Build the “Right Thing”, build the “Thing Right”, and build it “Fast”. This is what the agile triangle says, and this is all what we are all attempting to accomplish with Agile. However, what if we do not have sprints to build the “Thing”? What if we have days or hours to build an ecosystem that aims to speed up legal aid to Ukrainians. Let us discuss how we used agile to build a platform where volunteer lawyers across the globe can collaborate and link their offers of help with those in need.

So, do you think your problems are too complex and difficult for Agility?

While agility can have an impact in helping to create great software, come meet 4 leaders applying agility to some of the world’s most complex problems while helping countless people in need.

A panel at Agile 2022 started a movement by sharing how agility is taking on planetary-size challenges impacting countless human lives and families. Many were moved by the stories, and a community is forming. This panel discusses complex challenges and how agility is applied beyond software to help those in need.

You will have a new perspective on how agility can impact every issue and how you can get involved.

• Sally Ellata – Sudan NextGen, Enabling Sudan to be a leading Digital African Economy
• Ondřej Dvořák – UA Support, International Pro Bono Legal Help for Ukrainian Refugees
• Rocío Briceño – Social Impact Agile, Focused on carrying out Social Projects for People
• Joanne Stone – Wicked Agility, Passionate Problem Solvers

The way we’re working isn’t working. At best, people act with chaotic complacency, at worst creative problem solving and critical thinking are punished - resulting in burnout, anxiety, depression, apathy, helplessness, and hopelessness. In short, not for humans. Our businesses, organizations, departments, teams, and people cannot innovate, adapt, or evolve. 

Today’s leadership and organizational norms limit peoples’ ability to make valuable contributions.  We are at an inflection point where we each have a choice.  The future holds promise! The path forward? Together, we can nudge towards a System of Compassion.

Today, top performing agile teams exist in organizations worldwide. However, they are hamstrung by legacy bureaucratic management - the remnants of a waterfall phase gate governance approach.  True end-to-end, business agility requires a bimodal approach: continued care and feeding of agile teams done in parallel with a systematic middle-management transformation.

Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore 3 steps that enable rapid value delivery, increase decision velocity, enable portfolio prioritization, link strategy to execution and delink funding from projects:

1. Set up end to end Value Stream Teams
2. Set up an Agile Value Management Office (VMO)
3. Move from Yearly Budgeting to Fixed Funding   

We’ll cover case studies of how this approach has unshackled agile teams and liberated managers to deliver positive customer outcomes.

Most of us have experienced painful Sprint planning meetings. The meeting is painful because no one understands the requirements, or they are not yet prioritized, or they are barely written with no acceptance criteria. How does your team know when your product backlog items/user stories/requirements are ready to be brought into Sprint planning and ready to be worked on?

Then, once the item is done, how do we know if it’s really done? If a team member walks up to you and says, “This item is done”, what does that really mean? Does it mean it works on their machine? Does it mean it's been thoroughly tested and peer reviewed? Does it mean legal and security have looked at it?

In this session we will explore the concepts of Definition of Ready (going past the INVEST concept many of us know so well), which creates a checklist so that we know when a product backlog items is ready to be started. We will also explore Definition of Done, a checklist to help us understand what it really means to be done.

Product Owners: Are you concerned that the organization around you is not set up to support your success? Do you feel pressure due to conflicting expectations? If so, this session is for you.

Leadership: Do you feel your Product Owners are not as effective as you want them to be, no matter how much you support them? Then this session is also for you.

In this session, we will talk about the organizational challenges that often go unspoken but can make or break a Product Owner (PO). We’ll find those hidden challenges that escape a root cause analysis and manifest themselves in the form of missed commitments that often leave teams frustrated, wondering, “How did this happen?! I did everything right!”.

This session focuses squarely on the PO role and the critical factors to success. After this session, you will be able to clearly articulate how organizational culture is impacting the PO role and what leadership can do to positively influence it. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Application security is a critical part of software development that isn’t well-represented in many agile projects. This talk will explain how to factor application security into short feedback cycles so that teams don't become overwhelmed by application security issues or practices.

One of the challenges we have in using application security practices is where to start and how to get value. The world is being driven more and more by network-connected applications and services that are constantly under attack from the curious and malicious. 

What should you do if you aren’t involved with AppSec and still want to get started using AppSec practices? By adding steps to your daily practices and build pipeline, you can iteratively add AppSec practices to your process and increase the security of your software.

Join Jonathan as he lays out a plan for AppSec: where to start, how to achieve success, and how to build on it. We will also talk about what to do next, how you should introduce AppSec in your development process, and where AppSec should go in your build pipeline. Finally, we will discuss what can be accomplished with tools and what still needs to be done by a person.

“How does psychological safety add value to my workplace? Does investing in psychological safety reduce the ability to deliver on quarterly deadlines? There’s no time!” 

These are actual questions and statements I’ve heard recently from leaders who are so concerned about delivery they feel like they can’t invest in the value of their people. The fear of not hitting dates and deliverables becomes the driving factor of decisions, and things like psychological safety get looked at as an “extracurricular activity,” or perhaps a function of HR. Many individuals don’t recognize that by enabling and empowering people they’re actually immediately creating high performance teams, helping them get to what they’re looking for faster. 

Psychological safety is directly related to performance and is something actionable that can be practiced every single day, as certainly a lack of psychological safety is often felt by people every single day as well. Scoping projects, creating stories, roadmapping sessions, code reviews - let alone performance reviews and tracking velocity - all require us to interact with other people. Real psychological safety is something we can build a consciousness around  within our ecosystems.

Technologists created Agile to deliver software more quickly, predictably, and successfully.   Traditionalists argue that agile is for tech-only. 

In this presentation, Alan Zucker argues that Agile is everywhere.  The values and principles are organic and align with natural ways of working.  Its practices are broadly applicable across professions, industries, and business domains.  All organizations, from non-profits to high-tech, can benefit. 

The Manifesto of Agile Software Development presents a set of values and principles for delivering working software quickly and providing value to customers.  Small changes extend the Manifesto and make it universally applicable.  All knowledge work domains and even some traditional ones can benefit.

Agile practices and tools enable and empower all.  Examples demonstrate how practices can be applied to traditional industries such as the military, construction, education, and non-profits.  Agile provides a framework for solving complex problems with creativity and innovative thoughts.  They allow us to harness our energies, improve our focus, and achieve greatness.

Installing Scrum, SAFe, or LeSS is insufficient. Methodologies and frameworks alone won’t achieve Business Agility. Directing leadership to become servant leaders isn’t a silver bullet either. Empowered and autonomous teams won’t emerge just because you want them to. These truths are self-evident. Agile has existed for over 20 years now, and organizations are still struggling. So much so that many businesses have concluded that Agile doesn’t work. It’s our fault. We’ve sold these businesses a false bill of goods as an industry. We’ve sold them on the promise of practices and the allure of a cultural mindset shift. We’ve sold them on what’s easy. It’s easy to quantify the existence of teams performing the ceremonies of Scrum. It’s easy to quantify how many people have completed Agile Leadership Training. And while Scrum teams and training are easy to quantify, they’re not easy to justify when executives and key stakeholders aren’t getting the results they desire. The reality is that change is hard. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. But there are a set of guiding principles that every successful Agile organization has in common: • They minimize dependencies • Their governance is focused on flow • They connect work to customer value • And their leadership is engaged in the change Join Dennis as he guides you through these principles and discover how your organization can begin applying them today to achieve long-lasting Business Agility that gets you the results that matter.

Great testing starts as soon as your client comes to you with an idea.

Good testing uses TDD, BDD, Automation, and other accelerators. Great testing starts in the way we think about the new Epic, how it breaks into MVPs, how we develop our architecture. The more we think about how to test our solution, the more resilient and robust that solution will be.  Agile tells us to “inject quality” throughout the delivery process. We use testing to demonstrate that quality. The more we craft our solution to make testing easier and more effective, the faster we can demonstrate that quality, and get to production bug-free.  

In this presentation, we’ll talk about “injecting testability” throughout the pipeline. We will explore decisions and techniques in architecture, solution design, data management, and – yes – test environments, that make testing robust, easier, and more effective.

Joining a team that is already doing agile can be one of the biggest challenges for a Scrum Master. Starting a team from scratch allows you to help guide the team into best practices as you have learned them. What about when the team already has practices they believe in and agreed to? What if those practices aren't working for them, or are seen by management as not working?

This session will first provide strategies to approach joining an existing team as an agile leader. We will look at ways to integrate yourself into a team, methods of introducing process changes, and how to work with your leadership's perception of a team in flux. We will also discuss on how you can adapt and change as an agile leader, along with how to make yourself more open to accepting alternate approaches to agile.

Utilizing this information and our collective lessons learned, we will craft a set of best practices for Scrum Masters joining a new team and how leadership can assist in these changes.

Solutions, solutions, solutions! Get your solutions here! We have technical solutions, DevOps solutions, automations, and metrics! ...The Agile community is caught in the middle of the Framework Wars — SAFe vs Scrum@Scale vs Modern Delivery vs Kanban and XP — and following the rules has become more important than solving the problems that led us to Agile in the first place!

The Design Thinking Double Diamond teaches us to research and understand problems, separately from solutions. When was the last time you stopped to really think about your problems, separately from how you are solving them?

We also need to face the hard truth that yes, our teams are working hard, but sometimes they are creating more problems than they solve.

In this session we’ll walk through one technique for shifting people’s attention back to problems. It's called the “PEP Talk”. It has been used in fortune 50 companies, government institutions, and individual Release Trains to help refocus people on the right things at the right time, promote cross-team collaboration, and inspire them to design win-win solutions that solve multiple problems at once, while also unlocking intrinsic motivation. It works great as a part of a Lean Portfolio Management approach, in an Agile VMO, with a Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), or a Scrum of Scrum of Scrums because it is solution-agnostic. (Plus it helps you win at Buzzword Bingo!)

Want to know a secret? That “transformation” your company is working on will likely not be transformational. An even better-kept secret is that it probably doesn’t matter! But, for now, that large-scale, likely-to-fail change probably does impact you.

This session will briefly cover what a transformation is and why they are generally needed. Then we’ll discuss the five main reasons most large-scale change efforts typically fail to meet expectations. Finally, we’ll provide a few tips for surviving a “transformation” and a couple of practical tools that might even allow you to make some use of them!

When we think of becoming agile leaders, we recognize that we have a lot to learn, but do we also see how much we have to unlearn? Letting go of old paradigms, conventional wisdom and ingrained habits around leadership can unleash a new world of possibility for our teams and organizations. 

Many of us understand the logic behind the key principles of agile leadership, but we find them much harder to implement in practice. For example, what does it mean to let go of being the expert? Aren't leaders expected to know the best solutions? How do we create space for ownership and accountability without losing our sense of contribution? How much failure can we really encourage and tolerate in the spirit of empowerment? This is where self-awareness, self-development and humility become invaluable on the journey. 

This talk will share lessons learned and unlearned both from personal experience as well as from leaders I’ve collaborated with over the years. It will also invite the audience to share stories with their fellow attendees and introspect on their own way forward to help ignite agility in their teams and organizations.

How would you explain concepts about self-organization?

How would you explain the meaning of value?

How would you help make a case that retrospectives are important?

Could you do this in 45 minutes?

Well, if you couldn’t let us provide a fun and meaningful way to do this with a short simulation where you will build some towers.

During this session, you get a sense of value and how to improve using retrospectives while meeting the value articulated by the business representative. This will give you some meaningful insights you can use the next day…

Are you struggling to grow high performing teams at all levels?  Have your teams plateaued?

Psychological safety has been talked about within the Agile community for some time. Many practitioners agree it is the key ingredient to creating a high performing team. Unfortunately, there are not many reliable resources available that help us understand what psychological safety looks like, how to measure it, and how to improve it.

The goal of this talk is to take my deep experience in building psychological safety across many contexts to go beyond theory and get into real-world applications.

Participants will walk away from this session equipped to take action towards improving psychological safety (and consequently team performance) within their organization.

The release date is a week away. Development is complete. The code works. Marketing is ready with the media blitz. Our customers are waiting to get their hands on the new features and are sure to give us good feedback. The only step left is to get the security group to scan the application and give us the approval to release it. DevOps, and more importantly, DevSecOps, promises to do away with rolling the dice at the end and hoping we are allowed to release what we built. But how do we get to DevSecOps when we have a separate security sign-off, governance, regulations, and even corporate policies that say security gets the final word? How do we get from a classic security model to a DevOps-friendly process? Join Gene as he discusses practical steps for adding security to your existing development process. Attendees will learn tools and types of testing they can introduce to build security in from the beginning, eliminating late surprises that might halt your release.

Fledging and mature Agile teams go through periods where their ceremonies lack the desired level of engagement. In this session, we'll work together to identify common behaviors and anti-patterns of one of the iconic Agile ceremonies and discuss ways to get your teams to re-engage in ways that support self-organization, agility, and adaptability.