change throughout the organization to be successful. But, cultural change is far from easy. Much like the roots of a tree, culture runs deep, so it takes persistence and the right approach to achieve success.

In this talk, Donald Patti and David Bulkin will describe multiple successful plays, or approaches, to enterprise agile transformation, providing attendees with a number of practical ways to understand and change an organization's culture.

The job of an IT Project Manager is a difficult one and traditional approaches to governance tended to make it even more difficult. In the best of times, these approaches employ Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) as an impediment to project teams; in the worst of times, they set IV&V up as judge, jury, and executioner for projects.

But just because that’s the way things are often done doesn’t make it right. Oversight entities can be healthy enablers instead of adversarial obstacles.

Traditionally, the role of a governance framework is to enumerate statutory requirements, promote best practices, and reduce risk. The purpose of an IV&V team within this world is to ensure that appropriate elements of the framework are followed so as to mitigate risk. Larger projects typically present greater risks and require more controls; smaller projects less so.

The big challenge has always been in defining what is required for a given project.

Project sponsors want working solutions. The CFO wants tight budgets and lower costs. Project teams want happy sponsors. These stakeholders often oppose IV&V because the cost/benefit case for everything it promotes can be difficult to justify in comparison to business needs. Also, when these stakeholders do not pay directly for development costs they can have a very high tolerance for risk – but that’s an issue for another day.

What if we re-frame IV&V from risk mitigation to added value?

• What if, instead of requiring reams of documentation, IV&V identifies information it needs in the tools and processes already in use?
• What if, instead of forcing teams to follow so-called best practices in cookie-cutter fashion, IV&V provided the metrics and data they need to take specific action when it is most effective?
• What if, instead of reciting regulations to teams, IV&V worked hand-in-hand help teams meet them in the most efficient ways possible?
• What if, instead of looking for defects, IV&V asked teams how it could help and then provided the specific support they need, where and when they need it most?
• What if IV&V helped to onboard new teams and train them in specific skills and resources they will need to succeed?
• What if IV&V assessed team needs as they worked together and then developed training courses to address those needs?
• What if IV&V built project dashboards to present useful information from development tools that helped teams surface problems quickly?
• What if these and other steps help project teams deliver value while meeting regulations, reducing risk, trimming costs, and increasing quality all around?

What if? There is no what if. This works. It really does.

These are just some of the innovative governance strategies that our IV&V team at USCIS has employed and it has made all the difference.

Let us tell you more about them…

In the DevOps Handbook, Gene Kim introduces the Third Way - The Technical Practices of Continual Learning. Enter the DevOps Dojo - an immersive environment where whole teams come together to learn and practice their skills while solving real business problems.

Joel Tosi and Dion Stewart say teams learn better in the immersive eco-system of Dojos than they do using traditional forms of training. They explain why and how Dojos help teams bond around product, foster rapid experimentation, and reframe small failures as learning.

In this session, we will frame the need for dojos. From there we will walk attendees through the dojo format, including things they need to think about when creating their own. We wrap up with simple calls to actions for people to take to bring learning forward.

Come to this session not only to learn about what works in creating a Dojo but also how Dojos help upskill your teams and support the cultural DevOps change.

You may have heard about the #NoEstimates movement, and even #NoProjects. Both of those concepts challenge the assumptions behind two key aspects of delivering software. But what about the process itself? Do we even need approaches like Scrum, Kanban or XP - let alone SAFe, LESS, NEXUS, DAD - in order to be successful? Is following a pre-defined process helpful at all? Is there a simpler way to be effective?

This session examines the two key principles common to all successful software delivery approaches and builds out based on the experience of the participants. Like #NoEstimates and #NoProjects, the name doesn’t really mean to eliminate process altogether, but rather to build a process that works for your team, in your business domain, with your technology stack.

Getting leaders to adopt an Agile Mindset doesn’t happen by sending them to training. It won't happen simply because they approved the funding to do a transformation. Many leaders need your experience and appreciation for how Agile works differently than what they may have seen in the past. Helping them build, own and progress through a backlog of system wide challenges is key to their success and the success of the teams. We will walk through some examples, help you identify some backlog items of your own to take back to our office during this session.

Product Roadmapping, Release Planning, and Release Management are often difficult skills to learn for the Product Owners and Product Managers that support Agile Teams. If the estimates are fuzzy, and don't translate exactly to a linear measure like time, "How do we know when anything will be done?"

Participants in this workshop will get hands-on experience planning and managing a product Release, and deal with the same dynamics that real Product Owners experience collaborating with Agile Development Teams. Working in Teams, participants will play The Release Planning Game, a tabletop board game created by the facilitator for use in Certified Scrum Product Owner classes.